Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learn to Compress (LtC): Efficient Learning-based Streaming Video Analytics

Video analytics are often performed as cloud services in edge settings, mainly to offload computation, and also in situations where the results are not directly consumed at the video sensors. Sending high-quality video data from the edge devices can be expensive both in terms of bandwidth and power use. In order to build a streaming video analytics pipeline that makes efficient use of these resources, it is therefore imperative to reduce the size of the video stream. Traditional video compression algorithms are unaware of the semantics of the video, and can be both inefficient and harmful for the analytics performance. In this paper, we introduce LtC, a collaborative framework between the video source and the analytics server, that efficiently learns to reduce the video streams within an analytics pipeline. Specifically, LtC uses the full-fledged analytics algorithm at the server as a teacher to train a lightweight student neural network, which is then deployed at the video source. The student network is trained to comprehend the semantic significance of various regions within the videos, which is used to differentially preserve the crucial regions in high quality while the remaining regions undergo aggressive compression. Furthermore, LtC also incorporates a novel temporal filtering algorithm based on feature-differencing to omit transmitting frames that do not contribute new information. Overall, LtC is able to use 28-35% less bandwidth and has up to 45% shorter response delay compared to recently published state of the art streaming frameworks while achieving similar analytics performance.
VIRD: Immersive Match Video Analysis for High-Performance Badminton Coaching

Badminton is a fast-paced sport that requires a strategic combination of spatial, temporal, and technical tactics. To gain a competitive edge at high-level competitions, badminton professionals frequently analyze match videos to gain insights and develop game strategies. However, the current process for analyzing matches is time-consuming and relies heavily on manual note-taking, due to the lack of automatic data collection and appropriate visualization tools. As a result, there is a gap in effectively analyzing matches and communicating insights among badminton coaches and players. This work proposes an end-to-end immersive match analysis pipeline designed in close collaboration with badminton professionals, including Olympic and national coaches and players. We present VIRD, a VR Bird (i.e., shuttle) immersive analysis tool, that supports interactive badminton game analysis in an immersive environment based on 3D reconstructed game views of the match video. We propose a top-down analytic workflow that allows users to seamlessly move from a high-level match overview to a detailed game view of individual rallies and shots, using situated 3D visualizations and video. We collect 3D spatial and dynamic shot data and player poses with computer vision models and visualize them in VR. Through immersive visualizations, coaches can interactively analyze situated spatial data (player positions, poses, and shot trajectories) with flexible viewpoints while navigating between shots and rallies effectively with embodied interaction. We evaluated the usefulness of VIRD with Olympic and national-level coaches and players in real matches. Results show that immersive analytics supports effective badminton match analysis with reduced context-switching costs and enhances spatial understanding with a high sense of presence.
Rates in almost sure invariance principle for nonuniformly hyperbolic maps

We prove the Almost Sure Invariance Principle (ASIP) with close to optimal error rates for nonuniformly hyperbolic maps. We do not assume exponential contraction along stable leaves, therefore our result covers in particular slowly mixing invertible dynamical systems as Bunimovich flowers, billiards with flat points as in Chernov and Zhang (2005) and Wojtkowski' (1990) system of two falling balls. For these examples, the ASIP is a new result, not covered by prior works for various reasons, notably because in absence of exponential contraction along stable leaves, it is challenging to employ the so-called Sinai's trick (Sinai 1972, Bowen 1975) of reducing a nonuniformly hyperbolic system to a nonuniformly expanding one. Our strategy follows our previous papers on the ASIP for nonuniformly expanding maps, where we build a semiconjugacy to a specific renewal Markov shift and adapt the argument of Berkes, Liu and Wu (2014). The main difference is that now the Markov shift is two-sided, the observables depend on the full trajectory, both the future and the past.
A Survey on the Integration of NAND Flash Storage in the Design of File Systems and the Host Storage Software Stack

With the ever-increasing amount of data generate in the world, estimated to reach over 200 Zettabytes by 2025, pressure on efficient data storage systems is intensifying. The shift from HDD to flash-based SSD provides one of the most fundamental shifts in storage technology, increasing performance capabilities significantly. However, flash storage comes with different characteristics than prior HDD storage technology. Therefore, storage software was unsuitable for leveraging the capabilities of flash storage. As a result, a plethora of storage applications have been design to better integrate with flash storage and align with flash characteristics. In this literature study we evaluate the effect the introduction of flash storage has had on the design of file systems, which providing one of the most essential mechanisms for managing persistent storage. We analyze the mechanisms for effectively managing flash storage, managing overheads of introduced design requirements, and leverage the capabilities of flash storage. Numerous methods have been adopted in file systems, however prominently revolve around similar design decisions, adhering to the flash hardware constrains, and limiting software intervention. Future design of storage software remains prominent with the constant growth in flash-based storage devices and interfaces, providing an increasing possibility to enhance flash integration in the host storage software stack.
Large-Scale Evaluation of Topic Models and Dimensionality Reduction Methods for 2D Text Spatialization

Topic models are a class of unsupervised learning algorithms for detecting the semantic structure within a text corpus. Together with a subsequent dimensionality reduction algorithm, topic models can be used for deriving spatializations for text corpora as two-dimensional scatter plots, reflecting semantic similarity between the documents and supporting corpus analysis. Although the choice of the topic model, the dimensionality reduction, and their underlying hyperparameters significantly impact the resulting layout, it is unknown which particular combinations result in high-quality layouts with respect to accuracy and perception metrics. To investigate the effectiveness of topic models and dimensionality reduction methods for the spatialization of corpora as two-dimensional scatter plots (or basis for landscape-type visualizations), we present a large-scale, benchmark-based computational evaluation. Our evaluation consists of (1) a set of corpora, (2) a set of layout algorithms that are combinations of topic models and dimensionality reductions, and (3) quality metrics for quantifying the resulting layout. The corpora are given as document-term matrices, and each document is assigned to a thematic class. The chosen metrics quantify the preservation of local and global properties and the perceptual effectiveness of the two-dimensional scatter plots. By evaluating the benchmark on a computing cluster, we derived a multivariate dataset with over 45 000 individual layouts and corresponding quality metrics. Based on the results, we propose guidelines for the effective design of text spatializations that are based on topic models and dimensionality reductions. As a main result, we show that interpretable topic models are beneficial for capturing the structure of text corpora. We furthermore recommend the use of t-SNE as a subsequent dimensionality reduction.
Optimality of Glauber dynamics for general-purpose Ising model sampling and free energy approximation

Recently, Eldan, Koehler, and Zeitouni (2020) showed that Glauber dynamics mixes rapidly for general Ising models so long as the difference between the largest and smallest eigenvalues of the coupling matrix is at most $1 - \epsilon$ for any fixed $\epsilon>0$. We give evidence that Glauber dynamics is in fact optimal for this"general-purpose sampling"task. Namely, we give an average-case reduction from hypothesis testing in a Wishart negatively-spiked matrix model to approximately sampling from the Gibbs measure of a general Ising model for which the difference between the largest and smallest eigenvalues of the coupling matrix is at most $1 + \epsilon$ for any fixed $\epsilon>0$. Combined with results of Bandeira, Kunisky, and Wein (2019) that analyze low-degree polynomial algorithms to give evidence for the hardness of the former spiked matrix problem, our results in turn give evidence for the hardness of general-purpose sampling improving on Glauber dynamics. We also give a similar reduction to approximating the free energy of general Ising models, and again infer evidence that simulated annealing algorithms based on Glauber dynamics are optimal in the general-purpose setting.
Functional central limit theorem with mean-uncertainty under sublinear expectation

In this paper, we introduce a fundamental model for independent and identically distributed sequence with model uncertainty on the canonical space $(\mathbb{R}^\mathbb{N},\mathcal{B}(\mathbb{R}^\mathbb{N}))$ via probability kernels. Thanks to the well-defined upper and lower variances, we obtain a new functional central limit theorem with mean-uncertainty on the canonical space by the method based on the martingale central limit theorem and stability of stochastic integral in the classical probability theory. Then we extend it to the general sublinear expectation space through a new representation theorem. Our results generalize Peng's central limit theorem with zero-mean to the case of mean-uncertainty and provides a purely probabilistic proof instead of the existing nonlinear partial differential equation approach. As an application, we consider the two-armed bandit problem and generalize the corresponding central limit theorem from the case of mean-certainty to mean-uncertainty.
A high-order finite volume method for Maxwell's equations in heterogeneous and time-varying media

We develop a finite volume method for Maxwell's equations in materials whose electromagnetic properties vary in space and time. We investigate both conservative and non-conservative numerical formulations. High-order methods accurately resolve fine structures that develop due to the varying material properties. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in handling temporal variation and its efficiency relative to traditional 2nd-order FDTD.
AdvDiff: Generating Unrestricted Adversarial Examples using Diffusion Models

Unrestricted adversarial attacks present a serious threat to deep learning models and adversarial defense techniques. They pose severe security problems for deep learning applications because they can effectively bypass defense mechanisms. However, previous attack methods often utilize Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which are not theoretically provable and thus generate unrealistic examples by incorporating adversarial objectives, especially for large-scale datasets like ImageNet. In this paper, we propose a new method, called AdvDiff, to generate unrestricted adversarial examples with diffusion models. We design two novel adversarial guidance techniques to conduct adversarial sampling in the reverse generation process of diffusion models. These two techniques are effective and stable to generate high-quality, realistic adversarial examples by integrating gradients of the target classifier interpretably. Experimental results on MNIST and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that AdvDiff is effective to generate unrestricted adversarial examples, which outperforms GAN-based methods in terms of attack performance and generation quality.
Towards Generalising Neural Topical Representations

Topic models have evolved from conventional Bayesian probabilistic models to Neural Topic Models (NTMs) over the last two decays. Although NTMs have achieved promising performance when trained and tested on a specific corpus, their generalisation ability across corpora is rarely studied. In practice, we often expect that an NTM trained on a source corpus can still produce quality topical representation for documents in a different target corpus without retraining. In this work, we aim to improve NTMs further so that their benefits generalise reliably across corpora and tasks. To do so, we propose to model similar documents by minimising their semantical distance when training NTMs. Specifically, similar documents are created by data augmentation during training; The semantical distance between documents is measured by the Hierarchical Topic Transport Distance (HOTT), which computes the Optimal Transport (OT) distance between the topical representations. Our framework can be readily applied to most NTMs as a plug-and-play module. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly improves the generalisation ability regarding neural topical representation across corpora.
Refining ChatGPT-Generated Code: Characterizing and Mitigating Code Quality Issues

Since its introduction in November 2022, ChatGPT has rapidly gained popularity due to its remarkable ability in language understanding and human-like responses. ChatGPT, based on GPT-3.5 architecture, has shown great promise for revolutionizing various research fields, including code generation. However, the reliability and quality of code generated by ChatGPT remain unexplored, raising concerns about potential risks associated with the widespread use of ChatGPT-driven code generation. In this paper, we systematically study the quality of 4,066 ChatGPT-generated code implemented in two popular programming languages, i.e., Java and Python, for 2,033 programming tasks. The goal of this work is three folds. First, we analyze the correctness of ChatGPT on code generation tasks and uncover the factors that influence its effectiveness, including task difficulty, programming language, time that tasks are introduced, and program size. Second, we identify and characterize potential issues with the quality of ChatGPT-generated code. Last, we provide insights into how these issues can be mitigated. Experiments highlight that out of 4,066 programs generated by ChatGPT, 2,756 programs are deemed correct, 1,082 programs provide wrong outputs, and 177 programs contain compilation or runtime errors. Additionally, we further analyze other characteristics of the generated code through static analysis tools, such as code style and maintainability, and find that 1,930 ChatGPT-generated code snippets suffer from maintainability issues. Subsequently, we investigate ChatGPT’s self-repairing ability and its interaction with static analysis tools to fix the errors uncovered in the previous step. Experiments suggest that ChatGPT can partially address these challenges, improving code quality by more than 20%, but there are still limitations and opportunities for improvement. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the current limitations of ChatGPT and offers a roadmap for future research and development efforts to enhance the code generation capabilities of AI models like ChatGPT.
Charge Transfer via Temporary Bonds in $C_{60} + C_{60}^+$ Molecular Collisions

We present a theoretical description of resonant charge transfer in collisions of nano-particles, specifically for $C_{60} + C_{60}^+$ collisions. We predict that transient bonds between colliding fullerenes can significantly extend the interaction time, allowing for a greater probability of charge transfer. In our model, the dumbbell-shaped $(C_{60}-C_{60})^+$ quasi-molecule, that is temporarily formed during the collision, is described as a dynamic system of 120 zero-range potentials. Using this model, we calculate the exchange interaction between colliding fullerenes and subsequently determine the corresponding charge transfer cross sections at different collision velocities. Our results have been verified with data obtained from quantum molecular dynamics simulations of the fullerene collisions. The presented theoretical model provides a description of the experimental data on the $C_{60} + C_{60}^+ $ resonant charge transfer collision through the inclusion of the temporary formation of dumbbell-shaped fullerene molecules at low collision velocities.
Outage Performance of Multitier UAV Communication With Random Beam Misalignment

By exploiting the degree of freedom on the altitude, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication can provide ubiquitous communication for future wireless networks. In the case of concurrent transmission of multiple UAVs, the directional beamforming formed by multiple antennas is an effective way to reduce co-channel interference. However, factors, such as airflow disturbance or estimation error for UAV communications, can cause the occurrence of beam misalignment. In this article, we investigate the system performance of a multitier UAV communication network with the consideration of unstable beam alignment. In particular, we propose a tractable random model to capture the impacts of beam misalignment in the 3-D space. Based on this, by utilizing stochastic geometry, an analytical framework for obtaining the outage probability in the downlink of a multitier UAV communication network for the closest distance association scheme and the maximum average power association scheme is established. The accuracy of the analysis is verified by Monte Carlo simulations. The results indicate that in the presence of random beam misalignment, the optimal number of UAV antennas needs to be adjusted to be relatively larger when the density of UAVs increases or the altitude of UAVs becomes higher.
A Comprehensive Introduction of Visual-Inertial Navigation

In this article, a tutorial introduction to visual-inertial navigation(VIN) is presented. Visual and inertial perception are two complementary sensing modalities. Cameras and inertial measurement units (IMU) are the corresponding sensors for these two modalities. The low cost and light weight of camera-IMU sensor combinations make them ubiquitous in robotic navigation. Visual-inertial Navigation is a state estimation problem, that estimates the ego-motion and local environment of the sensor platform. This paper presents visual-inertial navigation in the classical state estimation framework, first illustrating the estimation problem in terms of state variables and system models, including related quantities representations (Parameterizations), IMU dynamic and camera measurement models, and corresponding general probabilistic graphical models (Factor Graph). Secondly, we investigate the existing model-based estimation methodologies, these involve filter-based and optimization-based frameworks and related on-manifold operations. We also discuss the calibration of some relevant parameters, also initialization of state of interest in optimization-based frameworks. Then the evaluation and improvement of VIN in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and robustness are discussed. Finally, we briefly mention the recent development of learning-based methods that may become alternatives to traditional model-based methods.
Dead-time Compensation Method for Bus-clamping Modulated Voltage Source Inverter

Bus-clamping Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is an effective method to reduce the switching loss in a three-phase voltage source inverter (VSI). In bus-clamping PWM scheme, the phase legs are switched using high frequency PWM signals for two-third of the line cycle, while for the remaining duration of cycle, the pole voltage is clamped to either positive or negative rail of the DC bus. In PWM operation of a half bridge, a dead-time is applied between the gate signals of complementary switches to ensure safe and reliable operation. However, introduction of dead-time leads to poor power quality, increased Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) and variation in actual voltage compared to the intended pole voltage. Moreover, when the bus-clamping technique is used, the PWM has both high frequency switching region and clamped region in a line cycle, and consequently, the undesired effects of dead-time are further aggravated. Therefore, in order to enhance the quality of output voltage, this paper presents a dead-time compensation strategy for a VSI operating with bus-clamping PWM. The proposed method calculates the required compensation term to be added on the modulation signal considering wide range of operating conditions. Additionally, the compensation includes a new strategy for low current conditions near zero-crossing to avoid distortion. The proposed method is verified by simulation and experiments in a three-phase VSI with a switching frequency of 100 kHz and a fundamental frequency of 60Hz.
Improved simulation of quantum circuits dominated by free fermionic operations

We present a classical algorithm for simulating universal quantum circuits composed of"free"nearest-neighbour matchgates or equivalently fermionic-linear-optical (FLO) gates, and"resourceful"non-Gaussian gates. We achieve the promotion of the efficiently simulable FLO subtheory to universal quantum computation by gadgetizing controlled phase gates with arbitrary phases employing non-Gaussian resource states. Our key contribution is the development of a novel phase-sensitive algorithm for simulating FLO circuits. This allows us to decompose the resource states arising from gadgetization into free states at the level of statevectors rather than density matrices. The runtime cost of our algorithm for estimating the Born-rule probability of a given quantum circuit scales polynomially in all circuit parameters, except for a linear dependence on the newly introduced FLO extent, which scales exponentially with the number of controlled-phase gates. More precisely, as a result of finding optimal decompositions of relevant resource states, the runtime doubles for every maximally resourceful (e.g., swap or CZ) gate added. Crucially, this cost compares very favourably with the best known prior algorithm, where each swap gate increases the simulation cost by a factor of approximately 9. For a quantum circuit containing arbitrary FLO unitaries and $k$ controlled-Z gates, we obtain an exponential improvement $O(4.5^k)$ over the prior state-of-the-art.