Large Language Models for Market Research: A Data-augmentation Approach

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by excelling in complex natural language processing tasks. Their ability to generate human-like text has opened new possibilities for market research, particularly in conjoint analysis, where understanding consumer preferences is essential but often resource-intensive. Traditional survey-based methods face limitations in scalability and cost, making LLM-generated data a promising alternative. However, while LLMs have the potential to simulate real consumer behavior, recent studies highlight a significant gap between LLM-generated and human data, with biases introduced when substituting between the two. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a novel statistical data augmentation approach that efficiently integrates LLM-generated data with real data in conjoint analysis. Our method leverages transfer learning principles to debias the LLM-generated data using a small amount of human data. This results in statistically robust estimators with consistent and asymptotically normal properties, in contrast to naive approaches that simply substitute human data with LLM-generated data, which can exacerbate bias. We validate our framework through an empirical study on COVID-19 vaccine preferences, demonstrating its superior ability to reduce estimation error and save data and costs by 24.9\% to 79.8\%. In contrast, naive approaches fail to save data due to the inherent biases in LLM-generated data compared to human data. Another empirical study on sports car choices validates the robustness of our results. Our findings suggest that while LLM-generated data is not a direct substitute for human responses, it can serve as a valuable complement when used within a robust statistical framework.

A Theory of Formalisms for Representing Knowledge

There has been a longstanding dispute over which formalism is the best for representing knowledge in AI. The well-known "declarative vs. procedural controversy" is concerned with the choice of utilizing declarations or procedures as the primary mode of knowledge representation. The ongoing debate between symbolic AI and connectionist AI also revolves around the question of whether knowledge should be represented implicitly (e.g., as parametric knowledge in deep learning and large language models) or explicitly (e.g., as logical theories in traditional knowledge representation and reasoning). To address these issues, we propose a general framework to capture various knowledge representation formalisms in which we are interested. Within the framework, we find a family of universal knowledge representation formalisms, and prove that all universal formalisms are recursively isomorphic. Moreover, we show that all pairwise intertranslatable formalisms that admit the padding property are also recursively isomorphic. These imply that, up to an offline compilation, all universal (or natural and equally expressive) representation formalisms are in fact the same, which thus provides a partial answer to the aforementioned dispute.

First Place Solution to the ECCV 2024 ROAD++ Challenge @ ROAD++ Atomic Activity Recognition 2024

This report presents our team's technical solution for participating in Track 3 of the 2024 ECCV ROAD++ Challenge. The task of Track 3 is atomic activity recognition, which aims to identify 64 types of atomic activities in road scenes based on video content. Our approach primarily addresses the challenges of small objects, discriminating between single object and a group of objects, as well as model overfitting in this task. Firstly, we construct a multi-branch activity recognition framework that not only separates different object categories but also the tasks of single object and object group recognition, thereby enhancing recognition accuracy. Subsequently, we develop various model ensembling strategies, including integrations of multiple frame sampling sequences, different frame sampling sequence lengths, multiple training epochs, and different backbone networks. Furthermore, we propose an atomic activity recognition data augmentation method, which greatly expands the sample space by flipping video frames and road topology, effectively mitigating model overfitting. Our methods rank first in the test set of Track 3 for the ROAD++ Challenge 2024, and achieve 69% mAP.

SRL-VIC: A Variable Stiffness-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Tasks

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in complex and continuous robotic tasks, however, safe exploration has been one of the main challenges, especially in contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments. Focusing on this issue, we propose SRL-VIC: a model-free safe RL framework combined with a variable impedance controller (VIC). Specifically, safety critic and recovery policy networks are pre-trained where safety critic evaluates the safety of the next action using a risk value before it is executed and the recovery policy suggests a corrective action if the risk value is high. Furthermore, the policies are updated online where the task policy not only achieves the task but also modulates the stiffness parameters to keep a safe and compliant profile. A set of experiments in contact-rich maze tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines (without the recovery mechanism and without the VIC), yielding a good trade-off between efficient task accomplishment and safety guarantee. We show our policy trained on simulation can be deployed on a physical robot without fine-tuning, achieving successful task completion with robustness and generalization. The video is available at https://youtu.be/ksWXR3vByoQ.

pFedAFM: Adaptive Feature Mixture for Batch-Level Personalization in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Model-heterogeneous personalized federated learning (MHPFL) enables FL clients to train structurally different personalized models on non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) local data. Existing MHPFL methods focus on achieving client-level personalization, but cannot address batch-level data heterogeneity. To bridge this important gap, we propose a model-heterogeneous personalized Federated learning approach with Adaptive Feature Mixture (pFedAFM) for supervised learning tasks. It consists of three novel designs: 1) A sharing global homogeneous small feature extractor is assigned alongside each client's local heterogeneous model (consisting of a heterogeneous feature extractor and a prediction header) to facilitate cross-client knowledge fusion. The two feature extractors share the local heterogeneous model's prediction header containing rich personalized prediction knowledge to retain personalized prediction capabilities. 2) An iterative training strategy is designed to alternately train the global homogeneous small feature extractor and the local heterogeneous large model for effective global-local knowledge exchange. 3) A trainable weight vector is designed to dynamically mix the features extracted by both feature extractors to adapt to batch-level data heterogeneity. Theoretical analysis proves that pFedAFM can converge over time. Extensive experiments on 2 benchmark datasets demonstrate that it significantly outperforms 7 state-of-the-art MHPFL methods, achieving up to 7.93% accuracy improvement while incurring low communication and computation costs.

Real-Time 4K Super-Resolution of Compressed AVIF Images. AIS 2024 Challenge Survey

This paper introduces a novel benchmark as part of the AIS 2024 Real-Time Image Super-Resolution (RTSR) Challenge, which aims to upscale compressed images from 540p to 4K resolution (4x factor) in real-time on commercial GPUs. For this, we use a diverse test set containing a variety of 4K images ranging from digital art to gaming and photography. The images are compressed using the modern AVIF codec, instead of JPEG. All the proposed methods improve PSNR fidelity over Lanczos interpolation, and process images under 10ms. Out of the 160 participants, 25 teams submitted their code and models. The solutions present novel designs tailored for memory-efficiency and runtime on edge devices. This survey describes the best solutions for real-time SR of compressed high-resolution images.

The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Adapting to Covariate Shift in Real-time by Encoding Trees with Motion Equations

Input distribution shift presents a significant problem in many real-world systems. Here we present Xenovert, an adaptive algorithm that can dynamically adapt to changes in input distribution. It is a perfect binary tree that adaptively divides a continuous input space into several intervals of uniform density while receiving a continuous stream of input. This process indirectly maps the source distribution to the shifted target distribution, preserving the data's relationship with the downstream decoder/operation, even after the shift occurs. In this paper, we demonstrated how a neural network integrated with Xenovert achieved better results in 4 out of 5 shifted datasets, saving the hurdle of retraining a machine learning model. We anticipate that Xenovert can be applied to many more applications that require adaptation to unforeseen input distribution shifts, even when the distribution shift is drastic.

pFedMoE: Data-Level Personalization with Mixture of Experts for Model-Heterogeneous Personalized Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has been widely adopted for collaborative training on decentralized data. However, it faces the challenges of data, system, and model heterogeneity. This has inspired the emergence of model-heterogeneous personalized federated learning (MHPFL). Nevertheless, the problem of ensuring data and model privacy, while achieving good model performance and keeping communication and computation costs low remains open in MHPFL. To address this problem, we propose a model-heterogeneous personalized Federated learning with Mixture of Experts (pFedMoE) method. It assigns a shared homogeneous small feature extractor and a local gating network for each client's local heterogeneous large model. Firstly, during local training, the local heterogeneous model's feature extractor acts as a local expert for personalized feature (representation) extraction, while the shared homogeneous small feature extractor serves as a global expert for generalized feature extraction. The local gating network produces personalized weights for extracted representations from both experts on each data sample. The three models form a local heterogeneous MoE. The weighted mixed representation fuses generalized and personalized features and is processed by the local heterogeneous large model's header with personalized prediction information. The MoE and prediction header are updated simultaneously. Secondly, the trained local homogeneous small feature extractors are sent to the server for cross-client information fusion via aggregation. Overall, pFedMoE enhances local model personalization at a fine-grained data level, while supporting model heterogeneity.

An Intraoperative Force Perception and Signal Decoupling Method on Capsulorhexis Forceps

Force perception on medical instruments is critical for understanding the mechanism between surgical tools and tissues for feeding back quantized force information, which is essential for guidance and supervision in robotic autonomous surgery. Especially for continuous curvilinear capsulorhexis (CCC), it always lacks a force measuring method, providing a sensitive, accurate, and multi-dimensional measurement to track the intraoperative force. Furthermore, the decoupling matrix obtained from the calibration can decorrelate signals with acceptable accuracy, however, this calculating method is not a strong way for thoroughly decoupling under some sensitive measuring situations such as the CCC. In this paper, a three-dimensional force perception method on capsulorhexis forceps by installing Fiber Bragg Grating sensors (FBGs) on prongs and a signal decoupling method combined with FASTICA is first proposed to solve these problems. According to experimental results, the measuring range is up to 1 N (depending on the range of wavelength shifts of sensors) and the resolution on x, y, and z axial force is 0.5, 0.5, and 2 mN separately. To minimize the coupling effects among sensors on measuring multi-axial forces, by unitizing the particular parameter and scaling the corresponding vector in the mixing matrix and recovered signals from FastICA, the signals from sensors can be decorrelated and recovered with the errors on axial forces decreasing up to 50% least. The calibration and calculation can also be simplified with half the parameters involved in the calculation. Experiments on thin sheets and in vitro porcine eyes were performed, and it was found that the tearing forces were stable and the time sequence of tearing forceps was stationary or first-order difference stationary during roughly circular crack propagating.