OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Architecting Sustainable MLOps: A Self-Adaptation Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In today's dynamic technological landscape, sustainability has emerged as a pivotal concern, especially with respect to architecting Machine Learning enabled Systems (MLS). Many ML models fail in transitioning to production, primarily hindered by uncertainties due to data variations, evolving requirements, and model instabilities. Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) offers a promising solution by enhancing adaptability and technical sustainability in MLS. However, MLOps itself faces challenges related to environmental impact, technical maintenance, and economic concerns. Over the years, self-adaptation has emerged as a potential solution to handle uncertainties. This paper introduces a novel approach employing self-adaptive principles integrated into the MLOps architecture through a MAPE-K loop to bolster MLOps sustainability. By autonomously responding to uncertainties, including data, model dynamics, and environmental variations, our approach aims to address the sustainability concerns of a given MLOps pipeline identified by an architect at design time. Further, we implement the method for a Smart City use case to display the capabilities of our approach.
GLCM-Based Feature Combination for Extraction Model Optimization in Object Detection Using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the era of modern technology, object detection using the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) extraction method plays a crucial role in object recognition processes. It finds applications in real-time scenarios such as security surveillance and autonomous vehicle navigation, among others. Computational efficiency becomes a critical factor in achieving real-time object detection. Hence, there is a need for a detection model with low complexity and satisfactory accuracy. This research aims to enhance computational efficiency by selecting appropriate features within the GLCM framework. Two classification models, namely K-Nearest Neighbours (K-NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), were employed, with the results indicating that K-Nearest Neighbours (K-NN) outperforms SVM in terms of computational complexity. Specifically, K-NN, when utilizing a combination of Correlation, Energy, and Homogeneity features, achieves a 100% accuracy rate with low complexity. Moreover, when using a combination of Energy and Homogeneity features, K-NN attains an almost perfect accuracy level of 99.9889%, while maintaining low complexity. On the other hand, despite SVM achieving 100% accuracy in certain feature combinations, its high or very high complexity can pose challenges, particularly in real-time applications. Therefore, based on the trade-off between accuracy and complexity, the K-NN model with a combination of Correlation, Energy, and Homogeneity features emerges as a more suitable choice for real-time applications that demand high accuracy and low complexity. This research provides valuable insights for optimizing object detection in various applications requiring both high accuracy and rapid responsiveness.
Panoptic Perception: A Novel Task and Fine-grained Dataset for Universal Remote Sensing Image Interpretation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Current remote-sensing interpretation models often focus on a single task such as detection, segmentation, or caption. However, the task-specific designed models are unattainable to achieve the comprehensive multi-level interpretation of images. The field also lacks support for multi-task joint interpretation datasets. In this paper, we propose Panoptic Perception, a novel task and a new fine-grained dataset (FineGrip) to achieve a more thorough and universal interpretation for RSIs. The new task, 1) integrates pixel-level, instance-level, and image-level information for universal image perception, 2) captures image information from coarse to fine granularity, achieving deeper scene understanding and description, and 3) enables various independent tasks to complement and enhance each other through multi-task learning. By emphasizing multi-task interactions and the consistency of perception results, this task enables the simultaneous processing of fine-grained foreground instance segmentation, background semantic segmentation, and global fine-grained image captioning. Concretely, the FineGrip dataset includes 2,649 remote sensing images, 12,054 fine-grained instance segmentation masks belonging to 20 foreground things categories, 7,599 background semantic masks for 5 stuff classes and 13,245 captioning sentences. Furthermore, we propose a joint optimization-based panoptic perception model. Experimental results on FineGrip demonstrate the feasibility of the panoptic perception task and the beneficial effect of multi-task joint optimization on individual tasks. The dataset will be publicly available.
IsoPredict: Dynamic Predictive Analysis for Detecting Unserializable Behaviors in Weakly Isolated Data Store Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the first dynamic predictive analysis for data store applications under weak isolation levels, called Isopredict. Given an observed serializable execution of a data store application, Isopredict generates and solves SMT constraints to find an unserializable execution that is a feasible execution of the application. Isopredict introduces novel techniques that handle divergent application behavior; solve mutually recursive sets of constraints; and balance coverage, precision, and performance. An evaluation on four transactional data store benchmarks shows that Isopredict often predicts unserializable behaviors, 99% of which are feasible.
Towards Analyzing and Understanding the Limitations of DPO: A Theoretical Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which derives reward signals directly from pairwise preference data, has shown its effectiveness on aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its widespread use across various tasks, DPO has been criticized for its sensitivity to the SFT's effectiveness and its hindrance to the learning capacity towards human-preferred responses, leading to less satisfactory performance. To overcome those limitations, the theoretical understanding of DPO are indispensable but still lacking. To this end, we take a step towards theoretically analyzing and understanding the limitations of DPO. Specifically, we provide an analytical framework using the field theory to analyze the optimization process of DPO. By analyzing the gradient vector field of the DPO loss function, we find that the DPO loss function decreases the probability of producing human dispreferred data at a faster rate than it increases the probability of producing preferred data. This provides theoretical insights for understanding the limitations of DPO discovered in the related research experiments, thereby setting the foundation for its improvement.
DifFUSER: Diffusion Model for Robust Multi-Sensor Fusion in 3D Object Detection and BEV Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models have recently gained prominence as powerful deep generative models, demonstrating unmatched performance across various domains. However, their potential in multi-sensor fusion remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce DifFUSER, a novel approach that leverages diffusion models for multi-modal fusion in 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation. Benefiting from the inherent denoising property of diffusion, DifFUSER is able to refine or even synthesize sensor features in case of sensor malfunction, thereby improving the quality of the fused output. In terms of architecture, our DifFUSER blocks are chained together in a hierarchical BiFPN fashion, termed cMini-BiFPN, offering an alternative architecture for latent diffusion. We further introduce a Gated Self-conditioned Modulated (GSM) latent diffusion module together with a Progressive Sensor Dropout Training (PSDT) paradigm, designed to add stronger conditioning to the diffusion process and robustness to sensor failures. Our extensive evaluations on the Nuscenes dataset reveal that DifFUSER not only achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 70.04% mIOU in BEV map segmentation tasks but also competes effectively with leading transformer-based fusion techniques in 3D object detection.
HawkDrive: A Transformer-driven Visual Perception System for Autonomous Driving in Night Scene
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Many established vision perception systems for autonomous driving scenarios ignore the influence of light conditions, one of the key elements for driving safety. To address this problem, we present HawkDrive, a novel perception system with hardware and software solutions. Hardware that utilizes stereo vision perception, which has been demonstrated to be a more reliable way of estimating depth information than monocular vision, is partnered with the edge computing device Nvidia Jetson Xavier AGX. Our software for low light enhancement, depth estimation, and semantic segmentation tasks, is a transformer-based neural network. Our software stack, which enables fast inference and noise reduction, is packaged into system modules in Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2). Our experimental results have shown that the proposed end-to-end system is effective in improving the depth estimation and semantic segmentation performance. Our dataset and codes will be released at https://github.com/ZionGo6/HawkDrive.
Spectral Independence Beyond Total Influence on Trees and Related Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study how to establish $\textit{spectral independence}$, a key concept in sampling, without relying on total influence bounds, by applying an $\textit{approximate inverse}$ of the influence matrix. Our method gives constant upper bounds on spectral independence for two foundational Gibbs distributions known to have unbounded total influences: $\bullet$ The monomer-dimer model on graphs with large girth (including trees). Prior to our work, such results were only known for graphs with constant maximum degrees or infinite regular trees, as shown by Chen, Liu, and Vigoda (STOC '21). $\bullet$ The hardcore model on trees with fugacity $λ< \mathrm{e}^2$. This remarkably surpasses the well-known $λ_r>\mathrm{e}-1$ lower bound for the reconstruction threshold on trees, significantly improving upon the current threshold $λ< 1.3$, established in a prior work by Efthymiou, Hayes, Štefankovič, and Vigoda (RANDOM '23). Consequently, we establish optimal $Ω(n^{-1})$ spectral gaps of the Glauber dynamics for these models on arbitrary trees, regardless of the maximum degree $Δ$.
Neural-ABC: Neural Parametric Models for Articulated Body with Clothes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce Neural-ABC, a novel parametric model based on neural implicit functions that can represent clothed human bodies with disentangled latent spaces for identity, clothing, shape, and pose. Traditional mesh-based representations struggle to represent articulated bodies with clothes due to the diversity of human body shapes and clothing styles, as well as the complexity of poses. Our proposed model provides a unified framework for parametric modeling, which can represent the identity, clothing, shape and pose of the clothed human body. Our proposed approach utilizes the power of neural implicit functions as the underlying representation and integrates well-designed structures to meet the necessary requirements. Specifically, we represent the underlying body as a signed distance function and clothing as an unsigned distance function, and they can be uniformly represented as unsigned distance fields. Different types of clothing do not require predefined topological structures or classifications, and can follow changes in the underlying body to fit the body. Additionally, we construct poses using a controllable articulated structure. The model is trained on both open and newly constructed datasets, and our decoupling strategy is carefully designed to ensure optimal performance. Our model excels at disentangling clothing and identity in different shape and poses while preserving the style of the clothing. We demonstrate that Neural-ABC fits new observations of different types of clothing. Compared to other state-of-the-art parametric models, Neural-ABC demonstrates powerful advantages in the reconstruction of clothed human bodies, as evidenced by fitting raw scans, depth maps and images. We show that the attributes of the fitted results can be further edited by adjusting their identities, clothing, shape and pose codes.
Salient Sparse Visual Odometry With Pose-Only Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual Odometry (VO) is vital for the navigation of autonomous systems, providing accurate position and orientation estimates at reasonable costs. While traditional VO methods excel in some conditions, they struggle with challenges like variable lighting and motion blur. Deep learning-based VO, though more adaptable, can face generalization problems in new environments. Addressing these drawbacks, this paper presents a novel hybrid visual odometry (VO) framework that leverages pose-only supervision, offering a balanced solution between robustness and the need for extensive labeling. We propose two cost-effective and innovative designs: a self-supervised homographic pre-training for enhancing optical flow learning from pose-only labels and a random patch-based salient point detection strategy for more accurate optical flow patch extraction. These designs eliminate the need for dense optical flow labels for training and significantly improve the generalization capability of the system in diverse and challenging environments. Our pose-only supervised method achieves competitive performance on standard datasets and greater robustness and generalization ability in extreme and unseen scenarios, even compared to dense optical flow-supervised state-of-the-art methods.
CEAR: Comprehensive Event Camera Dataset for Rapid Perception of Agile Quadruped Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

When legged robots perform agile movements, traditional RGB cameras often produce blurred images, posing a challenge for rapid perception. Event cameras have emerged as a promising solution for capturing rapid perception and coping with challenging lighting conditions thanks to their low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. However, integrating event cameras into agile-legged robots is still largely unexplored. Notably, no dataset including event cameras has yet been developed for the context of agile quadruped robots. To bridge this gap, we introduce CEAR, a dataset comprising data from an event camera, an RGB-D camera, an IMU, a LiDAR, and joint encoders, all mounted on a dynamic quadruped, Mini Cheetah robot. This comprehensive dataset features more than 100 sequences from real-world environments, encompassing various indoor and outdoor environments, different lighting conditions, a range of robot gaits (e.g., trotting, bounding, pronking), as well as acrobatic movements like backflip. To our knowledge, this is the first event camera dataset capturing the dynamic and diverse quadruped robot motions under various setups, developed to advance research in rapid perception for quadruped robots.
PoLLMgraph: Unraveling Hallucinations in Large Language Models via State Transition Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite tremendous advancements in large language models (LLMs) over recent years, a notably urgent challenge for their practical deployment is the phenomenon of hallucination, where the model fabricates facts and produces non-factual statements. In response, we propose PoLLMgraph, a Polygraph for LLMs, as an effective model-based white-box detection and forecasting approach. PoLLMgraph distinctly differs from the large body of existing research that concentrates on addressing such challenges through black-box evaluations. In particular, we demonstrate that hallucination can be effectively detected by analyzing the LLM's internal state transition dynamics during generation via tractable probabilistic models. Experimental results on various open-source LLMs confirm the efficacy of PoLLMgraph, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin, evidenced by over 20% improvement in AUC-ROC on common benchmarking datasets like TruthfulQA. Our work paves a new way for model-based white-box analysis of LLMs, motivating the research community to further explore, understand, and refine the intricate dynamics of LLM behaviors.
SAT-DIFF: A Tree Diffing Framework Using SAT Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Computing differences between tree-structured data is a critical but challenging problem in software analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel tree diffing approach called SatDiff, which reformulates the structural diffing problem into a MaxSAT problem. By encoding the necessary transformations from the source tree to the target tree, SatDiff generates correct, minimal, and type safe low-level edit scripts with formal guarantees. We then synthesize concise high-level edit scripts by effectively merging low-level edits in the appropriate topological order. Our empirical results demonstrate that SatDiff outperforms existing heuristic-based approaches by a significant margin in terms of conciseness while maintaining a reasonable runtime.
Fifth Generation IMC: Expanding the scope to Profit, People, and the Planet
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This editorial outlines an expanded scope for the next (fifth) generation of integrated marketing communication. It identifies key market forces that gave rise to this evolution and describes a trajectory of where Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) has been and where it is going. The central shift is moving from primarily focusing on one stakeholder to multiple ones, including people (employees and society), the planet (environment), and profits. It identifies examples from industry that exemplify multi-stakeholder decision-making and uses the examples to suggest research questions that academics and practitioners should address. Examples and research directions are organized around marketing strategy, communication media and messages, and measurement systems.
From Batch to Stream: Automatic Generation of Online Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Online streaming algorithms, tailored for continuous data processing, offer substantial benefits but are often more intricate to design than their offline counterparts. This paper introduces a novel approach for automatically synthesizing online streaming algorithms from their offline versions. In particular, we propose a novel methodology, based on the notion of relational function signature (RFS), for deriving an online algorithm given its offline version. Then, we propose a concrete synthesis algorithm that is an instantiation of the proposed methodology. Our algorithm uses the RFS to decompose the synthesis problem into a set of independent subtasks and uses a combination of symbolic reasoning and search to solve each subproblem. We implement the proposed technique in a new tool called Opera and evaluate it on over 50 tasks spanning two domains: statistical computations and online auctions. Our results show that Opera can automatically derive the online version of the original algorithm for 98% of the tasks. Our experiments also demonstrate that Opera significantly outperforms alternative approaches, including adaptations of SyGuS solvers to this problem as well as two of Opera's own ablations.
GDR-HGNN: A Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks Accelerator Frontend with Graph Decoupling and Recoupling
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have broadened the applicability of graph representation learning to heterogeneous graphs. However, the irregular memory access pattern of HGNNs leads to the buffer thrashing issue in HGNN accelerators. In this work, we identify an opportunity to address buffer thrashing in HGNN acceleration through an analysis of the topology of heterogeneous graphs. To harvest this opportunity, we propose a graph restructuring method and map it into a hardware frontend named GDR-HGNN. GDR-HGNN dynamically restructures the graph on the fly to enhance data locality for HGNN accelerators. Experimental results demonstrate that, with the assistance of GDR-HGNN, a leading HGNN accelerator achieves an average speedup of 14.6 times and 1.78 times compared to the state-of-the-art software framework running on A100 GPU and itself, respectively.
SqueezeAttention: 2D Management of KV-Cache in LLM Inference via Layer-wise Optimal Budget
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Optimizing the Key-Value (KV) cache of the Large Language Model (LLM) has been considered critical to saving the cost of inference. Most of the existing KV-cache compression algorithms attempted to sparsify the sequence of tokens by taking advantage of the different importance of tokens. However, most of these methods treat all layers equally, allocating the same KV budget to each layer. This approach is suboptimal, as some layers may be less sensitive to input tokens yet still receive the same budget as others. In this work, we found that by identifying the importance of attention layers, we could optimize the KV-cache jointly from two dimensions, i.e., sequence-wise and layer-wise. Based on our observations regarding layer-wise importance in inference, we propose SqueezeAttention to precisely optimize the allocation of KV-cache budget among layers on-the-fly and then incorporate three representative sequence-wise algorithms to compress the KV-cache for each layer with its very own budget. Specifically, we first measure each layer's importance by calculating the cosine similarity of the input prompt differences before and after the self-attention layers. Based on this similarity, we then categorize the layers into two groups and adjust their KV budgets accordingly. By optimizing the KV-cache from both sequence's and layer's dimensions, SqueezeAttention achieves around 30% to 70% of the memory reductions and up to 2.2 times of throughput improvements in a wide range of LLMs and benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/hetailang/SqueezeAttention.
Low-Resource Machine Translation through Retrieval-Augmented LLM Prompting: A Study on the Mambai Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for translating English into Mambai, a low-resource Austronesian language spoken in Timor-Leste, with approximately 200,000 native speakers. Leveraging a novel corpus derived from a Mambai language manual and additional sentences translated by a native speaker, we examine the efficacy of few-shot LLM prompting for machine translation (MT) in this low-resource context. Our methodology involves the strategic selection of parallel sentences and dictionary entries for prompting, aiming to enhance translation accuracy, using open-source and proprietary LLMs (LlaMa 2 70b, Mixtral 8x7B, GPT-4). We find that including dictionary entries in prompts and a mix of sentences retrieved through TF-IDF and semantic embeddings significantly improves translation quality. However, our findings reveal stark disparities in translation performance across test sets, with BLEU scores reaching as high as 21.2 on materials from the language manual, in contrast to a maximum of 4.4 on a test set provided by a native speaker. These results underscore the importance of diverse and representative corpora in assessing MT for low-resource languages. Our research provides insights into few-shot LLM prompting for low-resource MT, and makes available an initial corpus for the Mambai language.