OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Approximate Scan Flip-flop to Reduce Functional Path Delay and Power Consumption
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

The scan-based testing has been widely used as a Design-for-Test (DfT) mechanism for most recent designs. It has gained importance not only in manufacturing testing but also in online testing and debugging. However, the multiplexer-based scan flip-flop, which is the basic building block of scan chain, is troubled with a set of issues such as mux-induced additional delay and test power among others. The effect of additional delay due to the multiplexer on the functional path (D in path) has started influencing the clock period, particularly at the lower technology nodes for the high-performance design. In this work, we propose two scan flip-flop designs using 10nm FinFET technology to address the problem of mux-induced delay and internal power. The proposed designs have been experimentally validated for performance gain and power reduction and compared to the existing designs.
Discovering Customer-Service Dialog System with Semi-Supervised Learning and Coarse-to-Fine Intent Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Task-oriented dialog(TOD) aims to assist users in achieving specific goals through multi-turn conversation. Recently, good results have been obtained based on large pre-trained models. However, the labeled-data scarcity hinders the efficient development of TOD systems at scale. In this work, we constructed a weakly supervised dataset based on a teacher/student paradigm that leverages a large collection of unlabelled dialogues. Furthermore, we built a modular dialogue system and integrated coarse-to-fine grained classification for user intent detection. Experiments show that our method can reach the dialog goal with a higher success rate and generate more coherent responses.
Using MM principles to deal with incomplete data in K-means clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Among many clustering algorithms, the K-means clustering algorithm is widely used because of its simple algorithm and fast convergence. However, this algorithm suffers from incomplete data, where some samples have missed some of their attributes. To solve this problem, we mainly apply MM principles to restore the symmetry of the data, so that K-means could work well. We give the pseudo-code of the algorithm and use the standard datasets for experimental verification. The source code for the experiments is publicly available in the following link: \url{https://github.com/AliBeikmohammadi/MM-Optimization/blob/main/mini-project/MM%20K-means.ipynb}.
Tight Bounds for Connectivity Problems Parameterized by Cutwidth
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In this work we start the investigation of tight complexity bounds for connectivity problems parameterized by cutwidth assuming the Strong Exponential-Time Hypothesis (SETH). Van Geffen et al. posed this question for odd cycle transversal and feedback vertex set. We answer it for these two and four further problems, namely connected vertex cover, connected domintaing set, steiner tree, and connected odd cycle transversal. For the latter two problems it sufficed to prove lower bounds that match the running time inherited from parameterization by treewidth; for the others we provide faster algorithms than relative to treewidth and prove matching lower bounds. For upper bounds we first extend the idea of Groenland et al.~[STACS~2022] to solve what we call coloring-like problem. Such problems are defined by a symmetric matrix $M$ over $\mathbb{F}_2$ indexed by a set of colors. The goal is to count the number (modulo some prime $p$) of colorings of a graph such that $M$ has a $1$-entry if indexed by the colors of the end-points of any edge. We show that this problem can be solved faster if $M$ has small rank over $\mathbb{F}_p$. We apply this result to get our upper bounds for connected vertex cover and connected dominating set. The upper bounds for odd cycle transversal and feedback vertex set use a subdivision trick to get below the bounds that matrix rank would yield.
Alignment Entropy Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Existing training criteria in automatic speech recognition(ASR) permit the model to freely explore more than one time alignments between the feature and label sequences. In this paper, we use entropy to measure a model's uncertainty, i.e. how it chooses to distribute the probability mass over the set of allowed alignments. Furthermore, we evaluate the effect of entropy regularization in encouraging the model to distribute the probability mass only on a smaller subset of allowed alignments. Experiments show that entropy regularization enables a much simpler decoding method without sacrificing word error rate, and provides better time alignment quality.
On the Privacy-Utility Trade-off With and Without Direct Access to the Private Data
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We study an information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios where the private data is either observable or hidden. In each scenario, we first consider bounded mutual information as privacy leakage criterion, then we use two different per-letter privacy constraints. In the first scenario, an agent observes useful data $Y$ that is correlated with private data $X$, and wishes to disclose the useful information to a user. A privacy mechanism is designed to generate disclosed data $U$ which maximizes the revealed information about $Y$ while satisfying a bounded privacy leakage constraint. In the second scenario, the agent has additionally access to the private data. To this end, we first extend the Functional Representation Lemma and Strong Functional Representation Lemma by relaxing the independence condition and thereby allowing a certain leakage to find lower bounds for the second scenario with different privacy leakage constraints. Furthermore, upper and lower bounds are derived in the first scenario considering different privacy constraints. In particular, for the case where no leakage is allowed, our upper and lower bounds improve previous bounds. Moreover, considering bounded mutual information as privacy constraint we show that if the common information and mutual information between $X$ and $Y$ are equal, then the attained upper bound in the second scenario is tight. Finally, the privacy-utility trade-off with prioritized private data is studied where part of $X$, i.e., $X_1$, is more private than the remaining part, i.e., $X_2$, and we provide lower and upper bounds.
Out-of-Distribution Detection with Reconstruction Error and Typicality-based Penalty
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The task of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is vital to realize safe and reliable operation for real-world applications. After the failure of likelihood-based detection in high dimensions had been shown, approaches based on the \emph{typical set} have been attracting attention; however, they still have not achieved satisfactory performance. Beginning by presenting the failure case of the typicality-based approach, we propose a new reconstruction error-based approach that employs normalizing flow (NF). We further introduce a typicality-based penalty, and by incorporating it into the reconstruction error in NF, we propose a new OOD detection method, penalized reconstruction error (PRE). Because the PRE detects test inputs that lie off the in-distribution manifold, it effectively detects adversarial examples as well as OOD examples. We show the effectiveness of our method through the evaluation using natural image datasets, CIFAR-10, TinyImageNet, and ILSVRC2012.
Differentiable Rendering for Pose Estimation in Proximity Operations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Differentiable rendering aims to compute the derivative of the image rendering function with respect to the rendering parameters. This paper presents a novel algorithm for 6-DoF pose estimation through gradient-based optimization using a differentiable rendering pipeline. We emphasize two key contributions: (1) instead of solving the conventional 2D to 3D correspondence problem and computing reprojection errors, images (rendered using the 3D model) are compared only in the 2D feature space via sparse 2D feature correspondences. (2) Instead of an analytical image formation model, we compute an approximate local gradient of the rendering process through online learning. The learning data consists of image features extracted from multi-viewpoint renders at small perturbations in the pose neighborhood. The gradients are propagated through the rendering pipeline for the 6-DoF pose estimation using nonlinear least squares. This gradient-based optimization regresses directly upon the pose parameters by aligning the 3D model to reproduce a reference image shape. Using representative experiments, we demonstrate the application of our approach to pose estimation in proximity operations.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Heat Pump Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Heating in private households is a major contributor to the emissions generated today. Heat pumps are a promising alternative for heat generation and are a key technology in achieving our goals of the German energy transformation and to become less dependent on fossil fuels. Today, the majority of heat pumps in the field are controlled by a simple heating curve, which is a naive mapping of the current outdoor temperature to a control action. A more advanced control approach is model predictive control (MPC) which was applied in multiple research works to heat pump control. However, MPC is heavily dependent on the building model, which has several disadvantages. Motivated by this and by recent breakthroughs in the field, this work applies deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to heat pump control in a simulated environment. Through a comparison to MPC, it could be shown that it is possible to apply DRL in a model-free manner to achieve MPC-like performance. This work extends other works which have already applied DRL to building heating operation by performing an in-depth analysis of the learned control strategies and by giving a detailed comparison of the two state-of-the-art control methods.
Harnessing Elastic Energy to Transfer Reciprocating Actuation into Rotary Motion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.
GraffMatch: Global Matching of 3D Lines and Planes for Wide Baseline LiDAR Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Using geometric landmarks like lines and planes can increase navigation accuracy and decrease map storage requirements compared to commonly-used LiDAR point cloud maps. However, landmark-based registration for applications like loop closure detection is challenging because a reliable initial guess is not available. Global landmark matching has been investigated in the literature, but these methods typically use ad hoc representations of 3D line and plane landmarks that are not invariant to large viewpoint changes, resulting in incorrect matches and high registration error. To address this issue, we adopt the affine Grassmannian manifold to represent 3D lines and planes and prove that the distance between two landmarks is invariant to rotation and translation if a shift operation is performed before applying the Grassmannian metric. This invariance property enables the use of our graph-based data association framework for identifying landmark matches that can subsequently be used for registration in the least-squares sense. Evaluated on a challenging landmark matching and registration task using publicly-available LiDAR datasets, our approach yields a 1.7x and 3.5x improvement in successful registrations compared to methods that use viewpoint-dependent centroid and "closest point" representations, respectively.
zkFaith: Soonami's Zero-Knowledge Identity Protocol
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Individuals are encouraged to prove their eligibility to access specific services regularly. However, providing various organizations with personal data spreads sensitive information and endangers people's privacy. Hence, privacy-preserving identification systems that enable individuals to prove they are permitted to use specific services are required to fill the gap. Cryptographic techniques are deployed to construct identity proofs across the internet; nonetheless, they do not offer complete control over personal data or prevent users from forging and submitting fake data. In this paper, we design a privacy-preserving identity protocol called "zkFaith." A new approach to obtain a verified zero-knowledge identity unique to each individual. The protocol verifies the integrity of the documents provided by the individuals and issues a zero-knowledge-based id without revealing any information to the authenticator or verifier. The zkFaith leverages an aggregated version of the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya (CL) signature scheme to sign the user's commitment to the verified personal data. Then the users with a zero-knowledge proof system can prove that they own the required attributes of the access criterion of the requested service providers. Vector commitment and their position binding property enables us to, later on, update the commitments based on the modification of the personal data; hence update the issued zkFaith id with no requirement of initiating the protocol from scratch. We show that the design and implementation of the zkFaith with the generated proofs in real-world scenarios are scalable and comparable with the state-of-the-art schemes.
TriPINet: Tripartite Progressive Integration Network for Image Manipulation Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Image manipulation localization aims at distinguishing forged regions from the whole test image. Although many outstanding prior arts have been proposed for this task, there are still two issues that need to be further studied: 1) how to fuse diverse types of features with forgery clues; 2) how to progressively integrate multistage features for better localization performance. In this paper, we propose a tripartite progressive integration network (TriPINet) for end-to-end image manipulation localization. First, we extract both visual perception information, e.g., RGB input images, and visual imperceptible features, e.g., frequency and noise traces for forensic feature learning. Second, we develop a guided cross-modality dual-attention (gCMDA) module to fuse different types of forged clues. Third, we design a set of progressive integration squeeze-and-excitation (PI-SE) modules to improve localization performance by appropriately incorporating multiscale features in the decoder. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare our method with state-of-the-art image forensics approaches. The proposed TriPINet obtains competitive results on several benchmark datasets.
Deep Cost-sensitive Learning for Wheat Frost Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Frost damage is one of the main factors leading to wheat yield reduction. Therefore, the detection of wheat frost accurately and efficiently is beneficial for growers to take corresponding measures in time to reduce economic loss. To detect the wheat frost, in this paper we create a hyperspectral wheat frost data set by collecting the data characterized by temperature, wheat yield, and hyperspectral information provided by the handheld hyperspectral spectrometer. However, due to the imbalance of data, that is, the number of healthy samples is much higher than the number of frost damage samples, a deep learning algorithm tends to predict biasedly towards the healthy samples resulting in model overfitting of the healthy samples. Therefore, we propose a method based on deep cost-sensitive learning, which uses a one-dimensional convolutional neural network as the basic framework and incorporates cost-sensitive learning with fixed factors and adjustment factors into the loss function to train the network. Meanwhile, the accuracy and score are used as evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that the detection accuracy and the score reached 0.943 and 0.623 respectively, this demonstration shows that this method not only ensures the overall accuracy but also effectively improves the detection rate of frost samples.
PaletteNeRF: Palette-based Color Editing for NeRFs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a powerful tool to faithfully generate novel views for scenes with only sparse captured images. Despite its strong capability for representing 3D scenes and their appearance, its editing ability is very limited. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective extension of vanilla NeRF, named PaletteNeRF, to enable efficient color editing on NeRF-represented scenes. Motivated by recent palette-based image decomposition works, we approximate each pixel color as a sum of palette colors modulated by additive weights. Instead of predicting pixel colors as in vanilla NeRFs, our method predicts additive weights. The underlying NeRF backbone could also be replaced with more recent NeRF models such as KiloNeRF to achieve real-time editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves efficient, view-consistent, and artifact-free color editing on a wide range of NeRF-represented scenes.
Cache-Aided Multi-User Private Information Retrieval using PDAs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the problem of cache-aided multi-user private information retrieval (MuPIR). In this problem, $N$ independent files are replicated across $S \geq 2$ non-colluding servers. There are $K$ users, each equipped with cache memory which can store $M$ files. Each user wants to retrieve a file from the servers, but the users don't want any of the servers to get any information about their demand. The user caches are filled with some arbitrary function of the files before the users decide their demands, known as the placement phase. After deciding their demands, users cooperatively send queries to the servers to retrieve their desired files privately. Upon receiving the queries, servers broadcast coded transmissions which are a function of the queries they received and the files, known as the delivery phase. Conveying queries to the servers incurs an upload cost for the users, and downloading the answers broadcasted by the servers incurs a download cost. To implement cache-aided MuPIR schemes, each file has to be split into $F$ packets. In this paper, we propose MuPIR schemes that utilize placement delivery arrays (PDAs) to characterize placement and delivery. Proposed MuPIR schemes significantly reduce subpacketization levels while slightly increasing the download cost. The proposed scheme also substantially reduces the upload cost for the users. For PDAs based on {\it Ali-Niesen} scheme for centralized coded caching, we show that our scheme is order optimal in terms of download cost. We recover the optimal single-user PIR scheme presented by {\it Tian et al.} as a special case. Our scheme also achieves optimal rate for single-user cache-aided PIR setup reported by R. Tondon.
Towards Improved Prediction of Ship Performance: A Comparative Analysis on In-service Ship Monitoring Data for Modeling the Speed-Power Relation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Accurate modeling of ship performance is crucial for the shipping industry to optimize fuel consumption and subsequently reduce emissions. However, predicting the speed-power relation in real-world conditions remains a challenge. In this study, we used in-service monitoring data from multiple vessels with different hull shapes to compare the accuracy of data-driven machine learning (ML) algorithms to traditional methods for assessing ship performance. Our analysis consists of two main parts: (1) a comparison of sea trial curves with calm-water curves fitted on operational data, and (2) a benchmark of multiple added wave resistance theories with an ML-based approach. Our results showed that a simple neural network outperformed established semi-empirical formulas following first principles. The neural network only required operational data as input, while the traditional methods required extensive ship particulars that are often unavailable. These findings suggest that data-driven algorithms may be more effective for predicting ship performance in practical applications.
Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.