OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MMGPL: Multimodal Medical Data Analysis with Graph Prompt Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Prompt learning has demonstrated impressive efficacy in the fine-tuning of multimodal large models to a wide range of downstream tasks. Nonetheless, applying existing prompt learning methods for the diagnosis of neurological disorder still suffers from two issues: (i) existing methods typically treat all patches equally, despite the fact that only a small number of patches in neuroimaging are relevant to the disease, and (ii) they ignore the structural information inherent in the brain connection network which is crucial for understanding and diagnosing neurological disorders. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel prompt learning model by learning graph prompts during the fine-tuning process of multimodal large models for diagnosing neurological disorders. Specifically, we first leverage GPT-4 to obtain relevant disease concepts and compute semantic similarity between these concepts and all patches. Secondly, we reduce the weight of irrelevant patches according to the semantic similarity between each patch and disease-related concepts. Moreover, we construct a graph among tokens based on these concepts and employ a graph convolutional network layer to extract the structural information of the graph, which is used to prompt the pre-trained multimodal large models for diagnosing neurological disorders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance for neurological disorder diagnosis compared with state-of-the-art methods and validated by clinicians.
Towards Message Brokers for Generative AI: Survey, Challenges, and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In today's digital world, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) such as Large Language Models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly prevalent, extending its reach across diverse applications. This surge in adoption has sparked a significant increase in demand for data-centric GenAI models, highlighting the necessity for robust data communication infrastructures. Central to this need are message brokers, which serve as essential channels for data transfer within various system components. This survey aims to delve into a comprehensive analysis of traditional and modern message brokers, offering a comparative study of prevalent platforms. Our study considers numerous criteria including, but not limited to, open-source availability, integrated monitoring tools, message prioritization mechanisms, capabilities for parallel processing, reliability, distribution and clustering functionalities, authentication processes, data persistence strategies, fault tolerance, and scalability. Furthermore, we explore the intrinsic constraints that the design and operation of each message broker might impose, recognizing that these limitations are crucial in understanding their real-world applicability. Finally, this study examines the enhancement of message broker mechanisms specifically for GenAI contexts, emphasizing the criticality of developing a versatile message broker framework. Such a framework would be poised for quick adaptation, catering to the dynamic and growing demands of GenAI in the foreseeable future. Through this dual-pronged approach, we intend to contribute a foundational compendium that can guide future innovations and infrastructural advancements in the realm of GenAI data communication.
Accurate, scalable, and efficient Bayesian optimal experimental design with derivative-informed neural operators
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

We consider optimal experimental design (OED) problems in selecting the most informative observation sensors to estimate model parameters in a Bayesian framework. Such problems are computationally prohibitive when the parameter-to-observable (PtO) map is expensive to evaluate, the parameters are high-dimensional, and the optimization for sensor selection is combinatorial and high-dimensional. To address these challenges, we develop an accurate, scalable, and efficient computational framework based on derivative-informed neural operators (DINO). We propose to use derivative-informed dimension reduction to reduce the parameter dimensions, based on which we train DINO with derivative information as an accurate and efficient surrogate for the PtO map and its derivative. Moreover, we derive DINO-enabled efficient formulations in computing the maximum a posteriori (MAP) point, the eigenvalues of approximate posterior covariance, and three commonly used optimality criteria for the OED problems. Furthermore, we provide detailed error analysis for the approximations of the MAP point, the eigenvalues, and the optimality criteria. We also propose a modified swapping greedy algorithm for the sensor selection optimization and demonstrate that the proposed computational framework is scalable to preserve the accuracy for increasing parameter dimensions and achieves high computational efficiency, with an over 1000$\times$ speedup accounting for both offline construction and online evaluation costs, compared to high-fidelity Bayesian OED solutions for a three-dimensional nonlinear convection-diffusion-reaction example with tens of thousands of parameters.
Lift-Attend-Splat: Bird's-eye-view camera-lidar fusion using transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Combining complementary sensor modalities is crucial to providing robust perception for safety-critical robotics applications such as autonomous driving (AD). Recent state-of-the-art camera-lidar fusion methods for AD rely on monocular depth estimation which is a notoriously difficult task compared to using depth information from the lidar directly. Here, we find that this approach does not leverage depth as expected and show that naively improving depth estimation does not lead to improvements in object detection performance. Strikingly, we also find that removing depth estimation altogether does not degrade object detection performance substantially, suggesting that relying on monocular depth could be an unnecessary architectural bottleneck during camera-lidar fusion. In this work, we introduce a novel fusion method that bypasses monocular depth estimation altogether and instead selects and fuses camera and lidar features in a bird's-eye-view grid using a simple attention mechanism. We show that our model can modulate its use of camera features based on the availability of lidar features and that it yields better 3D object detection on the nuScenes dataset than baselines relying on monocular depth estimation.
Probabilistic Modeling for Sequences of Sets in Continuous-Time
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural marked temporal point processes have been a valuable addition to the existing toolbox of statistical parametric models for continuous-time event data. These models are useful for sequences where each event is associated with a single item (a single type of event or a "mark") -- but such models are not suited for the practical situation where each event is associated with a set of items. In this work, we develop a general framework for modeling set-valued data in continuous-time, compatible with any intensity-based recurrent neural point process model. In addition, we develop inference methods that can use such models to answer probabilistic queries such as "the probability of item $A$ being observed before item $B$," conditioned on sequence history. Computing exact answers for such queries is generally intractable for neural models due to both the continuous-time nature of the problem setting and the combinatorially-large space of potential outcomes for each event. To address this, we develop a class of importance sampling methods for querying with set-based sequences and demonstrate orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency over direct sampling via systematic experiments with four real-world datasets. We also illustrate how to use this framework to perform model selection using likelihoods that do not involve one-step-ahead prediction.
Scaling Is All You Need: Autonomous Driving with JAX-Accelerated Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform even the best humans in complex domains like video games. However, running reinforcement learning experiments on the required scale for autonomous driving is extremely difficult. Building a large scale reinforcement learning system and distributing it across many GPUs is challenging. Gathering experience during training on real world vehicles is prohibitive from a safety and scalability perspective. Therefore, an efficient and realistic driving simulator is required that uses a large amount of data from real-world driving. We bring these capabilities together and conduct large-scale reinforcement learning experiments for autonomous driving. We demonstrate that our policy performance improves with increasing scale. Our best performing policy reduces the failure rate by 64% while improving the rate of driving progress by 25% compared to the policies produced by state-of-the-art machine learning for autonomous driving.
PACE: A Large-Scale Dataset with Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce PACE (Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments), a large-scale benchmark designed to advance the development and evaluation of pose estimation methods in cluttered scenarios. PACE provides a large-scale real-world benchmark for both instance-level and category-level settings. The benchmark consists of 55K frames with 258K annotations across 300 videos, covering 238 objects from 43 categories and featuring a mix of rigid and articulated items in cluttered scenes. To annotate the real-world data efficiently, we develop an innovative annotation system with a calibrated 3-camera setup. Additionally, we offer PACE-Sim, which contains 100K photo-realistic simulated frames with 2.4M annotations across 931 objects. We test state-of-the-art algorithms in PACE along two tracks: pose estimation, and object pose tracking, revealing the benchmark's challenges and research opportunities. Our benchmark code and data is available on https://github.com/qq456cvb/PACE.
An FPGA-Based Accelerator for Graph Embedding using Sequential Training Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A graph embedding is an emerging approach that can represent a graph structure with a fixed-length low-dimensional vector. node2vec is a well-known algorithm to obtain such a graph embedding by sampling neighboring nodes on a given graph with a random walk technique. However, the original node2vec algorithm typically relies on a batch training of graph structures; thus, it is not suited for applications in which the graph structure changes after the deployment. In this paper, we focus on node2vec applications for IoT (Internet of Things) environments. To handle the changes of graph structures after the IoT devices have been deployed in edge environments, in this paper we propose to combine an online sequential training algorithm with node2vec. The proposed sequentially-trainable model is implemented on an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) device to demonstrate the benefits of our approach. The proposed FPGA implementation achieves up to 205.25 times speedup compared to the original model on ARM Cortex-A53 CPU. Evaluation results using dynamic graphs show that although the accuracy is decreased in the original model, the proposed sequential model can obtain better graph embedding that achieves a higher accuracy even when the graph structure is changed.
Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Keyphrase Extractors: A Preliminary Empirical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Zero-shot keyphrase extraction aims to build a keyphrase extractor without training by human-annotated data, which is challenging due to the limited human intervention involved. Challenging but worthwhile, zero-shot setting efficiently reduces the time and effort that data labeling takes. Recent efforts on pre-trained large language models (e.g., ChatGPT and ChatGLM) show promising performance on zero-shot settings, thus inspiring us to explore prompt-based methods. In this paper, we ask whether strong keyphrase extraction models can be constructed by directly prompting the large language model ChatGPT. Through experimental results, it is found that ChatGPT still has a lot of room for improvement in the keyphrase extraction task compared to existing state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised models.
Do LLM Agents Exhibit Social Behavior?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

As LLMs increasingly take on roles in human-AI interactions and autonomous AI systems, understanding their social behavior becomes important for informed use and continuous improvement. However, their behaviors in social interactions with humans and other agents, as well as the mechanisms shaping their responses, remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel probabilistic framework, State-Understanding-Value-Action (SUVA), to systematically analyze LLM responses in social contexts based on their textual outputs (i.e., utterances). Using canonical behavioral economics games and social preference concepts relatable to LLM users, SUVA assesses LLMs' social behavior through both their final decisions and the response generation processes leading to those decisions. Our analysis of eight LLMs -- including two GPT, four LLaMA, and two Mistral models -- suggests that most models do not generate decisions aligned solely with self-interest; instead, they often produce responses that reflect social welfare considerations and display patterns consistent with direct and indirect reciprocity. Additionally, higher-capacity models more frequently display group identity effects. The SUVA framework also provides explainable tools -- including tree-based visualizations and probabilistic dependency analysis -- to elucidate how factors in LLMs' utterance-based reasoning influence their decisions. We demonstrate that utterance-based reasoning reliably predicts LLMs' final actions; references to altruism, fairness, and cooperation in the reasoning increase the likelihood of prosocial actions, while mentions of self-interest and competition reduce them. Overall, our framework enables practitioners to assess LLMs for applications involving social interactions, and provides researchers with a structured method to interpret how LLM behavior arises from utterance-based reasoning.
Stochastic models of memristive behavior
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Under normal operations, memristive devices undergo variability in time and space and have internal dynamics. Interplay of memory and stochastic signal processing in memristive devices makes them candidates for performing bio-inspired tasks of information transduction and transformation, where intrinsic random behavior can be harnessed for high performance of circuits built up of individual memory storing elements. The paper discusses models of single memristive devices exhibiting both - dynamic hysteresis and Stochastic Resonance, addressing also the cooperative effect of correlated noises acting on the system and occurrence of dirty hysteretic rounding.
Statistical Inference with Limited Memory: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The problem of statistical inference in its various forms has been the subject of decades-long extensive research. Most of the effort has been focused on characterizing the behavior as a function of the number of available samples, with far less attention given to the effect of memory limitations on performance. Recently, this latter topic has drawn much interest in the engineering and computer science literature. In this survey paper, we attempt to review the state-of-the-art of statistical inference under memory constraints in several canonical problems, including hypothesis testing, parameter estimation, and distribution property testing/estimation. We discuss the main results in this developing field, and by identifying recurrent themes, we extract some fundamental building blocks for algorithmic construction, as well as useful techniques for lower bound derivations.
Monitoring the Evolution of Behavioural Embeddings in Social Media Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Emerging short-video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and ShareChat present unique challenges for recommender systems, primarily originating from a continuous stream of new content. ShareChat alone receives approximately 2 million pieces of fresh content daily, complicating efforts to assess quality, learn effective latent representations, and accurately match content with the appropriate user base, especially given limited user feedback. Embedding-based approaches are a popular choice for industrial recommender systems because they can learn low-dimensional representations of items, leading to effective recommendation that can easily scale to millions of items and users. Our work characterizes the evolution of such embeddings in short-video recommendation systems, comparing the effect of batch and real-time updates to content embeddings. We investigate \emph{how} embeddings change with subsequent updates, explore the relationship between embeddings and popularity bias, and highlight their impact on user engagement metrics. Our study unveils the contrast in the number of interactions needed to achieve mature embeddings in a batch learning setup versus a real-time one, identifies the point of highest information updates, and explores the distribution of $\ell_2$-norms across the two competing learning modes. Utilizing a production system deployed on a large-scale short-video app with over 180 million users, our findings offer insights into designing effective recommendation systems and enhancing user satisfaction and engagement in short-video applications.
GenMorph: Automatically Generating Metamorphic Relations via Genetic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Metamorphic testing is a popular approach that aims to alleviate the oracle problem in software testing. At the core of this approach are Metamorphic Relations (MRs), specifying properties that hold among multiple test inputs and corresponding outputs. Deriving MRs is mostly a manual activity, since their automated generation is a challenging and largely unexplored problem. This paper presents GenMorph, a technique to automatically generate MRs for Java methods that involve inputs and outputs that are boolean, numerical, or ordered sequences. GenMorph uses an evolutionary algorithm to search for effective test oracles, i.e., oracles that trigger no false alarms and expose software faults in the method under test. The proposed search algorithm is guided by two fitness functions that measure the number of false alarms and the number of missed faults for the generated MRs. Our results show that GenMorph generates effective MRs for 18 out of 23 methods (mutation score >20%). Furthermore, it can increase Randoop's fault detection capability in 7 out of 23 methods, and Evosuite's in 14 out of 23 methods. When compared with AutoMR, a state-of-the-art MR generator, GenMorph also outperformed its fault detection capability in 9 out of 10 methods.
Learning Multi-Step Manipulation Tasks from A Single Human Demonstration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Learning from human demonstrations has exhibited remarkable achievements in robot manipulation. However, the challenge remains to develop a robot system that matches human capabilities and data efficiency in learning and generalizability, particularly in complex, unstructured real-world scenarios. We propose a system that processes RGBD videos to translate human actions to robot primitives and identifies task-relevant key poses of objects using Grounded Segment Anything. We then address challenges for robots in replicating human actions, considering the human-robot differences in kinematics and collision geometry. To test the effectiveness of our system, we conducted experiments focusing on manual dishwashing. With a single human demonstration recorded in a mockup kitchen, the system achieved 50-100% success for each step and up to a 40% success rate for the whole task with different objects in a home kitchen. Videos are available at https://robot-dishwashing.github.io
Variation-Resilient FeFET-Based In-Memory Computing Leveraging Probabilistic Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Reliability issues stemming from device level non-idealities of non-volatile emerging technologies like ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFET), especially at scaled dimensions, cause substantial degradation in the accuracy of In-Memory crossbar-based AI systems. In this work, we present a variation-aware design technique to characterize the device level variations and to mitigate their impact on hardware accuracy employing a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) approach. An effective conductance variation model is derived from the experimental measurements of cycle-to-cycle (C2C) and device-to-device (D2D) variations performed on FeFET devices fabricated using 28 nm high-$k$ metal gate technology. The variations were found to be a function of different conductance states within the given programming range, which sharply contrasts earlier efforts where a fixed variation dispersion was considered for all conductance values. Such variation characteristics formulated for three different device sizes at different read voltages were provided as prior variation information to the BNN to yield a more exact and reliable inference. Near-ideal accuracy for shallow networks (MLP5 and LeNet models) on the MNIST dataset and limited accuracy decline by $\sim$3.8-16.1% for deeper AlexNet models on CIFAR10 dataset under a wide range of variations corresponding to different device sizes and read voltages, demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed device-algorithm co-design technique.
Risk-Aware and Energy-Efficient AoI Optimization for Multi-Connectivity WNCS with Short Packet Transmissions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Age of Information (AoI) has been proposed to quantify the freshness of information for emerging real-time applications such as remote monitoring and control in wireless networked control systems (WNCSs). Minimization of the average AoI and its outage probability can ensure timely and stable transmission. Energy efficiency (EE) also plays an important role in WNCSs, as many devices are featured by low cost and limited battery. Multi-connectivity over multiple links enables a decrease in AoI, at the cost of energy. We tackle the unresolved problem of selecting the optimal number of connections that is both AoI-optimal and energy-efficient, while avoiding risky states. To address this issue, the average AoI and peak AoI (PAoI), as well as PAoI violation probability are formulated as functions of the number of connections. Then the EE-PAoI ratio is introduced to allow a tradeoff between AoI and energy, which is maximized by the proposed risk-aware, AoI-optimal and energy-efficient connectivity scheme. To obtain this, we analyze the property of the formulated EE-PAoI ratio and prove the monotonicity of PAoI violation probability. Interestingly, we reveal that the multi-connectivity scheme is not always preferable, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold that determines the selection of the multi-connectivity scheme is derived as a function of the coding rate. Also, the optimal number of connections is obtained and shown to be a decreasing function of the transmit power. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme enables more than 15 folds of EE-PAoI gain at the low SNR than the single-connectivity scheme.
Globally Optimal Inverse Kinematics as a Quadratic Program
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We show how to compute globally optimal solutions to inverse kinematics (IK) by formulating the problem as an indefinite quadratically constrained quadratic program. Our approach makes it feasible to solve IK instances of generic redundant manipulators. We demonstrate the performance on randomly generated designs and on real-world robots with up to ten revolute joints. The same technique can be used for manipulator design by introducing kinematic parameters as variables.