Oceania
MetaXCR: Reinforcement-Based Meta-Transfer Learning for Cross-Lingual Commonsense Reasoning
Commonsense reasoning (CR) has been studied in many pieces of domain and has achieved great progress with the aid of large datasets. Unfortunately, most existing CR datasets are built in English, so most previous work focus on English. Furthermore, as the annotation of commonsense reasoning is costly, it is impossible to build a large dataset for every novel task. Therefore, there are growing appeals for Cross-lingual Low-Resource Commonsense Reasoning, which aims to leverage diverse existed English datasets to help the model adapt to new cross-lingual target datasets with limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a multi-source adapter for cross-lingual low-resource Commonsense Reasoning (MetaXCR). In this framework, we first extend meta learning by incorporating multiple training datasets to learn a generalized task adapters across different tasks. Then, we further introduce a reinforcement-based sampling strategy to help the model sample the source task that is the most helpful to the target task. Finally, we introduce two types of cross-lingual meta-adaption methods to enhance the performance of models on target languages. Extensive experiments demonstrate MetaXCR is superior over state-of-the-arts, while being trained with fewer parameters than other work.
ReynoldsFlow: Exquisite Flow Estimation via Reynolds Transport Theorem
Optical flow is a fundamental technique for motion estimation, widely applied in video stabilization, interpolation, and object tracking. Traditional optical flow estimation methods rely on restrictive assumptions like brightness constancy and slow motion constraints. Recent deep learning-based flow estimations require extensive training on large domain-specific datasets, making them computationally demanding. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) advances have enabled deep learning models to take advantage of optical flow as an important feature for object tracking and motion analysis. Since optical flow is commonly encoded in HSV for visualization, its conversion to RGB for neural network processing is nonlinear and may introduce perceptual distortions. These transformations amplify the sensitivity to estimation errors, potentially affecting the predictive accuracy of the networks. To address these challenges that are influential to the performance of downstream network models, we propose Reynolds flow, a novel training-free flow estimation inspired by the Reynolds transport theorem, offering a principled approach to modeling complex motion dynamics. In addition to conventional HSV-based visualization of Reynolds flow, we also introduce an RGB-encoded representation of Reynolds flow designed to improve flow visualization and feature enhancement for neural networks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Reynolds flow in video-based tasks. Experimental results on three benchmarks, tiny object detection on UAVDB, infrared object detection on Anti-UAV, and pose estimation on GolfDB, demonstrate that networks trained with RGB-encoded Reynolds flow achieve SOTA performance, exhibiting improved robustness and efficiency across all tasks.
Temporal Analysis of NetFlow Datasets for Network Intrusion Detection Systems
Luay, Majed, Layeghy, Siamak, Hosseininoorbin, Seyedehfaezeh, Sarhan, Mohanad, Moustafa, Nour, Portmann, Marius
This paper investigates the temporal analysis of NetFlow datasets for machine learning (ML)-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). Although many previous studies have highlighted the critical role of temporal features, such as inter-packet arrival time and flow length/duration, in NIDS, the currently available NetFlow datasets for NIDS lack these temporal features. This study addresses this gap by creating and making publicly available a set of NetFlow datasets that incorporate these temporal features [1]. With these temporal features, we provide a comprehensive temporal analysis of NetFlow datasets by examining the distribution of various features over time and presenting time-series representations of NetFlow features. This temporal analysis has not been previously provided in the existing literature. We also borrowed an idea from signal processing, time frequency analysis, and tested it to see how different the time frequency signal presentations (TFSPs) are for various attacks. The results indicate that many attacks have unique patterns, which could help ML models to identify them more easily.
KAD: No More FAD! An Effective and Efficient Evaluation Metric for Audio Generation
Chung, Yoonjin, Eu, Pilsun, Lee, Junwon, Choi, Keunwoo, Nam, Juhan, Chon, Ben Sangbae
Although being widely adopted for evaluating generated audio signals, the Fr\'echet Audio Distance (FAD) suffers from significant limitations, including reliance on Gaussian assumptions, sensitivity to sample size, and high computational complexity. As an alternative, we introduce the Kernel Audio Distance (KAD), a novel, distribution-free, unbiased, and computationally efficient metric based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). Through analysis and empirical validation, we demonstrate KAD's advantages: (1) faster convergence with smaller sample sizes, enabling reliable evaluation with limited data; (2) lower computational cost, with scalable GPU acceleration; and (3) stronger alignment with human perceptual judgments. By leveraging advanced embeddings and characteristic kernels, KAD captures nuanced differences between real and generated audio. Open-sourced in the kadtk toolkit, KAD provides an efficient, reliable, and perceptually aligned benchmark for evaluating generative audio models.
'Major brand worries': Just how toxic is Elon Musk for Tesla?
Globally renowned brands would not, ordinarily, want to be associated with Germany's far-right opposition. But Tesla, one of the world's biggest corporate names, does not have a conventional chief executive. After Elon Musk backed Alternative fรผr Deutschland (AfD) โ calling the party Germany's "only hope" โ voters are considering an alternative to Tesla. Data released on Thursday showed that registrations of the company's electric cars in Germany fell 76% to 1,429 last month. Overall, electric vehicle registrations rose by 31%.
Evaluation of the Automated Labeling Method for Taxonomic Nomenclature Through Prompt-Optimized Large Language Model
Inoshita, Keito, Nojiri, Kota, Sugeno, Haruto, Taga, Takumi
-- Scientific names of organisms consist of a genus name and a species epithet, with the latter often reflecting aspects such as morphology, ecology, distribution, and cultural background. Traditionally, researchers have manually labeled species names by care fully examining taxonomic descriptions, a process that demands substantial time and effort when dealing with large datasets. This study evaluates the feasibility of automatic species name labeling using large language model (LLM) by leveraging the ir text classification and semantic extraction capabilities. Using the spider name dataset compiled by Mammola et al., we compared LLM - based labeling results -- enhanced through prompt engineering -- with human annotations. The results indicate that LLM - based classification achieved high accuracy in Morphology, Geography, and People categories. However, classification accuracy was lower in Ecology & Behavior and Modern & Past Culture, revealing challenges in interpreting animal behavior and cultural contexts. Fut ure research will focus on improving accuracy through optimized few - shot learning and retrieval - augmented generation techniques, while also expanding the applicability of LLM - based labeling to diverse biological taxa. Humans have long sought to construct systematic classification methods to understand the complexity of natural phenomena and objects. These efforts serve as a foundation for uncovering patterns and interrelationships in nature, facilitating the accumulation of scientific knowledge.
WaveStitch: Flexible and Fast Conditional Time Series Generation with Diffusion Models
Shankar, Aditya, Chen, Lydia Y., van Deursen, Arie, Hai, Rihan
Generating temporal data under constraints is critical for forecasting, imputation, and synthesis. These datasets often include auxiliary conditions that influence the values within the time series signal. Existing methods face three key challenges: (1) they fail to adapt to conditions at inference time; (2) they rely on sequential generation, which slows the generation speed; and (3) they inefficiently encode categorical features, leading to increased sparsity and input sizes. We propose WaveStitch, a novel method that addresses these challenges by leveraging denoising diffusion probabilistic models to efficiently generate accurate temporal data under given auxiliary constraints. WaveStitch overcomes these limitations by: (1) modeling interactions between constraints and signals to generalize to new, unseen conditions; (2) enabling the parallel synthesis of sequential segments with a novel "stitching" mechanism to enforce coherence across segments; and (3) encoding categorical features as compact periodic signals while preserving temporal patterns. Extensive evaluations across diverse datasets highlight WaveStitch's ability to generalize to unseen conditions during inference, achieving up to a 10x lower mean-squared-error compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, WaveStitch generates data up to 460x faster than autoregressive methods while maintaining comparable accuracy. By efficiently encoding categorical features, WaveStitch provides a robust and efficient solution for temporal data generation. Our code is open-sourced: https://github.com/adis98/HierarchicalTS
Explaining Control Policies through Predicate Decision Diagrams
Chakraborty, Debraj, Dubslaff, Clemens, Kanav, Sudeep, Kretinsky, Jan, Weinhuber, Christoph
Safety-critical controllers of complex systems are hard to construct manually. Automated approaches such as controller synthesis or learning provide a tempting alternative but usually lack explainability. To this end, learning decision trees (DTs) have been prevalently used towards an interpretable model of the generated controllers. However, DTs do not exploit shared decision-making, a key concept exploited in binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to reduce their size and thus improve explainability. In this work, we introduce predicate decision diagrams (PDDs) that extend BDDs with predicates and thus unite the advantages of DTs and BDDs for controller representation. We establish a synthesis pipeline for efficient construction of PDDs from DTs representing controllers, exploiting reduction techniques for BDDs also for PDDs.
Graph Retrieval-Augmented LLM for Conversational Recommendation Systems
Qiu, Zhangchi, Luo, Linhao, Zhao, Zicheng, Pan, Shirui, Liew, Alan Wee-Chung
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm for offering personalized recommendations through natural language dialogue. However, they face challenges with knowledge sparsity, as users often provide brief, incomplete preference statements. While recent methods have integrated external knowledge sources to mitigate this, they still struggle with semantic understanding and complex preference reasoning. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in natural language understanding and reasoning, showing significant potential for CRSs. Nevertheless, due to the lack of domain knowledge, existing LLM-based CRSs either produce hallucinated recommendations or demand expensive domain-specific training, which largely limits their applicability. In this work, we present G-CRS (Graph Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for Conversational Recommender Systems), a novel training-free framework that combines graph retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning to enhance LLMs' recommendation capabilities. Specifically, G-CRS employs a two-stage retrieve-and-recommend architecture, where a GNN-based graph reasoner first identifies candidate items, followed by Personalized PageRank exploration to jointly discover potential items and similar user interactions. These retrieved contexts are then transformed into structured prompts for LLM reasoning, enabling contextually grounded recommendations without task-specific training. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that G-CRS achieves superior recommendation performance compared to existing methods without requiring task-specific training.
Reduced-Order Model-Based Gait Generation for Snake Robot Locomotion using NMPC
Salagame, Adarsh, Sihite, Eric, Ramezani, Milad, Ramezani, Alireza
Abstract-- This paper presents an optimization-based motion planning methodology for snake robots operating in constrained environments. By using a reduced-order model, the proposed approach simplifies the planning process, enabling the optimizer to autonomously generate gaits while constraining the robot's footprint within tight spaces. The method is validated through high-fidelity simulations that accurately model contact dynamics and the robot's motion. Key locomotion strategies are identified and further demonstrated through hardware experiments, including successful navigation through narrow corridors. I. INTRODUCTION Optimization-driven path planning and control strategies [1]-[6] have become pivotal methodologies for managing diverse, contact-intensive systems in real-world experimental settings.