Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Compute-in-Memory based Neural Network Accelerators for Safety-Critical Systems: Worst-Case Scenarios and Protections

Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM)-based Computing-in-Memory (CiM) architectures show substantial promise in accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs) due to their exceptional energy efficiency. However, NVM devices are prone to device variations. Consequently, the actual DNN weights mapped to NVM devices can differ considerably from their targeted values, inducing significant performance degradation. Many existing solutions aim to optimize average performance amidst device variations, which is a suitable strategy for general-purpose conditions. However, the worst-case performance that is crucial for safety-critical applications is largely overlooked in current research. In this study, we define the problem of pinpointing the worst-case performance of CiM DNN accelerators affected by device variations. Additionally, we introduce a strategy to identify a specific pattern of the device value deviations in the complex, high-dimensional value deviation space, responsible for this worst-case outcome. Our findings reveal that even subtle device variations can precipitate a dramatic decline in DNN accuracy, posing risks for CiM-based platforms in supporting safety-critical applications. Notably, we observe that prevailing techniques to bolster average DNN performance in CiM accelerators fall short in enhancing worst-case scenarios. In light of this issue, we propose a novel worst-case-aware training technique named A-TRICE that efficiently combines adversarial training and noise-injection training with right-censored Gaussian noise to improve the DNN accuracy in the worst-case scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate that A-TRICE improves the worst-case accuracy under device variations by up to 33%.
GalacticFlow: Learning a Generalized Representation of Galaxies with Normalizing Flows

State-of-the-art galaxy formation simulations generate data within weeks or months. Their results consist of a random sub-sample of possible galaxies with a fixed number of stars. We propose a ML based method, GalacticFlow, that generalizes such results. We use normalizing flows to learn the extended distribution function of galaxies conditioned on global galactic parameters. GalacticFlow then provides a continuized and condensed representation of the ensemble of galaxies in the data. Thus, essentially compressing large amounts of explicit simulation data into a small implicit generative model. Our model is able to evaluate any galaxy eDF given by a set of global parameters and allows generating arbitrarily many stars from it. We show that we can learn such a representation, embodying the entire mass range from dwarf to Milky Way mass, from only 90 galaxies in $\sim18$ hours on a single RTX 2080Ti and generate a new galaxy of one million stars within a few seconds.
Effect of levels of equisetin and fumonisin mycotoxins on blood parameters of broiler chicks

This study was carried out to assess the effect of equisetin and fumonisin mycotoxins on the blood parameters of broiler chicks. A total of 280 day old broiler chicks (Abor Acre) were acquired from a commercial hatchery in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria for this study. The chicks were randomly assigned to 7 treatments combinations in a completely randomized design. Treatment A had equisetin mycotoxin in three levels of concentration (25, 50 and 100%), treatment B had fumonisin also with three levels of concentration (25, 50 and 100%), while treatment C was the control. Each treatment concentration was replicated twice and the mycotoxin was administered at 20 birds per replicate. One milliliter sterile syringes were used per treatment to inject 0.1 mL solution of the 2 toxins intravenously through the wing web of the broiler chicks on days 8, 10, 12 and 14. On day 15, 5 mL sterile syringes were used to collect 4 mL of blood samples from the birds for haematological and biochemical analysis. Data collected were subjected to analysis of variance and treatment means were separated using Duncan multiple range test. With the exception of white blood cell count (WBC) and platelet (PLT), all other parameters measured for haematological studies showed no significant variation. This could mean that the broiler chicks had slow response to the toxin effect. However, the higher WBC value (89.44-98.73 µL) in birds administered mycotoxin, with the exception of A50, relative to the control (85.47 µL) indicated the presence of toxin in the birds’ blood stream. Results obtained on serum biochemical analyses showed a significant variation (P<0.05) on all the parameters measured. The ALT (4.10-8.30 IU L-1) and AST (46.90-123.30 mg dL-1 values obtained from experimental chicks were significantly higher than that of the control (2.50 IU L-1, 38.10 mg dL-1. Chicks exposed to A50 mycotoxin concentration had the highest creatinine value which an indication of kidney impairment. It is concluded that the exposure of broiler birds to mycotoxin has a negative effect on blood parameters and the functionality of internal organs of the birds. Feed ingredients should, therefore, be properly dried and stored under conducive condition to prevent mold growth and feed quality control measures should be established at feed mills.
RecJPQ: Training Large-Catalogue Sequential Recommenders

Sequential Recommendation is a popular recommendation task that uses the order of user-item interaction to model evolving users' interests and sequential patterns in their behaviour. Current state-of-the-art Transformer-based models for sequential recommendation, such as BERT4Rec and SASRec, generate sequence embeddings and compute scores for catalogue items, but the increasing catalogue size makes training these models costly. The Joint Product Quantisation (JPQ) method, originally proposed for passage retrieval, markedly reduces the size of the retrieval index with minimal effect on model effectiveness, by replacing passage embeddings with a limited number of shared sub-embeddings. This paper introduces RecJPQ, a novel adaptation of JPQ for sequential recommendations, which takes the place of item embeddings tensor and replaces item embeddings with a concatenation of a limited number of shared sub-embeddings and, therefore, limits the number of learnable model parameters. The main idea of RecJPQ is to split items into sub-item entities before training the main recommendation model, which is inspired by splitting words into tokens and training tokenisers in language models. We apply RecJPQ to SASRec, BERT4Rec, and GRU4rec models on three large-scale sequential datasets. Our results showed that RecJPQ could notably reduce the model size (e.g., 48% reduction for the Gowalla dataset with no effectiveness degradation). RecJPQ can also improve model performance through a regularisation effect (e.g. +0.96% NDCG@10 improvement on the Booking.com dataset). Overall, RecJPQ allows the training of state-of-the-art transformer recommenders in industrial applications, where datasets with millions of items are common.
From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity

'Identity continues to be the problem it was throughout modernity', says Douglas Kellner, and adds that 'far from identity disappearing in contemporary society, it is rather reconstructed and redefined' though just a few paragraphs later he casts doubts on the feasibility of the selfsame 'reconstruction and redefinition', pointing oht that 'identity today becomes a freely chosen game, a theatrical presentation of the self' and that 'when one radically shifts identity at will, one might lose controL 'I Kellner's ambivalence reflects the present ambivalence of the issue itself. One hears today of identity and its problems more often than ever before in modern times. And yet one wonders whether the current obsession is not just another case of the general rule of things being noticed only ex post facto; when they vanish, go bust or fall out of joint. I propose that while it is true that identity 'continues to be the problem', this is /lot 'the problem it was throughout modernity'. Indeed, if the modem 'problem of identity' was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodem 'problem of identity' is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open. In the case of identity, as in other cases, the catchword of modernity was creation; the catchword of postmodernity is recycling. Or one may say that if the 'media which was the message' of modernity was the photographic paper (think of the relentlessly swelling family albums, tracing page by yellowing page the slow accretion of irreversible and non-erasable identity-yielding events), the ultimately postmodern medium is the videotape (eminently erasable and re-usable, calculated not to hold anything for ever, admitting today's events solely on condition of effacing yesterday's ones, oozing the message of universal 'until-further-noticeness' of everything deemed worthy of recording). The main identity-bound anxiety of modern times was the worry about durability; it is the concern with commitment­ avoidance today. Modernity built in steel and concrete; postmodernity, in bio-degradable plastic. Identity as such is a modern invention. To say that modernity led to the 'disembedding' of identity, or that it rendered the identity 'unencum­ bered', is to assert a pleonasm, since at no time did identity 'become' a I From Pilgrim to Tourist
Compensation Sampling for Improved Convergence in Diffusion Models

Diffusion models achieve remarkable quality in image generation, but at a cost. Iterative denoising requires many time steps to produce high fidelity images. We argue that the denoising process is crucially limited by an accumulation of the reconstruction error due to an initial inaccurate reconstruction of the target data. This leads to lower quality outputs, and slower convergence. To address this issue, we propose compensation sampling to guide the generation towards the target domain. We introduce a compensation term, implemented as a U-Net, which adds negligible computation overhead during training and, optionally, inference. Our approach is flexible and we demonstrate its application in unconditional generation, face inpainting, and face de-occlusion using benchmark datasets CIFAR-10, CelebA, CelebA-HQ, FFHQ-256, and FSG. Our approach consistently yields state-of-the-art results in terms of image quality, while accelerating the denoising process to converge during training by up to an order of magnitude.
Local times of deterministic paths and self-similar processes with stationary increments as normalized numbers of interval crossings

We prove a general result on a relationship between a limit of normalized numbers of interval crossings by a c\`adl\`ag path and an occupation measure associated with this path. Using this result we define local times of fractional Brownian motions (classically defined as densities of relevant occupation measure) as weak limits of properly normalized numbers of interval crossings. We also discuss a similar result for c\`adl\`ag semimartingales, in particular for alpha-stable processes, and for Rosenblatt processes, and provide natural examples of deterministic paths which possess quadratic or higher order variation but no local times.
Two-fermion negativity and confinement in the Schwinger model

We consider the fermionic (logarithmic) negativity between two fermionic modes in the Schwinger model. Recent results pointed out that fermionic systems can exhibit stronger entanglement than bosonic systems, exhibiting a negativity that decays only algebraically. The Schwinger model is described by fermionic excitations at short distances, while its asymptotic spectrum is the one of a bosonic theory. We show that the two-mode negativity detects this confining, fermion-to-boson transition, shifting from an algebraic decay to an exponential decay at distances of the order of the de Broglie wavelength of the first excited state. We derive analytical expressions in the massless Schwinger model and confront them with tensor network simulations. We also perform tensor network simulations in the massive model, which is not solvable analytically, and close to the Ising quantum critical point of the Schwinger model, where we show that the negativity behaves as its bosonic counterpart.
Achieving the Fundamental Limit of Lossless Analog Compression via Polarization

In this paper, we study the lossless analog compression for i.i. d. nonsingular signals via the polarization-based framework. We prove that for nonsingular source, the error probability of maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation polarizes under the Hadamard transform, which extends the polarization phenomenon to analog domain. Building on this insight, we propose partial Hadamard compression and develop the corresponding analog successive cancellation (SC) decoder. The proposed scheme consists of deterministic measurement matrices and non-iterative reconstruction algorithm, providing benefits in both space and computational complexity. Using the polarization of error probability, we prove that our approach achieves the information-theoretical limit for lossless analog compression developed by Wu and Verdu.
Evaluating the Utility of Model Explanations for Model Development

One of the motivations for explainable AI is to allow humans to make better and more informed decisions regarding the use and deployment of AI models. But careful evaluations are needed to assess whether this expectation has been fulfilled. Current evaluations mainly focus on algorithmic properties of explanations, and those that involve human subjects often employ subjective questions to test human's perception of explanation usefulness, without being grounded in objective metrics and measurements. In this work, we evaluate whether explanations can improve human decision-making in practical scenarios of machine learning model development. We conduct a mixed-methods user study involving image data to evaluate saliency maps generated by SmoothGrad, GradCAM, and an oracle explanation on two tasks: model selection and counterfactual simulation. To our surprise, we did not find evidence of significant improvement on these tasks when users were provided with any of the saliency maps, even the synthetic oracle explanation designed to be simple to understand and highly indicative of the answer. Nonetheless, explanations did help users more accurately describe the models. These findings suggest caution regarding the usefulness and potential for misunderstanding in saliency-based explanations.
Model Extraction Attacks Revisited

Model extraction (ME) attacks represent one major threat to Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) platforms by ``stealing'' the functionality of confidential machine-learning models through querying black-box APIs. Over seven years have passed since ME attacks were first conceptualized in the seminal work. During this period, substantial advances have been made in both ME attacks and MLaaS platforms, raising the intriguing question: How has the vulnerability of MLaaS platforms to ME attacks been evolving? In this work, we conduct an in-depth study to answer this critical question. Specifically, we characterize the vulnerability of current, mainstream MLaaS platforms to ME attacks from multiple perspectives including attack strategies, learning techniques, surrogate-model design, and benchmark tasks. Many of our findings challenge previously reported results, suggesting emerging patterns of ME vulnerability. Further, by analyzing the vulnerability of the same MLaaS platforms using historical datasets from the past four years, we retrospectively characterize the evolution of ME vulnerability over time, leading to a set of interesting findings. Finally, we make suggestions about improving the current practice of MLaaS in terms of attack robustness. Our study sheds light on the current state of ME vulnerability in the wild and points to several promising directions for future research.
Human in-the-Loop Estimation of Cluster Count in Datasets via Similarity-Driven Nested Importance Sampling

Identifying the number of clusters serves as a preliminary goal for many data analysis tasks. A common approach to this problem is to vary the number of clusters in a clustering algorithm (e.g., 'k' in $k$-means) and pick the value that best explains the data. However, the count estimates can be unreliable especially when the image similarity is poor. Human feedback on the pairwise similarity can be used to improve the clustering, but existing approaches do not guarantee accurate count estimates. We propose an approach to produce estimates of the cluster counts in a large dataset given an approximate pairwise similarity. Our framework samples edges guided by the pairwise similarity, and we collect human feedback to construct a statistical estimate of the cluster count. On the technical front we have developed a nested importance sampling approach that yields (asymptotically) unbiased estimates of the cluster count with confidence intervals which can guide human effort. Compared to naive sampling, our similarity-driven sampling produces more accurate estimates of counts and tighter confidence intervals. We evaluate our method on a benchmark of six fine-grained image classification datasets achieving low error rates on the estimated number of clusters with significantly less human labeling effort compared to baselines and alternative active clustering approaches.
Learning the Causal Structure of Networked Dynamical Systems under Latent Nodes and Structured Noise

This paper considers learning the hidden causal network of a linear networked dynamical system (NDS) from the time series data at some of its nodes -- partial observability. The dynamics of the NDS are driven by colored noise that generates spurious associations across pairs of nodes, rendering the problem much harder. To address the challenge of noise correlation and partial observability, we assign to each pair of nodes a feature vector computed from the time series data of observed nodes. The feature embedding is engineered to yield structural consistency: there exists an affine hyperplane that consistently partitions the set of features, separating the feature vectors corresponding to connected pairs of nodes from those corresponding to disconnected pairs. The causal inference problem is thus addressed via clustering the designed features. We demonstrate with simple baseline supervised methods the competitive performance of the proposed causal inference mechanism under broad connectivity regimes and noise correlation levels, including a real world network. Further, we devise novel technical guarantees of structural consistency for linear NDS under the considered regime.
NovaCOMET: Open Commonsense Foundation Models with Symbolic Knowledge Distillation

We present NovaCOMET, an open commonsense knowledge model, that combines the best aspects of knowledge and general task models. Compared to previous knowledge models, NovaCOMET allows open-format relations enabling direct application to reasoning tasks; compared to general task models like Flan-T5, it explicitly centers knowledge, enabling superior performance for commonsense reasoning. NovaCOMET leverages the knowledge of opaque proprietary models to create an open knowledge pipeline. First, knowledge is symbolically distilled into NovATOMIC, a publicly-released discrete knowledge graph which can be audited, critiqued, and filtered. Next, we train NovaCOMET on NovATOMIC by fine-tuning an open-source pretrained model. NovaCOMET uses an open-format training objective, replacing the fixed relation sets of past knowledge models, enabling arbitrary structures within the data to serve as inputs or outputs. The resulting generation model, optionally augmented with human annotation, matches or exceeds comparable open task models like Flan-T5 on a range of commonsense generation tasks. NovaCOMET serves as a counterexample to the contemporary focus on instruction tuning only, demonstrating a distinct advantage to explicitly modeling commonsense knowledge as well.
Coherent control of a few-channel hole type gatemon qubit

Gatemon qubits are the electrically tunable cousins of superconducting transmon qubits. In this work, we demonstrate the full coherent control of a gatemon qubit based on hole carriers in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire, with the longest coherence times in group IV material gatemons to date. The key to these results is a high-quality Josephson junction obtained in a straightforward and reproducible annealing technique. We demonstrate that the transport through the narrow junctions is dominated by only two quantum channels, with transparencies up to unity. This novel qubit platform holds great promise for quantum information applications, not only because it incorporates technologically relevant materials, but also because it provides new opportunities, like an ultrastrong spin-orbit coupling in the few-channel regime of Josephson junctions.
Bag of Tricks: Semi-Supervised Cross-domain Crater Detection with Poor Data Quality

With the development of spaceflight and the exploration of extraterrestrial planets, exoplanet crater detection has gradually gained attention. However, with the current scarcity of relevant datasets, high sample background complexity, and large inter-domain differences, few existing detection models can achieve good robustness and generalization across domains by training on data with more background interference. To obtain a better robust model with better cross-domain generalization in the presence of poor data quality, we propose the SCPQ model, in which we first propose a method for fusing shallow information using attention mechanism (FSIAM), which utilizes feature maps fused with deep convolved feature maps after fully extracting the global sensory field of shallow information via the attention mechanism module, which can fully fit the data to obtain a better sense of the domain in the presence of poor data, and thus better multiscale adaptability. Secondly, we propose a pseudo-label and data augment strategy (PDAS) and a smooth hard example mining (SHEM) loss function to improve cross-domain performance. PDAS adopts high-quality pseudo-labeled data from the target domain to the finetune model, and adopts different strong and weak data enhancement strategies for different domains, which mitigates the different distribution of information inherent in the source and target domains, and obtains a better generalization effect. Meanwhile, our proposed SHEM loss function can solve the problem of poor robustness of hard examples due to partial background interference learning during the training process. The SHEM loss function can smooth this interference and has generalization while learning hard examples. Experimental results show that we achieved better performance on the DACD dataset and improved the Recall of cross-domain detection by 24.04\% over baseline.