AnimateAnything: Consistent and Controllable Animation for Video Generation

We present a unified controllable video generation approach AnimateAnything that facilitates precise and consistent video manipulation across various conditions, including camera trajectories, text prompts, and user motion annotations. Specifically, we carefully design a multi-scale control feature fusion network to construct a common motion representation for different conditions. It explicitly converts all control information into frame-by-frame optical flows. Then we incorporate the optical flows as motion priors to guide final video generation. In addition, to reduce the flickering issues caused by large-scale motion, we propose a frequency-based stabilization module. It can enhance temporal coherence by ensuring the video's frequency domain consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. For more details and videos, please refer to the webpage: https://yu-shaonian.github.io/Animate_Anything/.

StuGPTViz: A Visual Analytics Approach to Understand Student-ChatGPT Interactions

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially ChatGPT, into education is poised to revolutionize students' learning experiences by introducing innovative conversational learning methodologies. To empower students to fully leverage the capabilities of ChatGPT in educational scenarios, understanding students' interaction patterns with ChatGPT is crucial for instructors. However, this endeavor is challenging due to the absence of datasets focused on student-ChatGPT conversations and the complexities in identifying and analyzing the evolutional interaction patterns within conversations. To address these challenges, we collected conversational data from 48 students interacting with ChatGPT in a master's level data visualization course over one semester. We then developed a coding scheme, grounded in the literature on cognitive levels and thematic analysis, to categorize students' interaction patterns with ChatGPT. Furthermore, we present a visual analytics system, StuGPTViz, that tracks and compares temporal patterns in student prompts and the quality of ChatGPT's responses at multiple scales, revealing significant pedagogical insights for instructors. We validated the system's effectiveness through expert interviews with six data visualization instructors and three case studies. The results confirmed StuGPTViz's capacity to enhance educators' insights into the pedagogical value of ChatGPT. We also discussed the potential research opportunities of applying visual analytics in education and developing AI-driven personalized learning solutions.

fairBERTs: Erasing Sensitive Information Through Semantic and Fairness-aware Perturbations

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have revolutionized both the natural language processing research and applications. However, stereotypical biases (e.g., gender and racial discrimination) encoded in PLMs have raised negative ethical implications for PLMs, which critically limits their broader applications. To address the aforementioned unfairness issues, we present fairBERTs, a general framework for learning fair fine-tuned BERT series models by erasing the protected sensitive information via semantic and fairness-aware perturbations generated by a generative adversarial network. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on two real-world tasks, we demonstrate the great superiority of fairBERTs in mitigating unfairness while maintaining the model utility. We also verify the feasibility of transferring adversarial components in fairBERTs to other conventionally trained BERT-like models for yielding fairness improvements. Our findings may shed light on further research on building fairer fine-tuned PLMs.

Advanced Financial Fraud Detection Using GNN-CL Model

The innovative GNN-CL model proposed in this paper marks a breakthrough in the field of financial fraud detection by synergistically combining the advantages of graph neural networks (gnn), convolutional neural networks (cnn) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. This convergence enables multifaceted analysis of complex transaction patterns, improving detection accuracy and resilience against complex fraudulent activities. A key novelty of this paper is the use of multilayer perceptrons (MLPS) to estimate node similarity, effectively filtering out neighborhood noise that can lead to false positives. This intelligent purification mechanism ensures that only the most relevant information is considered, thereby improving the model's understanding of the network structure. Feature weakening often plagues graph-based models due to the dilution of key signals. In order to further address the challenge of feature weakening, GNN-CL adopts reinforcement learning strategies. By dynamically adjusting the weights assigned to central nodes, it reinforces the importance of these influential entities to retain important clues of fraud even in less informative data. Experimental evaluations on Yelp datasets show that the results highlight the superior performance of GNN-CL compared to existing methods.

FE-GUT: Factor Graph Optimization hybrid with Extended Kalman Filter for tightly coupled GNSS/UWB Integration

Precise positioning and navigation information has been increasingly important with the development of the consumer electronics market. Due to some deficits of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), such as susceptible to interferences, integrating of GNSS with additional alternative sensors is a promising approach to overcome the performance limitations of GNSS-based localization systems. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) can be used to enhance GNSS in constructing an integrated localization system. However, most low-cost UWB devices lack a hardware-level time synchronization feature, which necessitates the estimation and compensation of the time-offset in the tightly coupled GNSS/UWB integration. Given the flexibility of probabilistic graphical models, the time-offset can be modeled as an invariant constant in the discretization of the continuous model. This work proposes a novel architecture in which Factor Graph Optimization (FGO) is hybrid with Extend Kalman Filter (EKF) for tightly coupled GNSS/UWB integration with online Temporal calibration (FE-GUT). FGO is utilized to precisely estimate the time-offset, while EKF provides initailization for the new factors and performs time-offset compensation. Simulation-based experiments validate the integrated localization performance of FE-GUT. In a four-wheeled robot scenario, the results demonstrate that, compared to EKF, FE-GUT can improve horizontal and vertical localization accuracy by 58.59\% and 34.80\%, respectively, while the time-offset estimation accuracy is improved by 76.80\%. All the source codes and datasets can be gotten via https://github.com/zhaoqj23/FE-GUT/.

INDUS: Effective and Efficient Language Models for Scientific Applications

Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this pivotal insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics domains and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address natural language understanding tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning-based general text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets drawn from multiple sources to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation techniques to address applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets namely, CLIMATE-CHANGE-NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. Finally, we show that our models outperform both general-purpose encoders (RoBERTa) and existing domain-specific encoders (SciBERT) on these new tasks as well as existing benchmark tasks in the domains of interest.

Text-Driven Diverse Facial Texture Generation via Progressive Latent-Space Refinement

Automatic 3D facial texture generation has gained significant interest recently. Existing approaches may not support the traditional physically based rendering pipeline or rely on 3D data captured by Light Stage. Our key contribution is a progressive latent space refinement approach that can bootstrap from 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs)-based texture maps generated from facial images to generate high-quality and diverse PBR textures, including albedo, normal, and roughness. It starts with enhancing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for text-guided and diverse texture generation. To this end, we design a self-supervised paradigm to overcome the reliance on ground truth 3D textures and train the generative model with only entangled texture maps. Besides, we foster mutual enhancement between GANs and Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). SDS boosts GANs with more generative modes, while GANs promote more efficient optimization of SDS. Furthermore, we introduce an edge-aware SDS for multi-view consistent facial structure. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing 3D texture generation methods regarding photo-realistic quality, diversity, and efficiency.

Muted: Multilingual Targeted Offensive Speech Identification and Visualization

Offensive language such as hate, abuse, and profanity (HAP) occurs in various content on the web. While previous work has mostly dealt with sentence level annotations, there have been a few recent attempts to identify offensive spans as well. We build upon this work and introduce Muted, a system to identify multilingual HAP content by displaying offensive arguments and their targets using heat maps to indicate their intensity. Muted can leverage any transformer-based HAP-classification model and its attention mechanism out-of-the-box to identify toxic spans, without further fine-tuning. In addition, we use the spaCy library to identify the specific targets and arguments for the words predicted by the attention heatmaps. We present the model's performance on identifying offensive spans and their targets in existing datasets and present new annotations on German text. Finally, we demonstrate our proposed visualization tool on multilingual inputs.

CMOSE: Comprehensive Multi-Modality Online Student Engagement Dataset with High-Quality Labels

Online learning is a rapidly growing industry due to its convenience. However, a major challenge in online learning is whether students are as engaged as they are in face-to-face classes. An engagement recognition system can significantly improve the learning experience in online classes. Current challenges in engagement detection involve poor label quality in the dataset, intra-class variation, and extreme data imbalance. To address these problems, we present the CMOSE dataset, which contains a large number of data in different engagement levels and high-quality labels generated according to the psychological advice. We demonstrate the advantage of transferability by analyzing the model performance on other engagement datasets. We also developed a training mechanism, MocoRank, to handle the intra-class variation, the ordinal relationship between different classes, and the data imbalance problem. MocoRank outperforms prior engagement detection losses, achieving a 1.32% enhancement in overall accuracy and 5.05% improvement in average accuracy. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modality by conducting ablation studies on features such as pre-trained video features, high-level facial features, and audio features.

Model Inversion Attack via Dynamic Memory Learning

Model Inversion (MI) attacks aim to recover the private training data from the target model, which has raised security concerns about the deployment of DNNs in practice. Recent advances in generative adversarial models have rendered them particularly effective in MI attacks, primarily due to their ability to generate high-fidelity and perceptually realistic images that closely resemble the target data. In this work, we propose a novel Dynamic Memory Model Inversion Attack (DMMIA) to leverage historically learned knowledge, which interacts with samples (during the training) to induce diverse generations. DMMIA constructs two types of prototypes to inject the information about historically learned knowledge: Intra-class Multicentric Representation (IMR) representing target-related concepts by multiple learnable prototypes, and Inter-class Discriminative Representation (IDR) characterizing the memorized samples as learned prototypes to capture more privacy-related information. As a result, our DMMIA has a more informative representation, which brings more diverse and discriminative generated results. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that DMMIA performs better than state-of-the-art MI attack methods.