Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fog Device-as-a-Service (FDaaS): A Framework for Service Deployment in Public Fog Environments

Meeting the requirements of future services with time sensitivity and handling sudden load spikes of the services in Fog computing environments are challenging tasks due to the lack of publicly available Fog nodes and their characteristics. Researchers have assumed that the traditional autoscaling techniques, with lightweight virtualisation technology (containers), can be used to provide autoscaling features in Fog computing environments, few researchers have built the platform by exploiting the default autoscaling techniques of the containerisation orchestration tools or systems. However, the adoption of these techniques alone, in a publicly available Fog infrastructure, does not guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) due to the heterogeneity of Fog devices and their characteristics, such as frequent resource changes and high mobility. To tackle this challenge, in this work we developed a Fog as a Service (FaaS) framework that can create, configure and manage the containers which are running on the Fog devices to deploy services. This work presents the key techniques and algorithms which are responsible for handling sudden load spikes of the services to meet the QoS of the application. This work provides an evaluation by comparing it with existing techniques under real scenarios. The experiment results show that our proposed approach maximises the satisfied service requests by an average of 1.9 times in different scenarios.
Machine Learning Discovery of Optimal Quadrature Rules for Isogeometric Analysis

We propose the use of machine learning techniques to find optimal quadrature rules for the construction of stiffness and mass matrices in isogeometric analysis (IGA). We initially consider 1D spline spaces of arbitrary degree spanned over uniform and non-uniform knot sequences, and then the generated optimal rules are used for integration over higher-dimensional spaces using tensor product sense. The quadrature rule search is posed as an optimization problem and solved by a machine learning strategy based on gradient-descent. However, since the optimization space is highly non-convex, the success of the search strongly depends on the number of quadrature points and the parameter initialization. Thus, we use a dynamic programming strategy that initializes the parameters from the optimal solution over the spline space with a lower number of knots. With this method, we found optimal quadrature rules for spline spaces when using IGA discretizations with up to 50 uniform elements and polynomial degrees up to 8, showing the generality of the approach in this scenario. For non-uniform partitions, the method also finds an optimal rule in a reasonable number of test cases. We also assess the generated optimal rules in two practical case studies, namely, the eigenvalue problem of the Laplace operator and the eigenfrequency analysis of freeform curved beams, where the latter problem shows the applicability of the method to curved geometries. In particular, the proposed method results in savings with respect to traditional Gaussian integration of up to 44% in 1D, 68% in 2D, and 82% in 3D spaces.
Monotonicity of Multi-Term Floating-Point Adders

In the literature on algorithms for performing the multi-term addition $s_n=\sum_{i=1}^n x_i$ using floating-point arithmetic it is often shown that a hardware unit that has single normalization and rounding improves precision, area, latency, and power consumption, compared with the use of standard add or fused multiply-add units. However, non-monotonicity can appear when computing sums with a subclass of multi-term addition units, which currently is not explored in the literature. We demonstrate that common techniques for performing multi-term addition with $n\geq 4$, without normalization of intermediate quantities, can result in non-monotonicity -- increasing one of the addends $x_i$ decreases the sum $s_n$. Summation is required in dot product and matrix multiplication operations, operations that have increasingly started appearing in the hardware of supercomputers, thus knowing where monotonicity is preserved can be of interest to the users of these machines. Our results suggest that non-monotonicity of summation, in some of the commercial hardware devices that implement a specific class of multi-term adders, is a feature that may have appeared unintentionally as a consequence of design choices that reduce circuit area and other metrics. To demonstrate our findings, we use formal proofs as well as a numerical simulation of non-monotonic multi-term adders in MATLAB.
Distributed Block Coordinate Moving Horizon Estimation for 2D Visual-Inertial-Odometry SLAM

This paper presents a Visual Inertial Odometry Landmark-based Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping algorithm based on a distributed block coordinate nonlinear Moving Horizon Estimation scheme. The main advantage of the proposed method is that the updates on the position of the landmarks are based on a Bundle Adjustment technique that can be parallelised over the landmarks. The performance of the method is demonstrated in simulations in different environments and with different types of robot trajectory. Circular and wiggling patterns in the trajectory lead to better estimation performance than straight ones, confirming what is expected from recent nonlinear observability theory.
Knowledge Graphs in Practice: Characterizing their Users, Challenges, and Visualization Opportunities

This study presents insights from interviews with nineteen Knowledge Graph (KG) practitioners who work in both enterprise and academic settings on a wide variety of use cases. Through this study, we identify critical challenges experienced by KG practitioners when creating, exploring, and analyzing KGs that could be alleviated through visualization design. Our findings reveal three major personas among KG practitioners – KG Builders, Analysts, and Consumers – each of whom have their own distinct expertise and needs. We discover that KG Builders would benefit from schema enforcers, while KG Analysts need customizable query builders that provide interim query results. For KG Consumers, we identify a lack of efficacy for node-link diagrams, and the need for tailored domain-specific visualizations to promote KG adoption and comprehension. Lastly, we find that implementing KGs effectively in practice requires both technical and social solutions that are not addressed with current tools, technologies, and collaborative workflows. From the analysis of our interviews, we distill several visualization research directions to improve KG usability, including knowledge cards that balance digestibility and discoverability, timeline views to track temporal changes, interfaces that support organic discovery, and semantic explanations for AI and machine learning predictions.
Establishing group-level brain structural connectivity incorporating anatomical knowledge under latent space modeling

Brain structural connectivity, capturing the white matter fiber tracts among brain regions inferred by diffusion MRI (dMRI), provides a unique characterization of brain anatomical organization. One fundamental question to address with structural connectivity is how to properly summarize and perform statistical inference for a group-level connectivity architecture, for instance, under different sex groups, or disease cohorts. Existing analyses commonly summarize group-level brain connectivity by a simple entry-wise sample mean or median across individual brain connectivity matrices. However, such a heuristic approach fully ignores the associations among structural connections and the topological properties of brain networks. In this project, we propose a latent space-based generative network model to estimate group-level brain connectivity. We name our method the attributes-informed brain connectivity (ABC) model, which compared with existing group-level connectivity estimations, (1) offers an interpretable latent space representation of the group-level connectivity, (2) incorporates the anatomical knowledge of nodes and tests its co-varying relationship with connectivity and (3) quantifies the uncertainty and evaluates the likelihood of the estimated group-level effects against chance. We devise a novel Bayesian MCMC algorithm to estimate the model. By applying the ABC model to study brain structural connectivity stratified by sex among Alzheimer's Disease (AD) subjects and healthy controls incorporating the anatomical attributes (volume, thickness and area) on nodes, our method shows superior predictive power on out-of-sample structural connectivity and identifies meaningful sex-specific network neuromarkers for AD.
Robustness Benchmark of Road User Trajectory Prediction Models for Automated Driving

Accurate and robust trajectory predictions of road users are needed to enable safe automated driving. To do this, machine learning models are often used, which can show erratic behavior when presented with previously unseen inputs. In this work, two environment-aware models (MotionCNN and MultiPath++) and two common baselines (Constant Velocity and an LSTM) are benchmarked for robustness against various perturbations that simulate functional insufficiencies observed during model deployment in a vehicle: unavailability of road information, late detections, and noise. Results show significant performance degradation under the presence of these perturbations, with errors increasing up to +1444.8\% in commonly used trajectory prediction evaluation metrics. Training the models with similar perturbations effectively reduces performance degradation, with error increases of up to +87.5\%. We argue that despite being an effective mitigation strategy, data augmentation through perturbations during training does not guarantee robustness towards unforeseen perturbations, since identification of all possible on-road complications is unfeasible. Furthermore, degrading the inputs sometimes leads to more accurate predictions, suggesting that the models are unable to learn the true relationships between the different elements in the data.
Grid-SD2E: A General Grid-Feedback in a System for Cognitive Learning

Comprehending how the brain interacts with the external world through generated neural data is crucial for determining its working mechanism, treating brain diseases, and understanding intelligence. Although many theoretical models have been proposed, they have thus far been difficult to integrate and develop. In this study, we were inspired in part by grid cells in creating a more general and robust grid module and constructing an interactive and self-reinforcing cognitive system together with Bayesian reasoning, an approach called space-division and exploration-exploitation with grid-feedback (Grid-SD2E). Here, a grid module can be used as an interaction medium between the outside world and a system, as well as a self-reinforcement medium within the system. The space-division and exploration-exploitation (SD2E) receives the 0/1 signals of a grid through its space-division (SD) module. The system described in this paper is also a theoretical model derived from experiments conducted by other researchers and our experience on neural decoding. Herein, we analyse the rationality of the system based on the existing theories in both neuroscience and cognitive science, and attempt to propose special and general rules to explain the different interactions between people and between people and the external world. What's more, based on this framework, the smallest computing unit is extracted, which is analogous to a single neuron in the brain.
Socio-economic landscape of digital transformation & public NLP systems: A critical review

The current wave of digital transformation has spurred digitisation reforms and has led to prodigious development of AI&NLP systems, with several of them entering the public domain. There is a perception that these systems have a non trivial impact on society but there is a dearth of literature in critical AI exploring what kinds of systems exist and how do they operate. This paper constructs a broad taxonomy of NLP systems which impact or are impacted by the ``public'' and provides a concrete analyses via various instrumental and normative lenses on the socio-technical nature of these systems. This paper categorises thirty examples of these systems into seven families, namely; finance, customer service, policy making, education, healthcare, law, and security, based on their public use cases. It then critically analyses these applications, first the priors and assumptions they are based on, then their mechanisms, possible methods of data collection, the models and error functions used, etc. This paper further delves into exploring the socio-economic and political contexts in which these families of systems are generally used and their potential impact on the same, and the function creep of these systems. It provides commentary on the potential long-term downstream impact of these systems on communities which use them. Aside from providing a birds eye view of what exists our in depth analysis provides insights on what is lacking in the current discourse on NLP in particular and critical AI in general, proposes additions to the current framework of analysis, provides recommendations future research direction, and highlights the need to importance of exploring the social in this socio-technical system.
Privacy Amplification via Compression: Achieving the Optimal Privacy-Accuracy-Communication Trade-off in Distributed Mean Estimation

Privacy and communication constraints are two major bottlenecks in federated learning (FL) and analytics (FA). We study the optimal accuracy of mean and frequency estimation (canonical models for FL and FA respectively) under joint communication and $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy (DP) constraints. We show that in order to achieve the optimal error under $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-DP, it is sufficient for each client to send $\Theta\left( n \min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right)\right)$ bits for FL and $\Theta\left(\log\left( n\min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right) \right)\right)$ bits for FA to the server, where $n$ is the number of participating clients. Without compression, each client needs $O(d)$ bits and $\log d$ bits for the mean and frequency estimation problems respectively (where $d$ corresponds to the number of trainable parameters in FL or the domain size in FA), which means that we can get significant savings in the regime $ n \min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right) = o(d)$, which is often the relevant regime in practice. Our algorithms leverage compression for privacy amplification: when each client communicates only partial information about its sample, we show that privacy can be amplified by randomly selecting the part contributed by each client.
Sensing Performance of Cooperative Joint Sensing-Communication UAV Network

We propose a novel cooperative joint sensing-communication (JSC) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network that can achieve downward-looking detection and transmit detection data simultaneously using the same time and frequency resources by exploiting the beam sharing scheme. The UAV network consists of a UAV that works as a fusion center (FCUAV) and multiple subordinate UAVs (SU). All UAVs fly at the fixed height. FCUAV integrates the sensing data of network and carries out downward-looking detection. SUs carry out downward-looking detection and transmit the sensing data to FCUAV. To achieve the beam sharing scheme, each UAV is equipped with a novel JSC antenna array that is composed of both the sensing subarray (SenA) and the communication subarray (ComA) in order to generate the sensing beam (SenB) and the communication beam (ComB) for detection and communication, respectively. SenB and ComB of each UAV share a total amount of radio power. Because of the spatial orthogonality of communication and sensing, SenB and ComB can be easily formed orthogonally. The upper bound of average cooperative sensing area (UB-ACSA) is defined as the metric to measure the sensing performance, which is related to the mutual sensing interference and the communication capacity. Numerical simulations prove the validity of the theoretical expressions for UB-ACSA of the network. The optimal number of UAVs and the optimal SenB power are identified under the total power constraint.
EPVT: Environment-aware Prompt Vision Transformer for Domain Generalization in Skin Lesion Recognition

Skin lesion recognition using deep learning has made remarkable progress, and there is an increasing need for deploying these systems in real-world scenarios. However, recent research has revealed that deep neural networks for skin lesion recognition may overly depend on disease-irrelevant image artifacts (i.e., dark corners, dense hairs), leading to poor generalization in unseen environments. To address this issue, we propose a novel domain generalization method called EPVT, which involves embedding prompts into the vision transformer to collaboratively learn knowledge from diverse domains. Concretely, EPVT leverages a set of domain prompts, each of which plays as a domain expert, to capture domain-specific knowledge; and a shared prompt for general knowledge over the entire dataset. To facilitate knowledge sharing and the interaction of different prompts, we introduce a domain prompt generator that enables low-rank multiplicative updates between domain prompts and the shared prompt. A domain mixup strategy is additionally devised to reduce the co-occurring artifacts in each domain, which allows for more flexible decision margins and mitigates the issue of incorrectly assigned domain labels. Experiments on four out-of-distribution datasets and six different biased ISIC datasets demonstrate the superior generalization ability of EPVT in skin lesion recognition across various environments. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/SiyuanYan1/EPVT.
A Simple and Effective Method of Cross-Lingual Plagiarism Detection

We present a simple cross-lingual plagiarism detection method applicable to a large number of languages. The presented approach leverages open multilingual thesauri for candidate retrieval task and pre-trained multilingual BERT-based language models for detailed analysis. The method does not rely on machine translation and word sense disambiguation when in use, and therefore is suitable for a large number of languages, including under-resourced languages. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated for several existing and new benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results for French, Russian, and Armenian languages.
Consolidated Control Barrier Functions: Synthesis and Online Verification via Adaptation under Input Constraints

In this paper, we develop a novel adaptation-based approach to constrained control design under multiple state and input constraints. Specifically, we introduce a method for synthesizing any number of time-varying candidate control barrier functions (CBF) into one consolidated CBF (C-CBF) candidate, and propose a predictor-corrector optimization-based adaptation law for the weights of the constituent constraint functions that certifies the C-CBF as valid for a class of nonlinear, control-affine systems. We prove this result by showing that the adapted weights are guaranteed to confer sufficient control authority to meet the new, adaptive C-CBF condition in perpetuity despite input constraints, which thereby permits its use in a quadratic program based control law. We then illustrate the performance of our controller on an academic example, and further highlight that it is successful even for constraint functions with higher or mixed relative-degree by simulating a reach-avoid problem for bicycle robots, which we use to demonstrate how our approach out-performs two baseline approaches.
Learning the Delay Using Neural Delay Differential Equations

The intersection of machine learning and dynamical systems has generated considerable interest recently. Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) represent a rich overlap between these fields. In this paper, we develop a continuous time neural network approach based on Delay Differential Equations (DDEs). Our model uses the adjoint sensitivity method to learn the model parameters and delay directly from data. Our approach is inspired by that of NODEs and extends earlier neural DDE models, which have assumed that the value of the delay is known a priori. We perform a sensitivity analysis on our proposed approach and demonstrate its ability to learn DDE parameters from benchmark systems. We conclude our discussion with potential future directions and applications.
DLRover: An Elastic Deep Training Extension with Auto Job Resource Recommendation

The cloud is still a popular platform for distributed deep learning (DL) training jobs since resource sharing in the cloud can improve resource utilization and reduce overall costs. However, such sharing also brings multiple challenges for DL training jobs, e.g., high-priority jobs could impact, even interrupt, low-priority jobs. Meanwhile, most existing distributed DL training systems require users to configure the resources (i.e., the number of nodes and resources like CPU and memory allocated to each node) of jobs manually before job submission and can not adjust the job's resources during the runtime. The resource configuration of a job deeply affect this job's performance (e.g., training throughput, resource utilization, and completion rate). However, this usually leads to poor performance of jobs since users fail to provide optimal resource configuration in most cases. \system~is a distributed DL framework can auto-configure a DL job's initial resources and dynamically tune the job's resources to win the better performance. With elastic capability, \system~can effectively adjusts the resources of a job when there are performance issues detected or a job fails because of faults or eviction. Evaluations results show \system~can outperform manual well-tuned resource configurations. Furthermore, in the production Kubernetes cluster of \company, \system~reduces the medium of job completion time by 31\%, and improves the job completion rate by 6\%, CPU utilization by 15\%, and memory utilization by 20\% compared with manual configuration.
Search for vector-like leptons at a Muon Collider

A feasibility study is performed for searching vector-like leptons at a muon collider, in the context of the"4321 model", an ultraviolet-complete model with rich collider phenomenology together with potential to explain recent existing some B physics measurements or anomalies. In this paper, we perform a Monte Carlo study with various machine learning techniques, and examine the projected sensitivity on vector-like leptons over a wide mass range at a TeV-scale muon collider. We find that a 3 TeV muon collider with only 10/fb of data can already be sensitive to cover the mass range of a vector-like lepton up to 1450 GeV.