Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Li Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Li Zhang.

At least 487 records · Page 27Linked to original sources

How to Gain Commit Rights in Modern Top Open Source Communities?

The success of open source software (OSS) projects relies on voluntary contributions from various community roles.Being a committer signifies gaining trust and higher privileges. Substantial studies have focused on the requirements of becoming a committer, but most of them are based on interviews or several hypotheses, lacking a comprehensive understanding of committers' qualifications.We explore both the policies and practical implementations of committer qualifications in modern top OSS communities. Through a thematic analysis of these policies, we construct a taxonomy of committer qualifications, consisting of 26 codes categorized into nine themes, including Personnel-related to Project, Communication, and Long-term Participation. We also highlight the variations in committer qualifications emphasized in different OSS community governance models. For example, projects following the core maintainer model value project comprehension, while projects following the company-backed model place significant emphasis on user issue resolution. Then, we propose eight sets of metrics and perform survival analysis on two representative OSS projects to understand how these qualifications are implemented in practice. We find that the probability of gaining commit rights decreases as participation time passes.The selection criteria in practice are generally consistent with the community policies. Developers who submit high-quality code, actively engage in code review, and make extensive contributions to related projects are more likely to be granted commit rights. However, there are some qualifications that do not align precisely, and some are not adequately evaluated. This study contributes to the understanding of trust establishment in modern top OSS communities, assists communities in better allocating commit rights, and supports developers in achieving self-actualization through OSS participation.

cs.SE↗

VMambaCC: A Visual State Space Model for Crowd Counting

As a deep learning model, Visual Mamba (VMamba) has a low computational complexity and a global receptive field, which has been successful applied to image classification and detection. To extend its applications, we apply VMamba to crowd counting and propose a novel VMambaCC (VMamba Crowd Counting) model. Naturally, VMambaCC inherits the merits of VMamba, or global modeling for images and low computational cost. Additionally, we design a Multi-head High-level Feature (MHF) attention mechanism for VMambaCC. MHF is a new attention mechanism that leverages high-level semantic features to augment low-level semantic features, thereby enhancing spatial feature representation with greater precision. Building upon MHF, we further present a High-level Semantic Supervised Feature Pyramid Network (HS2PFN) that progressively integrates and enhances high-level semantic information with low-level semantic information. Extensive experimental results on five public datasets validate the efficacy of our approach. For example, our method achieves a mean absolute error of 51.87 and a mean squared error of 81.3 on the ShangHaiTech\_PartA dataset. Our code is coming soon.

cs.CV↗

Optimization of Dark-Field CT for Lung Imaging

Background: X-ray grating-based dark-field imaging can sense the small angle scattering caused by an object's micro-structure. This technique is sensitive to lung's porous alveoli and is able to detect lung disease at an early stage. Up to now, a human-scale dark-field CT has been built for lung imaging. Purpose: This study aimed to develop a more thorough optimization method for dark-field lung CT and summarize principles for system design. Methods: We proposed a metric in the form of contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) for system parameter optimization, and designed a phantom with concentric circle shape to fit the task of lung disease detection. Finally, we developed the calculation method of the CNR metric, and analyzed the relation between CNR and system parameters. Results: We showed that with other parameters held constant, the CNR first increases and then decreases with the system auto-correlation length (ACL). The optimal ACL is nearly not influenced by system's visibility, and is only related to phantom's property, i.e., scattering material's size and phantom's absorption. For our phantom, the optimal ACL is about 0.21 μm. As for system geometry, larger source-detector and isocenter-detector distance can increase the system's maximal ACL, helping the system meet the optimal ACL more easily. Conclusions: This study proposed a more reasonable metric and a task-based process for optimization, and demonstrated that the system optimal ACL is only related to the phantom's property.

physics.med-ph↗

Challenges of Using Pre-trained Models: the Practitioners' Perspective

The challenges associated with using pre-trained models (PTMs) have not been specifically investigated, which hampers their effective utilization. To address this knowledge gap, we collected and analyzed a dataset of 5,896 PTM-related questions on Stack Overflow. We first analyze the popularity and difficulty trends of PTM-related questions. We find that PTM-related questions are becoming more and more popular over time. However, it is noteworthy that PTM-related questions not only have a lower response rate but also exhibit a longer response time compared to many well-researched topics in software engineering. This observation emphasizes the significant difficulty and complexity associated with the practical application of PTMs. To delve into the specific challenges, we manually annotate 430 PTM-related questions, categorizing them into a hierarchical taxonomy of 42 codes (i.e., leaf nodes) and three categories. This taxonomy encompasses many PTM prominent challenges such as fine-tuning, output understanding, and prompt customization, which reflects the gaps between current techniques and practical needs. We discuss the implications of our study for PTM practitioners, vendors, and educators, and suggest possible directions and solutions for future research.

cs.SE↗

Characteristics of the MTx optical transmitter in Total Ionizing Dose

The dual-channel multi-mode 850 nm optical Miniature Transmitter (MTx) is developed for data transmission of the ATLAS LAr calorimeter readout at LHC. The MTx's are exposed to the radiation field of proton-proton collisions, therefore, the tolerance in Total Ionizing Dose (TID) is required. The TID effects in the MTx are investigated with X-rays and Co-60 gamma-rays for the active components of VCSEL diodes and the customized Link-on-Chip laser driver (LOCld) developed in 0.25 um Silicon-on-Sapphire CMOS technology. The irradiation tests were conducted at various dose rates. The responses to TID are observed with degradation of laser currents at initial dose of 10 to 100 Gy(SiO2), and partial recovery with additional TID to a stable output about 90 % of the original. The optical eye diagrams of irradiated samples show slightly increased jittering, and are suitable for the ATLAS requirement of 5 Gbps applications.

physics.ins-det↗

PromptCIR: Blind Compressed Image Restoration with Prompt Learning

Blind Compressed Image Restoration (CIR) has garnered significant attention due to its practical applications. It aims to mitigate compression artifacts caused by unknown quality factors, particularly with JPEG codecs. Existing works on blind CIR often seek assistance from a quality factor prediction network to facilitate their network to restore compressed images. However, the predicted numerical quality factor lacks spatial information, preventing network adaptability toward image contents. Recent studies in prompt-learning-based image restoration have showcased the potential of prompts to generalize across varied degradation types and degrees. This motivated us to design a prompt-learning-based compressed image restoration network, dubbed PromptCIR, which can effectively restore images from various compress levels. Specifically, PromptCIR exploits prompts to encode compression information implicitly, where prompts directly interact with soft weights generated from image features, thus providing dynamic content-aware and distortion-aware guidance for the restoration process. The light-weight prompts enable our method to adapt to different compression levels, while introducing minimal parameter overhead. Overall, PromptCIR leverages the powerful transformer-based backbone with the dynamic prompt module to proficiently handle blind CIR tasks, winning first place in the NTIRE 2024 challenge of blind compressed image enhancement track. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our proposed PromptCIR. The code is available at https://github.com/lbc12345/PromptCIR-NTIRE24.

cs.CV↗

ResVR: Joint Rescaling and Viewport Rendering of Omnidirectional Images

With the advent of virtual reality technology, omnidirectional image (ODI) rescaling techniques are increasingly embraced for reducing transmitted and stored file sizes while preserving high image quality. Despite this progress, current ODI rescaling methods predominantly focus on enhancing the quality of images in equirectangular projection (ERP) format, which overlooks the fact that the content viewed on head mounted displays (HMDs) is actually a rendered viewport instead of an ERP image. In this work, we emphasize that focusing solely on ERP quality results in inferior viewport visual experiences for users. Thus, we propose ResVR, which is the first comprehensive framework for the joint Rescaling and Viewport Rendering of ODIs. ResVR allows obtaining LR ERP images for transmission while rendering high-quality viewports for users to watch on HMDs. In our ResVR, a novel discrete pixel sampling strategy is developed to tackle the complex mapping between the viewport and ERP, enabling end-to-end training of ResVR pipeline. Furthermore, a spherical pixel shape representation technique is innovatively derived from spherical differentiation to significantly improve the visual quality of rendered viewports. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ResVR outperforms existing methods in viewport rendering tasks across different fields of view, resolutions, and view directions while keeping a low transmission overhead.

cs.CV↗

How far are AI-powered programming assistants from meeting developers' needs?

Recent In-IDE AI coding assistant tools (ACATs) like GitHub Copilot have significantly impacted developers' coding habits. While some studies have examined their effectiveness, there lacks in-depth investigation into the actual assistance process. To bridge this gap, we simulate real development scenarios encompassing three typical types of software development tasks and recruit 27 computer science students to investigate their behavior with three popular ACATs. Our goal is to comprehensively assess ACATs' effectiveness, explore characteristics of recommended code, identify reasons for modifications, and understand users' challenges and expectations. To facilitate the study, we develop an experimental platform that includes a data collection plugin for VSCode IDE and provides functions for screen recording, code evaluation, and automatic generation of personalized interview and survey questions. Through analysis of the collected data, we find that ACATs generally enhance task completion rates, reduce time, improve code quality, and increase self-perceived productivity. However, the improvement is influenced by both the nature of coding tasks and users' experience level. Notably, for experienced participants, the use of ACATs may even increase completion time. We observe that "edited line completion" is the most frequently recommended way, while "comments completion" and "string completion" have the lowest acceptance rates. The primary reasons for modifying recommended code are disparities between output formats and requirements, flawed logic, and inconsistent code styles. In terms of challenges and expectations, optimization of service access and help documentation is also concerned by participants except for functionality and performance. Our study provides valuable insights into the effectiveness and usability of ACATs, informing further improvements in their design and implementation.

cs.SE↗

Joint Coordinate Regression and Association For Multi-Person Pose Estimation, A Pure Neural Network Approach

We introduce a novel one-stage end-to-end multi-person 2D pose estimation algorithm, known as Joint Coordinate Regression and Association (JCRA), that produces human pose joints and associations without requiring any post-processing. The proposed algorithm is fast, accurate, effective, and simple. The one-stage end-to-end network architecture significantly improves the inference speed of JCRA. Meanwhile, we devised a symmetric network structure for both the encoder and decoder, which ensures high accuracy in identifying keypoints. It follows an architecture that directly outputs part positions via a transformer network, resulting in a significant improvement in performance. Extensive experiments on the MS COCO and CrowdPose benchmarks demonstrate that JCRA outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, JCRA demonstrates 69.2 mAP and is 78\% faster at inference acceleration than previous state-of-the-art bottom-up algorithms. The code for this algorithm will be publicly available.

cs.CV↗

Peer-aided Repairer: Empowering Large Language Models to Repair Advanced Student Assignments

Automated generation of feedback on programming assignments holds significant benefits for programming education, especially when it comes to advanced assignments. Automated Program Repair techniques, especially Large Language Model based approaches, have gained notable recognition for their potential to fix introductory assignments. However, the programs used for evaluation are relatively simple. It remains unclear how existing approaches perform in repairing programs from higher-level programming courses. To address these limitations, we curate a new advanced student assignment dataset named Defects4DS from a higher-level programming course. Subsequently, we identify the challenges related to fixing bugs in advanced assignments. Based on the analysis, we develop a framework called PaR that is powered by the LLM. PaR works in three phases: Peer Solution Selection, Multi-Source Prompt Generation, and Program Repair. Peer Solution Selection identifies the closely related peer programs based on lexical, semantic, and syntactic criteria. Then Multi-Source Prompt Generation adeptly combines multiple sources of information to create a comprehensive and informative prompt for the last Program Repair stage. The evaluation on Defects4DS and another well-investigated ITSP dataset reveals that PaR achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating impressive improvements of 19.94% and 15.2% in repair rate compared to prior state-of-the-art LLM- and symbolic-based approaches, respectively

cs.SE↗

Modular Blind Video Quality Assessment

Blind video quality assessment (BVQA) plays a pivotal role in evaluating and improving the viewing experience of end-users across a wide range of video-based platforms and services. Contemporary deep learning-based models primarily analyze video content in its aggressively subsampled format, while being blind to the impact of the actual spatial resolution and frame rate on video quality. In this paper, we propose a modular BVQA model and a method of training it to improve its modularity. Our model comprises a base quality predictor, a spatial rectifier, and a temporal rectifier, responding to the visual content and distortion, spatial resolution, and frame rate changes on video quality, respectively. During training, spatial and temporal rectifiers are dropped out with some probabilities to render the base quality predictor a standalone BVQA model, which should work better with the rectifiers. Extensive experiments on both professionally-generated content and user-generated content video databases show that our quality model achieves superior or comparable performance to current methods. Additionally, the modularity of our model offers an opportunity to analyze existing video quality databases in terms of their spatial and temporal complexity.

eess.IV↗

STEntConv: Predicting Disagreement with Stance Detection and a Signed Graph Convolutional Network

The rise of social media platforms has led to an increase in polarised online discussions, especially on political and socio-cultural topics such as elections and climate change. We propose a simple and novel unsupervised method to predict whether the authors of two posts agree or disagree, leveraging user stances about named entities obtained from their posts. We present STEntConv, a model which builds a graph of users and named entities weighted by stance and trains a Signed Graph Convolutional Network (SGCN) to detect disagreement between comment and reply posts. We run experiments and ablation studies and show that including this information improves disagreement detection performance on a dataset of Reddit posts for a range of controversial subreddit topics, without the need for platform-specific features or user history.

cs.CL↗

InternLM2 Technical Report

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 has sparked discussions on the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, replicating such advancements in open-source models has been challenging. This paper introduces InternLM2, an open-source LLM that outperforms its predecessors in comprehensive evaluations across 6 dimensions and 30 benchmarks, long-context modeling, and open-ended subjective evaluations through innovative pre-training and optimization techniques. The pre-training process of InternLM2 is meticulously detailed, highlighting the preparation of diverse data types including text, code, and long-context data. InternLM2 efficiently captures long-term dependencies, initially trained on 4k tokens before advancing to 32k tokens in pre-training and fine-tuning stages, exhibiting remarkable performance on the 200k ``Needle-in-a-Haystack" test. InternLM2 is further aligned using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and a novel Conditional Online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (COOL RLHF) strategy that addresses conflicting human preferences and reward hacking. By releasing InternLM2 models in different training stages and model sizes, we provide the community with insights into the model's evolution.

cs.CL↗

CoachLM: Automatic Instruction Revisions Improve the Data Quality in LLM Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Language Learning Models (LLMs) in responding to human instructions. The quality of instruction pairs used for tuning greatly affects the performance of LLMs. However, the manual creation of high-quality instruction datasets is costly, leading to the adoption of automatic generation of instruction pairs by LLMs as a popular alternative. To ensure the high quality of LLM-generated instruction datasets, several approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, existing methods either compromise dataset integrity by filtering a large proportion of samples, or are unsuitable for industrial applications. In this paper, instead of discarding low-quality samples, we propose CoachLM, a novel approach to enhance the quality of instruction datasets through automatic revisions on samples in the dataset. CoachLM is trained from the samples revised by human experts and significantly increases the proportion of high-quality samples in the dataset from 17.7% to 78.9%. The effectiveness of CoachLM is further assessed on various real-world instruction test sets. The results show that CoachLM improves the instruction-following capabilities of the instruction-tuned LLM by an average of 29.9%, which even surpasses larger LLMs with nearly twice the number of parameters. Furthermore, CoachLM is successfully deployed in a data management system for LLMs at Huawei, resulting in an efficiency improvement of up to 20% in the cleaning of 40k real-world instruction pairs. We release various assets of CoachLM, including the training data, code and test set (https://github.com/lunyiliu/CoachLM).

cs.CL↗

RA-Rec: An Efficient ID Representation Alignment Framework for LLM-based Recommendation

Large language models (LLM) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for a variety of natural language processing tasks, bringing a new surge of combining LLM with recommendation systems, termed as LLM-based RS. Current approaches generally fall into two main paradigms, the ID direct usage paradigm and the ID translation paradigm, noting their core weakness stems from lacking recommendation knowledge and uniqueness. To address this limitation, we propose a new paradigm, ID representation, which incorporates pre-trained ID embeddings into LLMs in a complementary manner. In this work, we present RA-Rec, an efficient ID representation alignment framework for LLM-based recommendation, which is compatible with multiple ID-based methods and LLM architectures. Specifically, we treat ID embeddings as soft prompts and design an innovative alignment module and an efficient tuning method with tailored data construction for alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate RA-Rec substantially outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 3.0% absolute HitRate@100 improvements while utilizing less than 10x training data.

cs.IR↗

Urban Scene Diffusion through Semantic Occupancy Map

Generating unbounded 3D scenes is crucial for large-scale scene understanding and simulation. Urban scenes, unlike natural landscapes, consist of various complex man-made objects and structures such as roads, traffic signs, vehicles, and buildings. To create a realistic and detailed urban scene, it is crucial to accurately represent the geometry and semantics of the underlying objects, going beyond their visual appearance. In this work, we propose UrbanDiffusion, a 3D diffusion model that is conditioned on a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) map and generates an urban scene with geometry and semantics in the form of semantic occupancy map. Our model introduces a novel paradigm that learns the data distribution of scene-level structures within a latent space and further enables the expansion of the synthesized scene into an arbitrary scale. After training on real-world driving datasets, our model can generate a wide range of diverse urban scenes given the BEV maps from the held-out set and also generalize to the synthesized maps from a driving simulator. We further demonstrate its application to scene image synthesis with a pretrained image generator as a prior.

cs.CV↗

Generalizable and Stable Finetuning of Pretrained Language Models on Low-Resource Texts

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks significantly, but finetuning PLMs on low-resource datasets poses significant challenges such as instability and overfitting. Previous methods tackle these issues by finetuning a strategically chosen subnetwork on a downstream task, while keeping the remaining weights fixed to the pretrained weights. However, they rely on a suboptimal criteria for sub-network selection, leading to suboptimal solutions. To address these limitations, we propose a regularization method based on attention-guided weight mixup for finetuning PLMs. Our approach represents each network weight as a mixup of task-specific weight and pretrained weight, controlled by a learnable attention parameter, providing finer control over sub-network selection. Furthermore, we employ a bi-level optimization (BLO) based framework on two separate splits of the training dataset, improving generalization and combating overfitting. We validate the efficacy of our proposed method through extensive experiments, demonstrating its superiority over previous methods, particularly in the context of finetuning PLMs on low-resource datasets.

cs.CL↗

Choice-75: A Dataset on Decision Branching in Script Learning

Script learning studies how stereotypical events unfold, enabling machines to reason about narratives with implicit information. Previous works mostly consider a script as a linear sequence of events while ignoring the potential branches that arise due to people's circumstantial choices. We hence propose Choice-75, the first benchmark that challenges intelligent systems to make decisions given descriptive scenarios, containing 75 scripts and more than 600 scenarios. We also present preliminary results with current large language models (LLM). Although they demonstrate overall decent performance, there is still notable headroom in hard scenarios.

cs.AI↗