OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Online Soft Error Tolerance in ReRAM Crossbars for Deep Learning Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Resistive Random-Access Memory (ReRAM) crossbar arrays are promising candidates for in-situ matrix-vector multiplication (MVM), a frequent operation in Deep Learning algorithms. Despite their advantages, these emerging non-volatile memories are susceptible to errors due to non-idealities such as immature fabrication processes and runtime errors, which lead to accuracy degradation in Processing-in-Memory (PIM) accelerators. This paper proposes an online soft error detection and correction method in ReRAM crossbar arrays. We utilize a test input vector and Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) to detect and correct faulty columns. The proposed approach demonstrates near fault-free accuracy for Neural Networks (NNs) on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, with low area overhead and power consumption compared to recent methods.
Improved Turbo Message Passing for Compressive Robust Principal Component Analysis: Algorithm Design and Asymptotic Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Compressive Robust Principal Component Analysis (CRPCA) naturally arises in various applications as a means to recover a low-rank matrix low-rank matrix $\boldsymbol{L}$ and a sparse matrix $\boldsymbol{S}$ from compressive measurements. In this paper, we approach the problem from a Bayesian inference perspective. We establish a probabilistic model for the problem and develop an improved turbo message passing (ITMP) algorithm based on the sum-product rule and the appropriate approximations. Additionally, we establish a state evolution framework to characterize the asymptotic behavior of the ITMP algorithm in the large-system limit. By analyzing the established state evolution, we further propose sufficient conditions for the global convergence of our algorithm. Our numerical results validate the theoretical results, demonstrating that the proposed asymptotic framework accurately characterize the dynamical behavior of the ITMP algorithm, and the phase transition curve specified by the sufficient condition agrees well with numerical simulations.
Summa Summarum: Moessner's Theorem without Dynamic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2024
Year: 2024

Seventy years on, Moessner's theorem and Moessner's process -- i.e., the additive computation of integral powers -- continue to fascinate. They have given rise to a variety of elegant proofs, to an implementation in hardware, to generalizations, and now even to a popular video, "The Moessner Miracle.'' The existence of this video, and even more its title, indicate that while the "what'' of Moessner's process is understood, its "how'' and even more its "why'' are still elusive. And indeed all the proofs of Moessner's theorem involve more complicated concepts than both the theorem and the process. This article identifies that Moessner's process implements an additive function with dynamic programming. A version of this implementation without dynamic programming (1) gives rise to a simpler statement of Moessner's theorem and (2) can be abstracted and then instantiated into related additive computations. The simpler statement also suggests a simpler and more efficient implementation to compute integral powers as well as simple additive functions to compute, e.g., Factorial numbers. It also reveals the source of -- to quote John Conway and Richard Guy -- Moessner's magic.
Integrating programmable plasticity in experiment descriptions for analog neuromorphic hardware
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The study of plasticity in spiking neural networks is an active area of research. However, simulations that involve complex plasticity rules, dense connectivity/high synapse counts, complex neuron morphologies, or extended simulation times can be computationally demanding. The BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic architecture has been designed to address this challenge by supporting "hybrid" plasticity, which combines the concepts of programmability and inherently parallel emulation. In particular, observables that are expensive in numerical simulation, such as per-synapse correlation measurements, are implemented directly in the synapse circuits. The evaluation of the observables, the decision to perform an update, and the magnitude of an update, are all conducted in a conventional program that runs simultaneously with the analog neural network. Consequently, these systems can offer a scalable and flexible solution in such cases. While previous work on the platform has already reported on the use of different kinds of plasticity, the descriptions for the spiking neural network experiment topology and protocol, and the plasticity algorithm have not been connected. In this work, we introduce an integrated framework for describing spiking neural network experiments and plasticity rules in a unified high-level experiment description language for the BrainScaleS-2 platform and demonstrate its use.
Topological Trajectory Classification and Landmark Inference on Simplicial Complexes
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the problem of classifying trajectories on a discrete or discretised 2-dimensional manifold modelled by a simplicial complex. Previous works have proposed to project the trajectories into the harmonic eigenspace of the Hodge Laplacian, and then cluster the resulting embeddings. However, if the considered space has vanishing homology (i.e., no "holes"), then the harmonic space of the 1-Hodge Laplacian is trivial and thus the approach fails. Here we propose to view this issue akin to a sensor placement problem and present an algorithm that aims to learn "optimal holes" to distinguish a set of given trajectory classes. Specifically, given a set of labelled trajectories, which we interpret as edge-flows on the underlying simplicial complex, we search for 2-simplices whose deletion results in an optimal separation of the trajectory labels according to the corresponding spectral embedding of the trajectories into the harmonic space. Finally, we generalise this approach to the unsupervised setting.
A Measure of the System Dependence of Automated Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Automated metrics for Machine Translation have made significant progress, with the goal of replacing expensive and time-consuming human evaluations. These metrics are typically assessed by their correlation with human judgments, which captures the monotonic relationship between human and metric scores. However, we argue that it is equally important to ensure that metrics treat all systems fairly and consistently. In this paper, we introduce a method to evaluate this aspect.
Resilient Timed Elastic Band Planner for Collision-Free Navigation in Unknown Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In autonomous navigation, trajectory replanning, refinement, and control command generation are essential for effective motion planning. This paper presents a resilient approach to trajectory replanning addressing scenarios where the initial planner's solution becomes infeasible. The proposed method incorporates a hybrid A* algorithm to generate feasible trajectories when the primary planner fails and applies a soft constraints-based smoothing technique to refine these trajectories, ensuring continuity, obstacle avoidance, and kinematic feasibility. Obstacle constraints are modelled using a dynamic Voronoi map to improve navigation through narrow passages. This approach enhances the consistency of trajectory planning, speeds up convergence, and meets real-time computational requirements. In environments with around 30\% or higher obstacle density, the ratio of free space before and after placing new obstacles, the Resilient Timed Elastic Band (RTEB) planner achieves approximately 20\% reduction in traverse distance, traverse time, and control effort compared to the Timed Elastic Band (TEB) planner and Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) planner. These improvements demonstrate the RTEB planner's potential for application in field robotics, particularly in agricultural and industrial environments, where navigating unstructured terrain is crucial for ensuring efficiency and operational resilience.
Fab-ME: A Vision State-Space and Attention-Enhanced Framework for Fabric Defect Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Effective defect detection is critical for ensuring the quality, functionality, and economic value of textile products. However, existing methods face challenges in achieving high accuracy, real-time performance, and efficient global information extraction. To address these issues, we propose Fab-ME, an advanced framework based on YOLOv8s, specifically designed for the accurate detection of 20 fabric defect types. Our contributions include the introduction of the cross-stage partial bottleneck with two convolutions (C2F) vision state-space (C2F-VMamba) module, which integrates visual state-space (VSS) blocks into the YOLOv8s feature fusion network neck, enhancing the capture of intricate details and global context while maintaining high processing speeds. Additionally, we incorporate an enhanced multi-scale channel attention (EMCA) module into the final layer of the feature extraction network, significantly improving sensitivity to small targets. Experimental results on the Tianchi fabric defect detection dataset demonstrate that Fab-ME achieves a 3.5% improvement in mAP@0.5 compared to the original YOLOv8s, validating its effectiveness for precise and efficient fabric defect detection.
TrustOps: Continuously Building Trustworthy Software
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software services play a crucial role in daily life, with automated actions determining access to resources and information. Trusting service providers to perform these actions fairly and accurately is essential, yet challenging for users to verify. Even with publicly available codebases, the rapid pace of development and the complexity of modern deployments hinder the understanding and evaluation of service actions, including for experts. Hence, current trust models rely heavily on the assumption that service providers follow best practices and adhere to laws and regulations, which is increasingly impractical and risky, leading to undetected flaws and data leaks. In this paper, we argue that gathering verifiable evidence during software development and operations is needed for creating a new trust model. Therefore, we present TrustOps, an approach for continuously collecting verifiable evidence in all phases of the software life cycle, relying on and combining already existing tools and trust-enhancing technologies to do so. For this, we introduce the adaptable core principles of TrustOps and provide a roadmap for future research and development.
Experimental reservoir computing with diffractively coupled VCSELs
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

We present experiments on reservoir computing (RC) using a network of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that we diffractively couple via an external cavity. Our optical reservoir computer consists of 24 physical VCSEL nodes. We evaluate the system's memory and solve the 2-bit XOR task and the 3-bit header recognition (HR) task with bit error ratios (BERs) below 1\,\% and the 2-bit digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) task with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.067.
GERD: Geometric event response data generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Event-based vision sensors are appealing because of their time resolution, higher dynamic range, and low-power consumption. They also provide data that is fundamentally different from conventional frame-based cameras: events are sparse, discrete, and require integration in time. Unlike conventional models grounded in established geometric and physical principles, event-based models lack comparable foundations. We introduce a method to generate event-based data under controlled transformations. Specifically, we subject a prototypical object to transformations that change over time to produce carefully curated event videos. We hope this work simplifies studies for geometric approaches in event-based vision. GERD is available at https://github.com/ncskth/gerd
Geometry-guided Cross-view Diffusion for One-to-many Cross-view Image Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a novel approach for cross-view synthesis aimed at generating plausible ground-level images from corresponding satellite imagery or vice versa. We refer to these tasks as satellite-to-ground (Sat2Grd) and ground-to-satellite (Grd2Sat) synthesis, respectively. Unlike previous works that typically focus on one-to-one generation, producing a single output image from a single input image, our approach acknowledges the inherent one-to-many nature of the problem. This recognition stems from the challenges posed by differences in illumination, weather conditions, and occlusions between the two views. To effectively model this uncertainty, we leverage recent advancements in diffusion models. Specifically, we exploit random Gaussian noise to represent the diverse possibilities learnt from the target view data. We introduce a Geometry-guided Cross-view Condition (GCC) strategy to establish explicit geometric correspondences between satellite and street-view features. This enables us to resolve the geometry ambiguity introduced by camera pose between image pairs, boosting the performance of cross-view image synthesis. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on three benchmark cross-view datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed geometry-guided cross-view condition over baseline methods, including recent state-of-the-art approaches in cross-view image synthesis. Our method generates images of higher quality, fidelity, and diversity than other state-of-the-art approaches.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Small VLM is a Precise Guidance for Accelerating Large VLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable success across various multi-modal tasks, yet large VLMs encounter significant efficiency challenges due to processing numerous visual tokens. A promising approach to accelerating large VLM inference is using partial information, such as attention maps from specific layers, to assess token importance and prune less essential tokens. However, our study reveals three key insights: (i) Partial attention information is insufficient for accurately identifying critical visual tokens, resulting in suboptimal performance, especially at low token retention ratios; (ii) Global attention information, such as the attention map aggregated across all layers, more effectively preserves essential tokens and maintains comparable performance under aggressive pruning. However, the attention maps from all layers requires a full inference pass, which increases computational load and is therefore impractical in existing methods; and (iii) The global attention map aggregated from a small VLM closely resembles that of a large VLM, suggesting an efficient alternative. Based on these findings, we introduce a \textbf{training-free} method, \underline{\textbf{S}}mall VLM \underline{\textbf{G}}uidance for accelerating \underline{\textbf{L}}arge VLMs (\textbf{SGL}). Specifically, we employ the attention map aggregated from a small VLM to guide visual token pruning in a large VLM. Additionally, an early exiting mechanism is developed to fully use the small VLM's predictions, dynamically invoking the larger VLM only when necessary, yielding a superior trade-off between accuracy and computation. Extensive evaluations across 11 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of SGL, achieving up to 91\% pruning ratio for visual tokens while retaining competitive performance.
Improving Linguistic Diversity of Large Language Models with Possibility Exploration Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in replicating human-like abilities, there are concerns about a reduction in the linguistic diversity of their outputs. This results in the homogenization of viewpoints and perspectives, as well as the underrepresentation of specific demographic groups. Although several fine-tuning and prompting techniques have been suggested to tackle the issue, they are often tailored to specific tasks or come with a substantial increase in computational cost and latency. This makes them challenging to apply to applications that demand very low latency, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. We propose Possibility Exploration Fine-Tuning (PEFT), a task-agnostic framework that enhances the text diversity of LLMs without increasing latency or computational cost. Given the same prompt, models fine-tuned with PEFT can simultaneously generate multiple diverse responses, each corresponding with a controllable possibility number. Experiments on dialogue and story generation tasks demonstrate that PEFT significantly enhances the diversity of LLM outputs, as evidenced by lower similarity between candidate responses. Since PEFT emphasizes semantic diversity over lexical diversity, it can also notably reduce demographic bias in dialogue systems. The implementations and datasets are available in our repository: https://github.com/mailong25/peft_diversity
Tango*: Constrained synthesis planning using chemically informed value functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) has made significant strides in generating retrosynthetic pathways for simple molecules in a non-constrained fashion. Recent work introduces a specialised bidirectional search algorithm with forward and retro expansion to address the starting material-constrained synthesis problem, allowing CASP systems to provide synthesis pathways from specified starting materials, such as waste products or renewable feed-stocks. In this work, we introduce a simple guided search which allows solving the starting material-constrained synthesis planning problem using an existing, uni-directional search algorithm, Retro*. We show that by optimising a single hyperparameter, Tango* outperforms existing methods in terms of efficiency and solve rate. We find the Tango* cost function catalyses strong improvements for the bidirectional DESP methods. Our method also achieves lower wall clock times while proposing synthetic routes of similar length, a common metric for route quality. Finally, we highlight potential reasons for the strong performance of Tango over neural guided search methods
Genetic Algorithm Based System for Path Planning with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Swarms in Cell-Grid Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Path Planning methods for autonomously controlling swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining momentum due to their operational advantages. An increasing number of scenarios now require autonomous control of multiple UAVs, as autonomous operation can significantly reduce labor costs. Additionally, obtaining optimal flight paths can lower energy consumption, thereby extending battery life for other critical operations. Many of these scenarios, however, involve obstacles such as power lines and trees, which complicate Path Planning. This paper presents an evolutionary computation-based system employing genetic algorithms to address this problem in environments with obstacles. The proposed approach aims to ensure complete coverage of areas with fixed obstacles, such as in field exploration tasks, while minimizing flight time regardless of map size or the number of UAVs in the swarm. No specific goal points or prior information beyond the provided map is required. The experiments conducted in this study used five maps of varying sizes and obstacle densities, as well as a control map without obstacles, with different numbers of UAVs. The results demonstrate that this method can determine optimal paths for all UAVs during full map traversal, thus minimizing resource consumption. A comparative analysis with other state-of-the-art approach is presented to highlight the advantages and potential limitations of the proposed method.
PlanarSplatting: Accurate Planar Surface Reconstruction in 3 Minutes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents PlanarSplatting, an ultra-fast and accurate surface reconstruction approach for multiview indoor images. We take the 3D planes as the main objective due to their compactness and structural expressiveness in indoor scenes, and develop an explicit optimization framework that learns to fit the expected surface of indoor scenes by splatting the 3D planes into 2.5D depth and normal maps. As our PlanarSplatting operates directly on the 3D plane primitives, it eliminates the dependencies on 2D/3D plane detection and plane matching and tracking for planar surface reconstruction. Furthermore, the essential merits of plane-based representation plus CUDA-based implementation of planar splatting functions, PlanarSplatting reconstructs an indoor scene in 3 minutes while having significantly better geometric accuracy. Thanks to our ultra-fast reconstruction speed, the largest quantitative evaluation on the ScanNet and ScanNet++ datasets over hundreds of scenes clearly demonstrated the advantages of our method. We believe that our accurate and ultrafast planar surface reconstruction method will be applied in the structured data curation for surface reconstruction in the future. The code of our CUDA implementation will be publicly available. Project page: https://icetttb.github.io/PlanarSplatting/
Flow Matching with General Discrete Paths: A Kinetic-Optimal Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The design space of discrete-space diffusion or flow generative models are significantly less well-understood than their continuous-space counterparts, with many works focusing only on a simple masked construction. In this work, we aim to take a holistic approach to the construction of discrete generative models based on continuous-time Markov chains, and for the first time, allow the use of arbitrary discrete probability paths, or colloquially, corruption processes. Through the lens of optimizing the symmetric kinetic energy, we propose velocity formulas that can be applied to any given probability path, completely decoupling the probability and velocity, and giving the user the freedom to specify any desirable probability path based on expert knowledge specific to the data domain. Furthermore, we find that a special construction of mixture probability paths optimizes the symmetric kinetic energy for the discrete case. We empirically validate the usefulness of this new design space across multiple modalities: text generation, inorganic material generation, and image generation. We find that we can outperform the mask construction even in text with kinetic-optimal mixture paths, while we can make use of domain-specific constructions of the probability path over the visual domain.