OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Segregated FLS Processing Cores for V/STOL Autonomous Landing Guidance Assistant System using FPGA
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

It is highly predicted that the roads and parking areas will be extremely congested with vehicles to the point that searching for a novel solution will not be an optional choice for conserving the sustainability rate of the overall humanity's development growth. Such issue could be overcome by developing modified generations of the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles that essentially depend on the Vertical and/or Short Take-Off and Landing (V/STOL) feature to increase the efficiency of landing capabilities on limited-space parking areas. The complexity of integrating an efficient and safe V/STOL feature in such UAM vehicles is notably difficult comparing with the conventional and normal techniques for landing and take-off. The efficient V/STOL feature should be carried out by a complete and collaborative Cyber-Physical System (CPS) processing architecture, such as the CPS-5C architecture. In this paper, we only proposed two CPS-5C physical layers of a V/STOL Autonomous Landing Guidance Assistant System (ALGAS2) processing unit to increase the reliability of the vertical landing mechanism. The proposed V/STOL-ALGAS2 system depends on Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) as the advanced control unit. Furthermore, the proposed ALGAS2 system depends on four symmetric and segregated processing ALGAS2 cores that processing the data in a fully parallel and independent manner to enhance many essential security and safety factors for the futuristic UAM vehicles. The proposed ALGAS2 digital circuits architecture has been designed using MATLAB and VHDL. Also, it has been further analyzed for the implementation and validation tests using the Intel Altera OpenVINO FPGA board. The proposed ALGAS processing unit attained a maximum computational processing performance of about 21.22 Giga Operations per Seconds (GOPS).
Computational Design of Passive Grippers
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

This work proposes a novel generative design tool for passive grippers -- robot end effectors that have no additional actuation and instead leverage the existing degrees of freedom in a robotic arm to perform grasping tasks. Passive grippers are used because they offer interesting trade-offs between cost and capabilities. However, existing designs are limited in the types of shapes that can be grasped. This work proposes to use rapid-manufacturing and design optimization to expand the space of shapes that can be passively grasped. Our novel generative design algorithm takes in an object and its positioning with respect to a robotic arm and generates a 3D printable passive gripper that can stably pick the object up. To achieve this, we address the key challenge of jointly optimizing the shape and the insert trajectory to ensure a passively stable grasp. We evaluate our method on a testing suite of 22 objects (23 experiments), all of which were evaluated with physical experiments to bridge the virtual-to-real gap. Code and data are at https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~milink/passive-gripper/
Personalized Federated Domain Adaptation for Item-to-Item Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Item-to-Item (I2I) recommendation is an important function in most recommendation systems, which generates replacement or complement suggestions for a particular item based on its semantic similarities to other cataloged items. Given that subsets of items in a recommendation system might be co-interacted with by the same set of customers, graph-based models, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), provide a natural framework to combine, ingest and extract valuable insights from such high-order relational interactions between cataloged items, as well as their metadata features, as has been shown in many recent studies. However, learning GNNs effectively for I2I requires ingesting a large amount of relational data, which might not always be available, especially in new, emerging market segments. To mitigate this data bottleneck, we postulate that recommendation patterns learned from existing mature market segments (with private data) could be adapted to build effective warm-start models for emerging ones. To achieve this, we propose and investigate a personalized federated modeling framework based on GNNs to summarize, assemble and adapt recommendation patterns across market segments with heterogeneous customer behaviors into effective local models. Our key contribution is a personalized graph adaptation model that bridges the gap between recent literature on federated GNNs and (non-graph) personalized federated learning, which either does not optimize for the adaptability of the federated model or is restricted to local models with homogeneous parameterization, excluding GNNs with heterogeneous local graphs.
AutoScrum: Automating Project Planning Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advancements in the field of large language models have made it possible to use language models for advanced reasoning. In this paper we leverage this ability for designing complex project plans based only on knowing the current state and the desired state. Two approaches are demonstrated - a scrum based approach and a shortcut plan approach. The scrum based approach executes an automated process of requirements gathering, user story mapping, feature identification, task decomposition and finally generates questions and search terms for seeking out domain specific information to assist with task completion. The shortcut approach looks at most recent snapshot of the current and desired state and generates the next most reasonable task to do in order to get to the desired state as quickly as possible. In this paper we automate everything using a novel concept of "Language Programs". These are programs written in natural language designed to process input data through the language model. Guidance language is used for all LLM programs. All demo source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/autoscrum/autoscrum
Evaluation of software impact designed for biomedical research: Are we measuring what's meaningful?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Software is vital for the advancement of biology and medicine. Analysis of usage and impact metrics can help developers determine user and community engagement, justify additional funding, encourage additional use, identify unanticipated use cases, and help define improvement areas. However, there are challenges associated with these analyses including distorted or misleading metrics, as well as ethical and security concerns. More attention to the nuances involved in capturing impact across the spectrum of biological software is needed. Furthermore, some tools may be especially beneficial to a small audience, yet may not have compelling typical usage metrics. We propose more general guidelines, as well as strategies for more specific types of software. We highlight outstanding issues regarding how communities measure or evaluate software impact. To get a deeper understanding of current practices for software evaluations, we performed a survey of participants in the Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). We also investigated software among this community and others to assess how often infrastructure that supports such evaluations is implemented and how this impacts rates of papers describing usage of the software. We find that developers recognize the utility of analyzing software usage, but struggle to find the time or funding for such analyses. We also find that infrastructure such as social media presence, more in-depth documentation, the presence of software health metrics, and clear information on how to contact developers seem to be associated with increased usage rates. Our findings can help scientific software developers make the most out of evaluations of their software.
Has the Machine Learning Review Process Become More Arbitrary as the Field Has Grown? The NeurIPS 2021 Consistency Experiment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present the NeurIPS 2021 consistency experiment, a larger-scale variant of the 2014 NeurIPS experiment in which 10% of conference submissions were reviewed by two independent committees to quantify the randomness in the review process. We observe that the two committees disagree on their accept/reject recommendations for 23% of the papers and that, consistent with the results from 2014, approximately half of the list of accepted papers would change if the review process were randomly rerun. Our analysis suggests that making the conference more selective would increase the arbitrariness of the process. Taken together with previous research, our results highlight the inherent difficulty of objectively measuring the quality of research, and suggest that authors should not be excessively discouraged by rejected work.
Exploiting Scratchpad Memory for Deep Temporal Blocking: A case study for 2D Jacobian 5-point iterative stencil kernel (j2d5pt)
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) are used in most of the top systems in HPC. The total capacity of scratchpad memory has increased by more than 40 times in the last decade. However, existing optimizations for stencil computations using temporal blocking have not aggressively exploited the large capacity of scratchpad memory. This work uses the 2D Jacobian 5-point iterative stencil as a case study to investigate the use of large scratchpad memory. Unlike existing research that tiles the domain in a thread block fashion, we tile the domain so that each tile is large enough to utilize all available scratchpad memory on the GPU. Consequently, we process several time steps inside a single tile before offloading the result back to global memory. Our evaluation shows that our performance is comparable to state-of-the-art implementations, yet our implementation is much simpler and does not require auto-generation of code.
Query Complexity of Active Learning for Function Family With Nearly Orthogonal Basis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Many machine learning algorithms require large numbers of labeled data to deliver state-of-the-art results. In applications such as medical diagnosis and fraud detection, though there is an abundance of unlabeled data, it is costly to label the data by experts, experiments, or simulations. Active learning algorithms aim to reduce the number of required labeled data points while preserving performance. For many convex optimization problems such as linear regression and $p$-norm regression, there are theoretical bounds on the number of required labels to achieve a certain accuracy. We call this the query complexity of active learning. However, today's active learning algorithms require the underlying learned function to have an orthogonal basis. For example, when applying active learning to linear regression, the requirement is the target function is a linear composition of a set of orthogonal linear functions, and active learning can find the coefficients of these linear functions. We present a theoretical result to show that active learning does not need an orthogonal basis but rather only requires a nearly orthogonal basis. We provide the corresponding theoretical proofs for the function family of nearly orthogonal basis, and its applications associated with the algorithmically efficient active learning framework.
WHAT, WHEN, and HOW to Ground: Designing User Persona-Aware Conversational Agents for Engaging Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a method for building a personalized open-domain dialogue system to address the WWH (WHAT, WHEN, and HOW) problem for natural response generation in a commercial setting, where personalized dialogue responses are heavily interleaved with casual response turns. The proposed approach involves weighted dataset blending, negative persona information augmentation methods, and the design of personalized conversation datasets to address the challenges of WWH in personalized, open-domain dialogue systems. Our work effectively balances dialogue fluency and tendency to ground, while also introducing a response-type label to improve the controllability and explainability of the grounded responses. The combination of these methods leads to more fluent conversations, as evidenced by subjective human evaluations as well as objective evaluations.
X-ray: Discovering DRAM Internal Structure and Error Characteristics by Issuing Memory Commands
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The demand for accurate information about the internal structure and characteristics of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) has been on the rise. Recent studies have explored the structure and characteristics of DRAM to improve processing in memory, enhance reliability, and mitigate a vulnerability known as rowhammer. However, DRAM manufacturers only disclose limited information through official documents, making it difficult to find specific information about actual DRAM devices. This paper presents reliable findings on the internal structure and characteristics of DRAM using activate-induced bitflips (AIBs), retention time test, and row-copy operation. While previous studies have attempted to understand the internal behaviors of DRAM devices, they have only shown results without identifying the causes or have analyzed DRAM modules rather than individual chips. We first uncover the size, structure, and operation of DRAM subarrays and verify our findings on the characteristics of DRAM. Then, we correct misunderstood information related to AIBs and demonstrate experimental results supporting the cause of rowhammer. We expect that the information we uncover about the structure, behavior, and characteristics of DRAM will help future DRAM research.
VR.net: A Real-world Dataset for Virtual Reality Motion Sickness Research
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Researchers have used machine learning approaches to identify motion sickness in VR experience. These approaches demand an accurately-labeled, real-world, and diverse dataset for high accuracy and generalizability. As a starting point to address this need, we introduce `VR.net', a dataset offering approximately 12-hour gameplay videos from ten real-world games in 10 diverse genres. For each video frame, a rich set of motion sickness-related labels, such as camera/object movement, depth field, and motion flow, are accurately assigned. Building such a dataset is challenging since manual labeling would require an infeasible amount of time. Instead, we utilize a tool to automatically and precisely extract ground truth data from 3D engines' rendering pipelines without accessing VR games' source code. We illustrate the utility of VR.net through several applications, such as risk factor detection and sickness level prediction. We continuously expand VR.net and envision its next version offering 10X more data than the current form. We believe that the scale, accuracy, and diversity of VR.net can offer unparalleled opportunities for VR motion sickness research and beyond.
Origin-Destination Network Generation via Gravity-Guided GAN
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Origin-destination (OD) flow, which contains valuable population mobility information including direction and volume, is critical in many urban applications, such as urban planning, transportation management, etc. However, OD data is not always easy to access due to high costs or privacy concerns. Therefore, we must consider generating OD through mathematical models. Existing works utilize physics laws or machine learning (ML) models to build the association between urban structures and OD flows while these two kinds of methods suffer from the limitation of over-simplicity and poor generalization ability, respectively. In this paper, we propose to adopt physics-informed ML paradigm, which couple the physics scientific knowledge and data-driven ML methods, to construct a model named Origin-Destination Generation Networks (ODGN) for better population mobility modeling by leveraging the complementary strengths of combining physics and ML methods. Specifically, we first build a Multi-view Graph Attention Networks (MGAT) to capture the urban features of every region and then use a gravity-guided predictor to obtain OD flow between every two regions. Furthermore, we use a conditional GAN training strategy and design a sequence-based discriminator to consider the overall topological features of OD as a network. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have been done to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with baselines.
Computational Technologies for Fashion Recommendation: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

Fashion recommendation is a key research field in computational fashion research and has attracted considerable interest in the computer vision, multimedia, and information retrieval communities in recent years. Due to the great demand for applications, various fashion recommendation tasks, such as personalized fashion product recommendation, complementary (mix-and-match) recommendation, and outfit recommendation, have been posed and explored in the literature. The continuing research attention and advances impel us to look back and in-depth into the field for a better understanding. In this paper, we comprehensively review recent research efforts on fashion recommendation from a technological perspective. We first introduce fashion recommendation at a macro level and analyse its characteristics and differences with general recommendation tasks. We then clearly categorize different fashion recommendation efforts into several sub-tasks and focus on each sub-task in terms of its problem formulation, research focus, state-of-the-art methods, and limitations. We also summarize the datasets proposed in the literature for use in fashion recommendation studies to give readers a brief illustration. Finally, we discuss several promising directions for future research in this field. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the development of fashion recommendation research. It also discusses the current limitations and gaps between academic research and the real needs of the fashion industry. In the process, we offer a deep insight into how the fashion industry could benefit from the computational technologies of fashion recommendation.
Prompting Large Language Models to Reformulate Queries for Moment Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The task of moment localization is to localize a temporal moment in an untrimmed video for a given natural language query. Since untrimmed video contains highly redundant contents, the quality of the query is crucial for accurately localizing moments, i.e., the query should provide precise information about the target moment so that the localization model can understand what to look for in the videos. However, the natural language queries in current datasets may not be easy to understand for existing models. For example, the Ego4D dataset uses question sentences as the query to describe relatively complex moments. While being natural and straightforward for humans, understanding such question sentences are challenging for mainstream moment localization models like 2D-TAN. Inspired by the recent success of large language models, especially their ability of understanding and generating complex natural language contents, in this extended abstract, we make early attempts at reformulating the moment queries into a set of instructions using large language models and making them more friendly to the localization models.
GSHOT: Few-shot Generative Modeling of Labeled Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep graph generative modeling has gained enormous attraction in recent years due to its impressive ability to directly learn the underlying hidden graph distribution. Despite their initial success, these techniques, like much of the existing deep generative methods, require a large number of training samples to learn a good model. Unfortunately, large number of training samples may not always be available in scenarios such as drug discovery for rare diseases. At the same time, recent advances in few-shot learning have opened door to applications where available training data is limited. In this work, we introduce the hitherto unexplored paradigm of few-shot graph generative modeling. Towards this, we develop GSHOT, a meta-learning based framework for few-shot labeled graph generative modeling. GSHOT learns to transfer meta-knowledge from similar auxiliary graph datasets. Utilizing these prior experiences, GSHOT quickly adapts to an unseen graph dataset through self-paced fine-tuning. Through extensive experiments on datasets from diverse domains having limited training samples, we establish that GSHOT generates graphs of superior fidelity compared to existing baselines.
Correlated Pseudorandomness from the Hardness of Quasi-Abelian Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Secure computation often benefits from the use of correlated randomness to achieve fast, non-cryptographic online protocols. A recent paradigm put forth by Boyle $\textit{et al.}$ (CCS 2018, Crypto 2019) showed how pseudorandom correlation generators (PCG) can be used to generate large amounts of useful forms of correlated (pseudo)randomness, using minimal interactions followed solely by local computations, yielding silent secure two-party computation protocols (protocols where the preprocessing phase requires almost no communication). An additional property called programmability allows to extend this to build N-party protocols. However, known constructions for programmable PCG's can only produce OLE's over large fields, and use rather new splittable Ring-LPN assumption. In this work, we overcome both limitations. To this end, we introduce the quasi-abelian syndrome decoding problem (QA-SD), a family of assumptions which generalises the well-established quasi-cyclic syndrome decoding assumption. Building upon QA-SD, we construct new programmable PCG's for OLE's over any field $\mathbb{F}_q$ with $q>2$. Our analysis also sheds light on the security of the ring-LPN assumption used in Boyle $\textit{et al.}$ (Crypto 2020). Using our new PCG's, we obtain the first efficient N-party silent secure computation protocols for computing general arithmetic circuit over $\mathbb{F}_q$ for any $q>2$.
SciCap+: A Knowledge Augmented Dataset to Study the Challenges of Scientific Figure Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In scholarly documents, figures provide a straightforward way of communicating scientific findings to readers. Automating figure caption generation helps move model understandings of scientific documents beyond text and will help authors write informative captions that facilitate communicating scientific findings. Unlike previous studies, we reframe scientific figure captioning as a knowledge-augmented image captioning task that models need to utilize knowledge embedded across modalities for caption generation. To this end, we extended the large-scale SciCap dataset~\cite{hsu-etal-2021-scicap-generating} to SciCap+ which includes mention-paragraphs (paragraphs mentioning figures) and OCR tokens. Then, we conduct experiments with the M4C-Captioner (a multimodal transformer-based model with a pointer network) as a baseline for our study. Our results indicate that mention-paragraphs serves as additional context knowledge, which significantly boosts the automatic standard image caption evaluation scores compared to the figure-only baselines. Human evaluations further reveal the challenges of generating figure captions that are informative to readers. The code and SciCap+ dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/ZhishenYang/scientific_figure_captioning_dataset