OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A2CI: A Cloud-based, Service-oriented Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure to Support Atmospheric Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Big earth science data offers the scientific community great opportunities. Many more studies at large-scales, over long-terms and at high resolution can now be conducted using the rich information collected by remote sensing satellites, ground-based sensor networks, and even social media input. However, the hundreds of terabytes of information collected and compiled on an hourly basis by NASA and other government agencies present a significant challenge for atmospheric scientists seeking to improve the understanding of the Earth atmospheric system. These challenges include effective discovery, organization, analysis and visualization of large amounts of data. This paper reports the outcomes of an NSF-funded project that developed a geospatial cyberinfrastructure -- the A2CI (Atmospheric Analysis Cyberinfrastructure) -- to support atmospheric research. We first introduce the service-oriented system framework then describe in detail the implementation of the data discovery module, data management module, data integration module, data analysis and visualization modules following the cloud computing principles-Data-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. We demonstrate the graphic user interface by performing an analysis between Sea Surface Temperature and the intensity of tropical storms in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We expect this work to contribute to the technical advancement of cyberinfrastructure research as well as to the development of an online, collaborative scientific analysis system for atmospheric science.
Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlighting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs), while powerful, are built and trained to process a single text input. In common applications, multiple inputs can be processed by concatenating them together into a single stream of text. However, the LLM is unable to distinguish which sections of prompt belong to various input sources. Indirect prompt injection attacks take advantage of this vulnerability by embedding adversarial instructions into untrusted data being processed alongside user commands. Often, the LLM will mistake the adversarial instructions as user commands to be followed, creating a security vulnerability in the larger system. We introduce spotlighting, a family of prompt engineering techniques that can be used to improve LLMs' ability to distinguish among multiple sources of input. The key insight is to utilize transformations of an input to provide a reliable and continuous signal of its provenance. We evaluate spotlighting as a defense against indirect prompt injection attacks, and find that it is a robust defense that has minimal detrimental impact to underlying NLP tasks. Using GPT-family models, we find that spotlighting reduces the attack success rate from greater than {50}\% to below {2}\% in our experiments with minimal impact on task efficacy.
GPolylla: Fully GPU-accelerated polygonal mesh generator
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

This work presents a fully GPU-accelerated algorithm for the polygonal mesh generator known as Polylla. Polylla is a tri-to-polygon mesh generator, which benefits from the half-edge data structure to manage any polygonal shape. The proposed parallel algorithm introduces a novel approach to modify triangulations to get polygonal meshes using the half-edge data structure in parallel on the GPU. By changing the adjacency values of each half-edge, the algorithm accomplish to unlink half-edges that are not used in the new polygonal mesh without the need neither removing nor allocating new memory in the GPU. The experimental results show a speedup, reaching up to $\times 83.2$ when compared to the CPU sequential implementation. Additionally, the speedup is $\times 746.8$ when the cost of copying the data structure from the host device and back is not included.
Improving Galileo OSNMA Time To First Authenticated Fix
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Galileo is the first global navigation satellite system to authenticate their civilian signals through the Open Service Galileo Message Authentication (OSNMA) protocol. However, OSNMA delays the time to obtain a first position and time fix, the Time To First Authentication Fix (TTFAF). Reducing the TTFAF as much as possible is crucial to integrate the technology seamlessly into the current products. In the cases where the receiver already has cryptographic data available, the so-called hot start mode and focus of this article, the currently available implementations achieve an average TTFAF of around 100 seconds in ideal environments. In this work, we explore the TTFAF optimizations available to general OSNMA capable receivers and to receivers with a tighter time synchronization than the required by the OSNMA guidelines. We dissect the TTFAF process, describe the optimizations, and benchmark them in three distinct scenarios with recorded real data (open-sky, soft urban, and hard urban) and the official OSNMA test vectors. The first block of optimizations centers on extracting as much information as possible from broken sub-frames by processing them at page level and combining redundant data from multiple satellites. The second block of optimizations aims to reconstruct missed navigation data by the intelligent use of fields in the authentication tags belonging to the same sub-frame as the authentication key. Combining both optimization ideas improves the TTFAF substantially for all considered scenarios. We obtain an average TTFAF of 60.9 and 68.8 seconds for the test vectors and the open-sky scenario, respectively, with a lowest TTFAF of 44.0 seconds in both. Likewise, the urban scenarios see a drastic reduction of the average TTFAF between the non-optimized and optimized cases. These optimizations have been made available as part of the open-source OSNMAlib library on GitHub.
Beehive: A Flexible Network Stack for Direct-Attached Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Direct-attached accelerators, where application accelerators are directly connected to the datacenter network via a hardware network stack, offer substantial benefits in terms of reduced latency, CPU overhead, and energy use. However, a key challenge is that modern datacenter network stacks are complex, with interleaved protocol layers, network management functions, and virtualization support. To operators, network feature agility, diagnostics, and manageability are often considered just as important as raw performance. By contrast, existing hardware network stacks only support basic protocols and are often difficult to extend since they use fixed processing pipelines. We propose Beehive, a new, open-source FPGA network stack for direct-attached accelerators designed to enable flexible and adaptive construction of complex network functionality in hardware. Application and network protocol elements are modularized as tiles over a network-on-chip substrate. Elements can be added or scaled up/down to match workload characteristics with minimal effort or changes to other elements. Flexible diagnostics and control are integral, with tooling to ensure deadlock safety. Our implementation interoperates with standard Linux TCP and UDP clients, with a 4x improvement in end-to-end RPC tail latency for Linux UDP clients versus a CPU-attached accelerator. Beehive is available at https://github.com/beehive-fpga/beehive
The opportunities and risks of large language models in mental health
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Global rates of mental health concerns are rising, and there is increasing realization that existing models of mental health care will not adequately expand to meet the demand. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has come great optimism regarding their promise to create novel, large-scale solutions to support mental health. Despite their nascence, LLMs have already been applied to mental health related tasks. In this paper, we summarize the extant literature on efforts to use LLMs to provide mental health education, assessment, and intervention and highlight key opportunities for positive impact in each area. We then highlight risks associated with LLMs' application to mental health and encourage the adoption of strategies to mitigate these risks. The urgent need for mental health support must be balanced with responsible development, testing, and deployment of mental health LLMs. It is especially critical to ensure that mental health LLMs are fine-tuned for mental health, enhance mental health equity, and adhere to ethical standards and that people, including those with lived experience with mental health concerns, are involved in all stages from development through deployment. Prioritizing these efforts will minimize potential harms to mental health and maximize the likelihood that LLMs will positively impact mental health globally.
Model order reduction of deep structured state-space models: A system-theoretic approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With a specific emphasis on control design objectives, achieving accurate system modeling with limited complexity is crucial in parametric system identification. The recently introduced deep structured state-space models (SSM), which feature linear dynamical blocks as key constituent components, offer high predictive performance. However, the learned representations often suffer from excessively large model orders, which render them unsuitable for control design purposes. The current paper addresses this challenge by means of system-theoretic model order reduction techniques that target the linear dynamical blocks of SSMs. We introduce two regularization terms which can be incorporated into the training loss for improved model order reduction. In particular, we consider modal $\ell_1$ and Hankel nuclear norm regularization to promote sparsity, allowing one to retain only the relevant states without sacrificing accuracy. The presented regularizers lead to advantages in terms of parsimonious representations and faster inference resulting from the reduced order models. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated using real-world ground vibration data from an aircraft.
An Analysis of the Preferences of Distribution Indicators in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The distribution of objective vectors in a Pareto Front Approximation (PFA) is crucial for representing the associated manifold accurately. Distribution Indicators (DIs) assess the distribution of a PFA numerically, utilizing concepts like distance calculation, Biodiversity, Entropy, Potential Energy, or Clustering. Despite the diversity of DIs, their strengths and weaknesses across assessment scenarios are not well-understood. This paper introduces a taxonomy for classifying DIs, followed by a preference analysis of nine DIs, each representing a category in the taxonomy. Experimental results, considering various PFAs under controlled scenarios (loss of coverage, loss of uniformity, pathological distributions), reveal that some DIs can be misleading and need cautious use. Additionally, DIs based on Biodiversity and Potential Energy show promise for PFA evaluation and comparison of Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms.
Learning to Change: Choreographing Mixed Traffic Through Lateral Control and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The management of mixed traffic that consists of robot vehicles (RVs) and human-driven vehicles (HVs) at complex intersections presents a multifaceted challenge. Traditional signal controls often struggle to adapt to dynamic traffic conditions and heterogeneous vehicle types. Recent advancements have turned to strategies based on reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging its model-free nature, real-time operation, and generalizability over different scenarios. We introduce a hierarchical RL framework to manage mixed traffic through precise longitudinal and lateral control of RVs. Our proposed hierarchical framework combines the state-of-the-art mixed traffic control algorithm as a high level decision maker to improve the performance and robustness of the whole system. Our experiments demonstrate that the framework can reduce the average waiting time by up to 54% compared to the state-of-the-art mixed traffic control method. When the RV penetration rate exceeds 60%, our technique consistently outperforms conventional traffic signal control programs in terms of the average waiting time for all vehicles at the intersection.
Geometric Generative Models based on Morphological Equivariant PDEs and GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Content and image generation consist in creating or generating data from noisy information by extracting specific features such as texture, edges, and other thin image structures. We are interested here in generative models, and two main problems are addressed. Firstly, the improvements of specific feature extraction while accounting at multiscale levels intrinsic geometric features; and secondly, the equivariance of the network to reduce its complexity and provide a geometric interpretability. To proceed, we propose a geometric generative model based on an equivariant partial differential equation (PDE) for group convolution neural networks (G-CNNs), so called PDE-G-CNNs, built on morphology operators and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Equivariant morphological PDE layers are composed of multiscale dilations and erosions formulated in Riemannian manifolds, while group symmetries are defined on a Lie group. We take advantage of the Lie group structure to properly integrate the equivariance in layers, and are able to use the Riemannian metric to solve the multiscale morphological operations. Each point of the Lie group is associated with a unique point in the manifold, which helps us derive a metric on the Riemannian manifold from a tensor field invariant under the Lie group so that the induced metric has the same symmetries. The proposed geometric morphological GAN (GM-GAN) is obtained by using the proposed morphological equivariant convolutions in PDE-G-CNNs to bring nonlinearity in classical CNNs. GM-GAN is evaluated on MNIST data and compared with GANs. Preliminary results show that GM-GAN model outperforms classical GAN.
Hydro: Adaptive Query Processing of ML Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Query optimization in relational database management systems (DBMSs) is critical for fast query processing. The query optimizer relies on precise selectivity and cost estimates to effectively optimize queries prior to execution. While this strategy is effective for relational DBMSs, it is not sufficient for DBMSs tailored for processing machine learning (ML) queries. In ML-centric DBMSs, query optimization is challenging for two reasons. First, the performance bottleneck of the queries shifts to user-defined functions (UDFs) that often wrap around deep learning models, making it difficult to accurately estimate UDF statistics without profiling the query. This leads to inaccurate statistics and sub-optimal query plans. Second, the optimal query plan for ML queries is data-dependent, necessitating DBMSs to adapt the query plan on the fly during execution. So, a static query plan is not sufficient for such queries. In this paper, we present Hydro, an ML-centric DBMS that utilizes adaptive query processing (AQP) for efficiently processing ML queries. Hydro is designed to quickly evaluate UDF-based query predicates by ensuring optimal predicate evaluation order and improving the scalability of UDF execution. By integrating AQP, Hydro continuously monitors UDF statistics, routes data to predicates in an optimal order, and dynamically allocates resources for evaluating predicates. We demonstrate Hydro's efficacy through four illustrative use cases, delivering up to 11.52x speedup over a baseline system.
GPT-Connect: Interaction between Text-Driven Human Motion Generator and 3D Scenes in a Training-free Manner
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, while text-driven human motion generation has received massive research attention, most existing text-driven motion generators are generally only designed to generate motion sequences in a blank background. While this is the case, in practice, human beings naturally perform their motions in 3D scenes, rather than in a blank background. Considering this, we here aim to perform scene-aware text-drive motion generation instead. Yet, intuitively training a separate scene-aware motion generator in a supervised way can require a large amount of motion samples to be troublesomely collected and annotated in a large scale of different 3D scenes. To handle this task rather in a relatively convenient manner, in this paper, we propose a novel GPT-connect framework. In GPT-connect, we enable scene-aware motion sequences to be generated directly utilizing the existing blank-background human motion generator, via leveraging ChatGPT to connect the existing motion generator with the 3D scene in a totally training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy and generalizability of our proposed framework.
Enabling Physical Localization of Uncooperative Cellular Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In cellular networks, authorities may need to physically locate user devices to track criminals or illegal equipment. This process involves authorized agents tracing devices by monitoring uplink signals with cellular operator assistance. However, tracking uncooperative uplink signal sources remains challenging, even for operators and authorities. Three key challenges persist for fine-grained localization: i) devices must generate sufficient, consistent uplink traffic over time, ii) target devices may transmit uplink signals at very low power, and iii) signals from cellular repeaters may hinder localization of the target device. While these challenges pose significant practical obstacles to localization, they have been largely overlooked in existing research. This work examines the impact of these real-world challenges on cellular localization and introduces the Uncooperative Multiangulation Attack (UMA) to address them. UMA can 1) force a target device to transmit traffic continuously, 2) boost the target's signal strength to maximum levels, and 3) uniquely differentiate between signals from the target and repeaters. Importantly, UMA operates without requiring privileged access to cellular operators or user devices, making it applicable to any LTE network. Our evaluations demonstrate that UMA effectively overcomes practical challenges in physical localization when devices are uncooperative.
Learners Teaching Novices: An Uplifting Alternative Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

We propose and carry-out a novel method of formative assessment called Assessment via Teaching (AVT), in which learners demonstrate their understanding of CS1 topics by tutoring more novice students. AVT has powerful benefits over traditional forms of assessment: it is centered around service to others and is highly rewarding for the learners who teach. Moreover, teaching greatly improves the learners' own understanding of the material and has a huge positive impact on novices, who receive free 1:1 tutoring. Lastly, this form of assessment is naturally difficult to cheat -- a critical property for assessments in the era of large-language models. We use AVT in a randomised control trial with learners in a CS1 course at an R1 university. The learners provide tutoring sessions to more novice students taking a lagged online version of the same course. We show that learners who do an AVT session before the course exam performed 20 to 30 percentage points better than the class average on several questions. Moreover, compared to students who did a practice exam, the AVT learners enjoyed their experience more and were twice as likely to study for their teaching session. We believe AVT is a scalable and uplifting method for formative assessment that could one day replace traditional exams.
MasonTigers at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Performance Analysis of Transformer-based Models on Machine-Generated Text Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the MasonTigers entry to the SemEval-2024 Task 8 - Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection. The task encompasses Binary Human-Written vs. Machine-Generated Text Classification (Track A), Multi-Way Machine-Generated Text Classification (Track B), and Human-Machine Mixed Text Detection (Track C). Our best performing approaches utilize mainly the ensemble of discriminator transformer models along with sentence transformer and statistical machine learning approaches in specific cases. Moreover, zero-shot prompting and fine-tuning of FLAN-T5 are used for Track A and B.
Linear Quadratic Guidance Law for Joint Motion Planning of a Pursuer-Turret Assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents joint motion planning of a vehicle with an attached rotating turret. The turret has a limited range as well as the field of view. The objective is capture a maneuvering target such that at the terminal time it is withing the field-of-view and range limits. Catering to it, we present a minimum effort guidance law that commensurate for the turn rate abilities of the vehicle and the turret. The guidance law is obtained using linearization about the collision triangle and admits an analytical solution. Simulation results are presented to exemplify the cooperation between the turret and the vehicle.
ESG Classification by Implicit Rule Learning via GPT-4
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are widely adopted as higher investment return indicators. Accordingly, ongoing efforts are being made to automate ESG evaluation with language models to extract signals from massive web text easily. However, recent approaches suffer from a lack of training data, as rating agencies keep their evaluation metrics confidential. This paper investigates whether state-of-the-art language models like GPT-4 can be guided to align with unknown ESG evaluation criteria through strategies such as prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and dynamic in-context learning. We demonstrate the efficacy of these approaches by ranking 2nd in the Shared-Task ML-ESG-3 Impact Type track for Korean without updating the model on the provided training data. We also explore how adjusting prompts impacts the ability of language models to address financial tasks leveraging smaller models with openly available weights. We observe longer general pre-training to correlate with enhanced performance in financial downstream tasks. Our findings showcase the potential of language models to navigate complex, subjective evaluation guidelines despite lacking explicit training examples, revealing opportunities for training-free solutions for financial downstream tasks.