Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Robustness of LiDAR-Camera Fusion Model against Weather Corruption from Fusion Strategy Perspective

In recent years, LiDAR-camera fusion models have markedly advanced 3D object detection tasks in autonomous driving. However, their robustness against common weather corruption such as fog, rain, snow, and sunlight in the intricate physical world remains underexplored. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of fusion models from the perspective of fusion strategies on the corrupted dataset. Based on the evaluation, we further propose a concise yet practical fusion strategy to enhance the robustness of the fusion models, namely flexibly weighted fusing features from LiDAR and camera sources to adapt to varying weather scenarios. Experiments conducted on four types of fusion models, each with two distinct lightweight implementations, confirm the broad applicability and effectiveness of the approach.
Zero-shot Sentiment Analysis in Low-Resource Languages Using a Multilingual Sentiment Lexicon

Improving multilingual language models capabilities in low-resource languages is generally difficult due to the scarcity of large-scale data in those languages. In this paper, we relax the reliance on texts in low-resource languages by using multilingual lexicons in pretraining to enhance multilingual capabilities. Specifically, we focus on zero-shot sentiment analysis tasks across 34 languages, including 6 high/medium-resource languages, 25 low-resource languages, and 3 code-switching datasets. We demonstrate that pretraining using multilingual lexicons, without using any sentence-level sentiment data, achieves superior zero-shot performance compared to models fine-tuned on English sentiment datasets, and large language models like GPT–3.5, BLOOMZ, and XGLM. These findings are observable for unseen low-resource languages to code-mixed scenarios involving high-resource languages.
A Review on Building Blocks of Decentralized Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is transforming our lives, and technological progress and transfer from the academic and theoretical sphere to the real world are accelerating yearly. But during that progress and transition, several open problems and questions need to be addressed for the field to develop ethically, such as digital privacy, ownership, and control. These are some of the reasons why the currently most popular approaches of artificial intelligence, i.e., centralized AI (CEAI), are questionable, with other directions also being widely explored, such as decentralized artificial intelligence (DEAI), to solve some of the most reaching problems. This paper provides a systematic literature review (SLR) of existing work in the field of DEAI, presenting the findings of 71 identified studies. The paper's primary focus is identifying the building blocks of DEAI solutions and networks, tackling the DEAI analysis from a bottom-up approach. In the end, future directions of research and open problems are proposed.
Factuality of Large Language Models in the Year 2024

Large language models (LLMs), especially when instruction-tuned for chat, have become part of our daily lives, freeing people from the process of searching, extracting, and integrating information from multiple sources by offering a straightforward answer to a variety of questions in a single place. Unfortunately, in many cases, LLM responses are factually incorrect, which limits their applicability in real-world scenarios. As a result, research on evaluating and improving the factuality of LLMs has attracted a lot of research attention recently. In this survey, we critically analyze existing work with the aim to identify the major challenges and their associated causes, pointing out to potential solutions for improving the factuality of LLMs, and analyzing the obstacles to automated factuality evaluation for open-ended text generation. We further offer an outlook on where future research should go.
Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Benefits and Risks of AI Afterlives

As AI systems quickly improve in both breadth and depth of performance, they lend themselves to creating increasingly powerful and realistic agents, including the possibility of agents modeled on specific people. We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create a custom AI agent to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death. We call these generative ghosts, since such agents will be capable of generating novel content rather than merely parroting content produced by their creator while living. In this paper, we first discuss the design space of potential implementations of generative ghosts. We then discuss the practical and ethical implications of generative ghosts, including potential positive and negative impacts on individuals and society. Based on these considerations, we lay out a research agenda for the AI and HCI research communities to empower people to create and interact with AI afterlives in a safe and beneficial manner.
A Risk-aware Planning Framework of UGVs in Off-Road Environment

Planning module is an essential component of intelligent vehicle study. In this paper, we address the risk-aware planning problem of UGVs through a global-local planning framework which seamlessly integrates risk assessment methods. In particular, a global planning algorithm named Coarse2fine A* is proposed, which incorporates a potential field approach to enhance the safety of the planning results while ensuring the efficiency of the algorithm. A deterministic sampling method for local planning is leveraged and modified to suit off-road environment. It also integrates a risk assessment model to emphasize the avoidance of local risks. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated through simulation experiments by comparing it with baseline algorithms, where the results of Coarse2fine A* are shown to be approximately 30% safer than those of the baseline algorithms. The practicality and effectiveness of the proposed planning framework are validated by deploying it on a real-world system consisting of a control center and a practical UGV platform.
Open RL Benchmark: Comprehensive Tracked Experiments for Reinforcement Learning

In many Reinforcement Learning (RL) papers, learning curves are useful indicators to measure the effectiveness of RL algorithms. However, the complete raw data of the learning curves are rarely available. As a result, it is usually necessary to reproduce the experiments from scratch, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. We present Open RL Benchmark, a set of fully tracked RL experiments, including not only the usual data such as episodic return, but also all algorithm-specific and system metrics. Open RL Benchmark is community-driven: anyone can download, use, and contribute to the data. At the time of writing, more than 25,000 runs have been tracked, for a cumulative duration of more than 8 years. Open RL Benchmark covers a wide range of RL libraries and reference implementations. Special care is taken to ensure that each experiment is precisely reproducible by providing not only the full parameters, but also the versions of the dependencies used to generate it. In addition, Open RL Benchmark comes with a command-line interface (CLI) for easy fetching and generating figures to present the results. In this document, we include two case studies to demonstrate the usefulness of Open RL Benchmark in practice. To the best of our knowledge, Open RL Benchmark is the first RL benchmark of its kind, and the authors hope that it will improve and facilitate the work of researchers in the field.
A Morphologically-Aware Dictionary-based Data Augmentation Technique for Machine Translation of Under-Represented Languages

The availability of parallel texts is crucial to the performance of machine translation models. However, most of the world's languages face the predominant challenge of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose strategies to synthesize parallel data relying on morpho-syntactic information and using bilingual lexicons along with a small amount of seed parallel data. Our methodology adheres to a realistic scenario backed by the small parallel seed data. It is linguistically informed, as it aims to create augmented data that is more likely to be grammatically correct. We analyze how our synthetic data can be combined with raw parallel data and demonstrate a consistent improvement in performance in our experiments on 14 languages (28 English<->X pairs) ranging from well- to very low-resource ones. Our method leads to improvements even when using only five seed sentences and a bilingual lexicon.
Comparing Knowledge Sources for Open-Domain Scientific Claim Verification

The increasing rate at which scientific knowledge is discovered and health claims shared online has highlighted the importance of developing efficient fact-checking systems for scientific claims. The usual setting for this task in the literature assumes that the documents containing the evidence for claims are already provided and annotated or contained in a limited corpus. This renders the systems unrealistic for real-world settings where knowledge sources with potentially millions of documents need to be queried to find relevant evidence. In this paper, we perform an array of experiments to test the performance of open-domain claim verification systems. We test the final verdict prediction of systems on four datasets of biomedical and health claims in different settings. While keeping the pipeline’s evidence selection and verdict prediction parts constant, document retrieval is performed over three common knowledge sources (PubMed, Wikipedia, Google) and using two different information retrieval techniques. We show that PubMed works better with specialized biomedical claims, while Wikipedia is more suited for everyday health concerns. Likewise, BM25 excels in retrieval precision, while semantic search in recall of relevant evidence. We discuss the results, outline frequent retrieval patterns and challenges, and provide promising future directions.
The flavor composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos: measurement forecasts for in-ice radio-based EeV neutrino telescopes

In-ice radio-detection is a promising technique to discover and characterize ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos, with energies above 100 PeV, adopted by present - ARA, ARIANNA, and RNO-G - and planned - IceCube-Gen2. So far, their ability to measure neutrino flavor has remained unexplored. We show and quantify how the neutrino flavor can be measured with in-ice radio detectors using two complementary detection channels. The first channel, sensitive to $\nu_e$, identifies them via their charged-current interactions, whose radio emission is elongated in time due to the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect. The second channel, sensitive to $\nu_\mu$ and $\nu_\tau$, identifies events made up of multiple showers generated by the muons and taus they generate. We show this in state-of-the-art forecasts geared at IceCube-Gen2, for representative choices of the UHE neutrino flux. This newfound sensitivity could allow us to infer the UHE neutrino flavor composition at their sources - and thus the neutrino production mechanism - and to probe UHE neutrino physics.
A Comprehensive Numerical Approach to Coil Placement in Cerebral Aneurysms: Mathematical Modeling and In Silico Occlusion Classification

Endovascular coil embolization is one of the primary treatment techniques for cerebral aneurysms. Although it is a well established and minimally invasive method, it bears the risk of sub-optimal coil placement which can lead to incomplete occlusion of the aneurysm possibly causing recurrence. One of the key features of coils is that they have an imprinted natural shape supporting the fixation within the aneurysm. For the spatial discretization our mathematical coil model is based on the Discrete Elastic Rod model which results in a dimension-reduced 1D system of differential equations. We include bending and twisting responses to account for the coils natural curvature. Collisions between coil segments and the aneurysm-wall are handled by an efficient contact algorithm that relies on an octree based collision detection. The numerical solution of the model is obtained by a symplectic semi-implicit Euler time stepping method. Our model can be easily incorporated into blood flow simulations of embolized aneurysms. In order to differentiate optimal from sub-optimal placements, we employ a suitable in silico Raymond-Roy type occlusion classification and measure the local packing density in the aneurysm at its neck, wall-region and core. We investigate the impact of uncertainties in the coil parameters and embolization procedure. To this end, we vary the position and the angle of insertion of the microcatheter, and approximate the local packing density distributions by evaluating sample statistics.
GitBug-Java: A Reproducible Benchmark of Recent Java Bugs

Bug-fix benchmarks are essential for evaluating methodologies in automatic program repair (APR) and fault localization (FL). However, existing benchmarks, exemplified by Defects4J, need to evolve to incorporate recent bug-fixes aligned with contemporary development practices. Moreover, reproducibility, a key scientific principle, has been lacking in bug-fix benchmarks. To address these gaps, we present GitBug-Java, a reproducible benchmark of recent Java bugs. GitBug-Java features 199 bugs extracted from the 2023 commit history of 55 notable open-source repositories. The methodology for building GitBug-Java ensures the preservation of bug-fixes in fully-reproducible environments. We publish GitBug-Java at https://github.com/gitbugactions/gitbug-java.
Revisiting the Power of Prompt for Visual Tuning

Visual prompt tuning (VPT) is a promising solution incorporating learnable prompt tokens to customize pre-trained models for downstream tasks. However, VPT and its variants often encounter challenges like prompt initialization, prompt length, and subpar performance in self-supervised pretraining, hindering successful contextual adaptation. This study commences by exploring the correlation evolvement between prompts and patch tokens during proficient training. Inspired by the observation that the prompt tokens tend to share high mutual information with patch tokens, we propose initializing prompts with downstream token prototypes. The strategic initialization, a stand-in for the previous initialization, substantially improves performance in fine-tuning. To refine further, we optimize token construction with a streamlined pipeline that maintains excellent performance with almost no increase in computational expenses compared to VPT. Exhaustive experiments show our proposed approach outperforms existing methods by a remarkable margin. For instance, it surpasses full fine-tuning in 19 out of 24 tasks, using less than 0.4% of learnable parameters on the FGVC and VTAB-1K benchmarks. Notably, our method significantly advances the adaptation for self-supervised pretraining, achieving impressive task performance gains of at least 10% to 30%. Besides, the experimental results demonstrate the proposed SPT is robust to prompt lengths and scales well with model capacity and training data size. We finally provide an insightful exploration into the amount of target data facilitating the adaptation of pre-trained models to downstream tasks.
Improved Quantization Strategies for Managing Heavy-tailed Gradients in Distributed Learning

Gradient compression has surfaced as a key technique to address the challenge of communication efficiency in distributed learning. In distributed deep learning, however, it is observed that gradient distributions are heavy-tailed, with outliers significantly influencing the design of compression strategies. Existing parameter quantization methods experience performance degradation when this heavy-tailed feature is ignored. In this paper, we introduce a novel compression scheme specifically engineered for heavy-tailed gradients, which effectively combines gradient truncation with quantization. This scheme is adeptly implemented within a communication-limited distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) framework. We consider a general family of heavy-tail gradients that follow a power-law distribution, we aim to minimize the error resulting from quantization, thereby determining optimal values for two critical parameters: the truncation threshold and the quantization density. We provide a theoretical analysis on the convergence error bound under both uniform and non-uniform quantization scenarios. Comparative experiments with other benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in managing the heavy-tailed gradients in a distributed learning environment.
Demystifying Datapath Accelerator Enhanced Off-path SmartNIC

Network speeds grow quickly in the modern cloud, so SmartNICs are introduced to offload network processing tasks, even application logic. However, typical multicore SmartNICs such as BlueFiled-2 are only capable of processing control-plane tasks with their embedded CPU that has limited memory bandwidth and computing power. On the other hand, hot cloud applications evolve, such that a limited number of fixed hardware engines in a SmartNIC cannot satisfy the requirements of cloud applications. Therefore, SmartNIC programmers call for a programmable datapath accelerator (DPA) to process network traffic at line rate. However, no existing work has unveiled the performance characteristics of the existing DPA. To this end, we present the first architectural characterization of the latest DPA-enhanced BF3 SmartNIC. Our evaluation results indicate that BF3's DPA is much wimpier than the off-path Arm and the host CPU. However, we still identify that DPA has three unique architectural characteristics that unleash the performance potential of DPA. Specifically, we demonstrate how to take advantage of DPA's three architectural characteristics regarding computing, networking, and memory subsystems. Then we propose three important guidelines for programmers to fully unleash the potential of DPA. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct detailed case studies regarding each guideline. Our case study on key-value aggregation service achieves up to 4.3$\times$ higher throughput by using our guidelines to optimize memory combinations.
Region-Based Representations Revisited

We investigate whether region-based representations are effective for recognition. Regions were once a mainstay in recognition approaches, but pixel and patch-based features are now used almost exclusively. We show that recent class-agnostic segmenters like SAM can be effectively combined with strong unsupervised representations like DINOv2 and used for a wide variety of tasks, including semantic segmentation, object-based image retrieval, and multi-image analysis. Once the masks and features are extracted, these representations, even with linear decoders, enable competitive performance, making them well suited to applications that require custom queries. The compactness of the representation also makes it well-suited to video analysis and other problems requiring inference across many images.
Classification of Tennis Actions Using Deep Learning

Recent advances of deep learning makes it possible to identify specific events in videos with greater precision. This has great relevance in sports like tennis in order to e.g., automatically collect game statistics, or replay actions of specific interest for game strategy or player improvements. In this paper, we investigate the potential and the challenges of using deep learning to classify tennis actions. Three models of different size, all based on the deep learning architecture SlowFast were trained and evaluated on the academic tennis dataset THETIS. The best models achieve a generalization accuracy of 74 %, demonstrating a good performance for tennis action classification. We provide an error analysis for the best model and pinpoint directions for improvement of tennis datasets in general. We discuss the limitations of the data set, general limitations of current publicly available tennis data-sets, and future steps needed to make progress.
Putting Context in Context: the Impact of Discussion Structure on Text Classification

Current text classification approaches usually focus on the content to be classified. Contextual aspects (both linguistic and extra-linguistic) are usually neglected, even in tasks based on online discussions. Still in many cases the multi-party and multi-turn nature of the context from which these elements are selected can be fruitfully exploited. In this work, we propose a series of experiments on a large dataset for stance detection in English, in which we evaluate the contribution of different types of contextual information, i.e. linguistic, structural and temporal, by feeding them as natural language input into a transformer-based model. We also experiment with different amounts of training data and analyse the topology of local discussion networks in a privacy-compliant way. Results show that structural information can be highly beneficial to text classification but only under certain circumstances (e.g. depending on the amount of training data and on discussion chain complexity). Indeed, we show that contextual information on smaller datasets from other classification tasks does not yield significant improvements. Our framework, based on local discussion networks, allows the integration of structural information while minimising user profiling, thus preserving their privacy.
Optimal Control

A new method for solving H°° control problems is developed. The method makes use of the Youla parametrization to characterize the set of all stabilizing controllers . S T CO in terms of a stable function Q ( s ), and also to transform the H°° control problem into a model-matching problem with an objective function E (s ) being linear in Q (s) . The model-matching problem is then solved by using the interpolation results of Hung. In the general case (i.e. problems of the 3rd kind) closed-form state-space characterizations of optimal and suboptimal solutions for Qis') and E (s ) are given. Furthermore, the solutions generally only require to solve two standard algebraic Riccati equations of smaller size than the McMillan degree of the (generalized) plant. This has an advantage of alleviating the computation burden associated with the y -iteration required for determining the attainable minimum of | \E (5 ) 11 <*,. The H°° approach to feedback design with multiple objective functions is studied in this thesis. For a system with two objective functions ^ ( 5 ), (i = 1, 2) a design criterion of minimizing the function max ( 11T ) 1 1 , 11 T 2(s ) 11«,) subject to internal stability of the closed-loop system is proposed. The problem is formulated as an H°° control problem and an iterative algorithm for obtaining a solution is given. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design technique for tightly bounding and shaping the frequency responses of two objective functions. The application of H°° feedback design techniques to the control of flexible structures is investigated. Experiments are conducted in order to evaluate the use of the H°° approach to the control of flexible structures. An H°° optimal controller is designed and implemented in a laboratory system to manoeuvre a cantilever flexible beam and simultaneously control its vibrations. The controller performance is then assessed. The results obtained are shown to be satisfactory and encouraging.