Multipath Mitigation Technology-integrated GNSS Direct Position Estimation Plug-in Module

Direct position estimation (DPE) is an effective solution to the MP issue at the signal processing level. Unlike two-step positioning (2SP) receivers, DPE directly solves for the receiver position, velocity, and time (PVT) in the navigation domain, without the estimation of intermediate measurements, thus allowing it to provide more robust and accurate PVT estimates in the presence of multipath (MP) and weak signals. But GNSS positioning with DPE is mostly left unapplied commercially, and continuing research into DPE has remained relatively stagnant over the past few years. To encourage further research on DPE by the GNSS community, we propose a DPE plug-in module that can be integrated into the conventional 2SP software-defined receivers (SDRs). Programmed in MATLAB, the proposed DPE plug-in module is aimed for better understanding and familiarity of a practical implementation of DPE. Its plug-in module architecture allows it to be incorporated with 2SP MATLAB SDRs, both vector tracking and scalar tracking with minimum changes, making it easy to use, and provides greater flexibility for researchers using various 2SP SDRs. Since the proposed DPE implementation makes use of tracking observables from 2SP to propagate the channel, we propose to further improve the performance of DPE against MP through using MP-compensated observables generated from Multipath Mitigation Technology (MMT)-aided tracking. Referred to as Multipath Mitigation Technology (MMT)-integrated DPE, it is proposed as a variant of DPE that is better suit for urban environment applications. Results show that while in MP-only conditions, an MMT-integrated 2SP has similar performance with MMT-integrated DPE, the proposed MMT-integrated DPE manages to show great superiority against non-line-of-sight (NLOS), making it the preferable option for applications in urban environments.

PMoL: Parameter Efficient MoE for Preference Mixing of LLM Alignment

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been proven to be an effective method for preference alignment of large language models (LLMs) and is widely used in the post-training process of LLMs. However, RLHF struggles with handling multiple competing preferences. This leads to a decrease in the alignment of LLMs with human preferences. To address this issue, we propose Preference Mixture of LoRAs (PMoL) from the perspective of model architecture, which can adapt to any number of preferences to mix. PMoL combines Mixture of Experts (MoE) and Low Rank Adaptor (LoRA). This architecture is innovatively applied to the research of preference alignment and has achieved significant performance improvement. The expert group soft loss is used to enable MoE with the ability to mix preferences. Through comprehensive evaluation by the reward model and GPT-4o, the experiment results show that PMoL has superior preference mixing capabilities compared to baseline methods. PMoL achieves better preference alignment with lower training costs.

Mitigating the Bias of Large Language Model Evaluation

Recently, there has been a trend of evaluating the Large Language Model (LLM) quality in the flavor of LLM-as-a-Judge, namely leveraging another LLM to evaluate the current output quality. However, existing judges are proven to be biased, namely they would favor answers which present better superficial quality (such as verbosity, fluency) while ignoring the instruction following ability. In this work, we propose systematic research about the bias of LLM-as-a-Judge. Specifically, for closed-source judge models, we apply calibration to mitigate the significance of superficial quality, both on probability level and prompt level. For open-source judge models, we propose to mitigate the bias by contrastive training, with curated negative samples that deviate from instruction but present better superficial quality. We apply our methods on the bias evaluation benchmark, and experiment results show our methods mitigate the bias by a large margin while maintaining a satisfactory evaluation accuracy.

Navigating Public Sentiment in the Circular Economy through Topic Modelling and Hyperparameter Optimisation

To advance the circular economy (CE), it is crucial to gain insights into the evolution of public sentiments, cognitive pathways of the masses concerning circular products and digital technology, and recognise the primary concerns. To achieve this, we collected data related to the CE from diverse platforms including Twitter, Reddit, and The Guardian. This comprehensive data collection spanned across three distinct strata of the public: the general public, professionals, and official sources. Subsequently, we utilised three topic models on the collected data. Topic modelling represents a type of data-driven and machine learning approach for text mining, capable of automatically categorising a large number of documents into distinct semantic groups. Simultaneously, these groups are described by topics, and these topics can aid in understanding the semantic content of documents at a high level. However, the performance of topic modelling may vary depending on different hyperparameter values. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a framework for topic modelling with hyperparameter optimisation for CE and conducted a series of systematic experiments to ensure that topic models are set with appropriate hyperparameters and to gain insights into the correlations between the CE and public opinion based on well-established models. The results of this study indicate that concerns about sustainability and economic impact persist across all three datasets. Official sources demonstrate a higher level of engagement with the application and regulation of CE. To the best of our knowledge, this study is pioneering in investigating various levels of public opinions concerning CE through topic modelling with the exploration of hyperparameter optimisation.

Robust Causal Graph Representation Learning against Confounding Effects

The prevailing graph neural network models have achieved significant progress in graph representation learning. However, in this paper, we uncover an ever-overlooked phenomenon: the pre-trained graph representation learning model tested with full graphs underperforms the model tested with well-pruned graphs. This observation reveals that there exist confounders in graphs, which may interfere with the model learning semantic information, and current graph representation learning methods have not eliminated their influence. To tackle this issue, we propose Robust Causal Graph Representation Learning (RCGRL) to learn robust graph representations against confounding effects. RCGRL introduces an active approach to generate instrumental variables under unconditional moment restrictions, which empowers the graph representation learning model to eliminate confounders, thereby capturing discriminative information that is causally related to downstream predictions. We offer theorems and proofs to guarantee the theoretical effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments on a synthetic dataset and multiple benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art methods, RCGRL achieves better prediction performance and generalization ability.

CLMLF:A Contrastive Learning and Multi-Layer Fusion Method for Multimodal Sentiment Detection

Compared with unimodal data, multimodal data can provide more features to help the model analyze the sentiment of data. Previous research works rarely consider token-level feature fusion, and few works explore learning the common features related to sentiment in multimodal data to help the model fuse multimodal features. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Learning and Multi-Layer Fusion (CLMLF) method for multimodal sentiment detection. Specifically, we first encode text and image to obtain hidden representations, and then use a multi-layer fusion module to align and fuse the token-level features of text and image. In addition to the sentiment analysis task, we also designed two contrastive learning tasks, label based contrastive learning and data based contrastive learning tasks, which will help the model learn common features related to sentiment in multimodal data. Extensive experiments conducted on three publicly available multimodal datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for multimodal sentiment detection compared with existing methods. The codes are available for use at https://github.com/Link-Li/CLMLF

Hybrid Composition with IdleBlock: More Efficient Networks for Image Recognition

We propose a new building block, IdleBlock, which naturally prunes connections within the block. To fully utilize the IdleBlock we break the tradition of monotonic design in state-of-the-art networks, and introducing hybrid composition with IdleBlock. We study hybrid composition on MobileNet v3 and EfficientNet-B0, two of the most efficient networks. Without any neural architecture search, the deeper "MobileNet v3" with hybrid composition design surpasses possibly all state-of-the-art image recognition network designed by human experts or neural architecture search algorithms. Similarly, the hybridized EfficientNet-B0 networks are more efficient than previous state-of-the-art networks with similar computation budgets. These results suggest a new simpler and more efficient direction for network design and neural architecture search.

Biometric Blockchain: A Better Solution for the Security and Trust of Food Logistics

Blockchain has been emerging as a promising technology that could totally change the landscape of data security in the coming years, particularly for data access over Internet-of-Things and cloud servers. However, blockchain itself, though secured by its protocol, does not identify who owns the data and who uses the data. Other than simply encrypting data into keys, in this paper, we proposed a protocol called Biometric Blockchain (BBC) that explicitly incorporate the biometric cues of individuals to unambiguously identify the creators and users in a blockchain-based system, particularly to address the increasing needs to secure the food logistics, following the recently widely reported incident on wrongly labelled foods that caused the death of a customer on a flight. The advantage of using BBC in the food logistics is clear: it can not only identify if the data or labels are authentic, but also clearly record who is responsible for the secured data or labels. As a result, such a BBC-based solution can great ease the difficulty to control the risks accompanying the food logistics, such as faked foods or wrong gradient labels.

Drop an Octave: Reducing Spatial Redundancy in Convolutional Neural Networks with Octave Convolution

In natural images, information is conveyed at different frequencies where higher frequencies are usually encoded with fine details and lower frequencies are usually encoded with global structures. Similarly, the output feature maps of a convolution layer can also be seen as a mixture of information at different frequencies. In this work, we propose to factorize the mixed feature maps by their frequencies and design a novel Octave Convolution (OctConv) operation to store and process feature maps that vary spatially "slower" at a lower spatial resolution reducing both memory and computation cost. Unlike existing multi-scale meth-ods, OctConv is formulated as a single, generic, plug-and-play convolutional unit that can be used as a direct replacement of (vanilla) convolutions without any adjustments in the network architecture. It is also orthogonal and complementary to methods that suggest better topologies or reduce channel-wise redundancy like group or depth-wise convolutions. We experimentally show that by simply replacing con-volutions with OctConv, we can consistently boost accuracy for both image and video recognition tasks, while reducing memory and computational cost. An OctConv-equipped ResNet-152 can achieve 82.9% top-1 classification accuracy on ImageNet with merely 22.2 GFLOPs.

Revise Saturated Activation Functions

In this paper, we revise two commonly used saturated functions, the logistic sigmoid and the hyperbolic tangent (tanh). We point out that, besides the well-known non-zero centered property, slope of the activation function near the origin is another possible reason making training deep networks with the logistic function difficult to train. We demonstrate that, with proper rescaling, the logistic sigmoid achieves comparable results with tanh. Then following the same argument, we improve tahn by penalizing in the negative part. We show that "penalized tanh" is comparable and even outperforms the state-of-the-art non-saturated functions including ReLU and leaky ReLU on deep convolution neural networks. Our results contradict to the conclusion of previous works that the saturation property causes the slow convergence. It suggests further investigation is necessary to better understand activation functions in deep architectures.