OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep networks for system identification: a Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning is a topic of considerable current interest. The availability of massive data collections and powerful software resources has led to an impressive amount of results in many application areas that reveal essential but hidden properties of the observations. System identification learns mathematical descriptions of dynamic systems from input-output data and can thus benefit from the advances of deep neural networks to enrich the possible range of models to choose from. For this reason, we provide a survey of deep learning from a system identification perspective. We cover a wide spectrum of topics to enable researchers to understand the methods, providing rigorous practical and theoretical insights into the benefits and challenges of using them. The main aim of the identified model is to predict new data from previous observations. This can be achieved with different deep learning based modelling techniques and we discuss architectures commonly adopted in the literature, like feedforward, convolutional, and recurrent networks. Their parameters have to be estimated from past data trying to optimize the prediction performance. For this purpose, we discuss a specific set of first-order optimization tools that is emerged as efficient. The survey then draws connections to the well-studied area of kernel-based methods. They control the data fit by regularization terms that penalize models not in line with prior assumptions. We illustrate how to cast them in deep architectures to obtain deep kernel-based methods. The success of deep learning also resulted in surprising empirical observations, like the counter-intuitive behaviour of models with many parameters. We discuss the role of overparameterized models, including their connection to kernels, as well as implicit regularization mechanisms which affect generalization, specifically the interesting phenomena of benign overfitting ...
Sum-Rate Maximization for Active RIS-Aided Downlink RSMA System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, the problem of sum-rate maximization for an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted downlink rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) transmission system is studied. In the considered model, the active RIS is deployed to overcome severe power attenuation, which is caused by the cumulative product of RIS incidence path loss and the reflection path loss. Since the active RIS can adjust both the phase and the amplitude of the incident signal simultaneously, the RIS control scheme requires delicate design to improve RSMA communication performance. To address this issue, a sum-rate maximization problem is formulated to jointly optimize the beamforming vectors, rate allocation vector, and RIS precoding matrix. To solve this non-convex sum-rate maximization problem, an iterative algorithm based on fractional programming (FP) and quadratic constraint quadratic programming (QCQP) is proposed. In particular, the proposed algorithm firstly decomposes the original problem into two subproblems, namely, 1) beamforming and rate allocation optimization and 2) active RIS precoding optimization. The corresponding variables of the two subproblems are optimized through sequential convex approximation (SCA) and block coordinate descent (BCD), respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed active RIS-aided RSMA system could increase the sum-rate by up to 45% over the conventional passive RIS-aided RSMA system with the same energy consumption.
A Quantification Approach for Transferability in Lifelike Computing Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

The basic idea of lifelike computing systems is the transfer of concepts in living systems to technical use that goes even beyond existing concepts of self-adaptation and self-organisation (SASO). As a result, these systems become even more autonomous and changeable - up to a runtime transfer of the actual target function. Maintaining controllability requires a complete and dynamic (self-)quantification of the system behaviour with regard to aspects of SASO but also, in particular, lifelike properties. In this article, we discuss possible approaches for such metrics and establish a first metric for transferability. We analyse the behaviour of the metric using example applications and show that it is suitable for describing the system's behaviour at runtime.
SMDP-Based Dynamic Batching for Efficient Inference on GPU-Based Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In up-to-date machine learning (ML) applications on cloud or edge computing platforms, batching is an important technique for providing efficient and economical services at scale. In particular, parallel computing resources on the platforms, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), have higher computational and energy efficiency with larger batch sizes. However, larger batch sizes may also result in longer response time, and thus it requires a judicious design. This paper aims to provide a dynamic batching policy that strikes a balance between efficiency and latency. The GPU-based inference service is modeled as a batch service queue with batch-size dependent processing time. Then, the design of dynamic batching is a continuous-time average-cost problem, and is formulated as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) with the objective of minimizing the weighted sum of average response time and average power consumption. The optimal policy is acquired by solving an associated discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP) problem with finite state approximation and "discretization". By introducing an abstract cost to reflect the impact of "tail" states, the space complexity and the time complexity of the procedure can decrease by 63.5% and 98%, respectively. Our results show that the optimal policies potentially possess a control limit structure. Numerical results also show that SMDP-based batching policies can adapt to different traffic intensities and outperform other benchmark policies. Furthermore, the proposed solution has notable flexibility in balancing power consumption and latency.
On Robustness of Prompt-based Semantic Parsing with Large Pre-trained Language Model: An Empirical Study on Codex
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Semantic parsing is a technique aimed at constructing a structured representation of the meaning of a natural-language question. Recent advancements in few-shot language models trained on code have demonstrated superior performance in generating these representations compared to traditional unimodal language models, which are trained on downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, existing fine-tuned neural semantic parsers are susceptible to adversarial attacks on natural-language inputs. While it has been established that the robustness of smaller semantic parsers can be enhanced through adversarial training, this approach is not feasible for large language models in real-world scenarios, as it requires both substantial computational resources and expensive human annotation on in-domain semantic parsing data. This paper presents the first empirical study on the adversarial robustness of a large prompt-based language model of code, \codex. Our results demonstrate that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) code-language models are vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples. To address this challenge, we propose methods for improving robustness without the need for significant amounts of labeled data or heavy computational resources.
Guiding Online Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Offline Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Offline RL methods have been shown to reduce the need for environment interaction by training agents using offline collected episodes. However, these methods typically require action information to be logged during data collection, which can be difficult or even impossible in some practical cases. In this paper, we investigate the potential of using action-free offline datasets to improve online reinforcement learning, name this problem Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Offline Pretraining (AFP-RL). We introduce Action-Free Guide (AF-Guide), a method that guides online training by extracting knowledge from action-free offline datasets. AF-Guide consists of an Action-Free Decision Transformer (AFDT) implementing a variant of Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning. It learns to plan the next states from the offline dataset, and a Guided Soft Actor-Critic (Guided SAC) that learns online with guidance from AFDT. Experimental results show that AF-Guide can improve sample efficiency and performance in online training thanks to the knowledge from the action-free offline dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/Vision-CAIR/AF-Guide.
Incentives to Offer Algorithmic Recourse
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in a variety of high-stakes decisions, such as loan approval, job hiring, and criminal bail, researchers in Explainable AI (XAI) have developed algorithms to provide users with recourse for an unfavorable outcome. We analyze the incentives for a decision-maker to offer recourse to a set of applicants. Does the decision-maker have the incentive to offer recourse to all rejected applicants? We show that the decision-maker only offers recourse to all applicants in extreme cases, such as when the recourse process is impossible to manipulate. Some applicants may be worse off when the decision-maker can offer recourse.
SplitGNN: Splitting GNN for Node Classification with Heterogeneous Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

With the frequent happening of privacy leakage and the enactment of privacy laws across different countries, data owners are reluctant to directly share their raw data and labels with any other party. In reality, a lot of these raw data are stored in the graph database, especially for finance. For collaboratively building graph neural networks(GNNs), federated learning(FL) may not be an ideal choice for the vertically partitioned setting where privacy and efficiency are the main concerns. Moreover, almost all the existing federated GNNs are mainly designed for homogeneous graphs, which simplify various types of relations as the same type, thus largely limits their performance. We bridge this gap by proposing a split learning-based GNN(SplitGNN), where this model is divided into two sub-models: the local GNN model includes all the private data related computation to generate local node embeddings, whereas the global model calculates global embeddings by aggregating all the participants' local embeddings. Our SplitGNN allows the isolated heterogeneous neighborhood to be collaboratively utilized. To better capture representations, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Attention(HAT) algorithm and use both node-based and path-based attention mechanisms to learn various types of nodes and edges with multi-hop relation features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our SplitGNN on node classification tasks for two standard public datasets and the real-world dataset. Extensive experimental results validate that our proposed SplitGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods.
Coarse-to-fine Hybrid 3D Mapping System with Co-calibrated Omnidirectional Camera and Non-repetitive LiDAR
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a novel 3D mapping robot with an omnidirectional field-of-view (FoV) sensor suite composed of a non-repetitive LiDAR and an omnidirectional camera. Thanks to the non-repetitive scanning nature of the LiDAR, an automatic targetless co-calibration method is proposed to simultaneously calibrate the intrinsic parameters for the omnidirectional camera and the extrinsic parameters for the camera and LiDAR, which is crucial for the required step in bringing color and texture information to the point clouds in surveying and mapping tasks. Comparisons and analyses are made to target-based intrinsic calibration and mutual information (MI)-based extrinsic calibration, respectively. With this co-calibrated sensor suite, the hybrid mapping robot integrates both the odometry-based mapping mode and stationary mapping mode. Meanwhile, we proposed a new workflow to achieve coarse-to-fine mapping, including efficient and coarse mapping in a global environment with odometry-based mapping mode; planning for viewpoints in the region-of-interest (ROI) based on the coarse map (relies on the previous work); navigating to each viewpoint and performing finer and more precise stationary scanning and mapping of the ROI. The fine map is stitched with the global coarse map, which provides a more efficient and precise result than the conventional stationary approaches and the emerging odometry-based approaches, respectively.
Factors that affect Camera based Self-Monitoring of Vitals in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The reliability of the results of self monitoring of the vitals in the wild using medical devices or wearables or camera based smart phone solutions is subject to variabilities such as position of placement, hardware of the device and environmental factors. In this first of its kind study, we demonstrate that this variability in self monitoring of Blood Pressure (BP), Blood oxygen saturation level (SpO2) and Heart rate (HR) is statistically significant (p<0.05) on 203 healthy subjects by quantifying positional and hardware variability. We also establish the existence of this variability in camera based solutions for self-monitoring of vitals in smart phones and thus prove that the use of camera based smart phone solutions is similar to the use of medical devices or wearables for self-monitoring in the wild.
A Framework for Operational Volume Generation for Urban Air Mobility Strategic Deconfliction
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2023
Year: 2023

Strategic pre-flight functions focus on the planning and deconfliction of routes for aircraft systems. The urban air mobility concept calls for higher levels of autonomy with onboard and en route functions but also strategic and pre-flight systems. Existing endeavours into strategic pre-flight functions focus on improving the route generation and strategic deconfliction of these routes. Introduced with the urban air mobility concept is the premise of operational volumes. These 4D regions of airspace, describe the intended operational region for an aircraft for finite time. Chaining these together forms a contract of finite operational volumes over a given route. It is no longer enough to only deconflict routes within the airspace, but to now consider these 4D operational volumes. To provide an effective all-in-one approach, we propose a novel framework for generating routes and accompanying contracts of operational volumes, along with deconfliction focused around 4D operational volumes. Experimental results show efficiency of operational volume generation utilising reachability analysis and demonstrate sufficient success in deconfliction of operational volumes.
Human Vision Based 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Outdoor Scene
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes EyeNet, a novel semantic segmentation network for point clouds that addresses the critical yet often overlooked parameter of coverage area size. Inspired by human peripheral vision, EyeNet overcomes the limitations of conventional networks by introducing a simple but efficient multi-contour input and a parallel processing network with connection blocks between parallel streams. The proposed approach effectively addresses the challenges of dense point clouds, as demonstrated by our ablation studies and state-of-the-art performance on Large-Scale Outdoor datasets.
ContCommRTD: A Distributed Content-based Misinformation-aware Community Detection System for Real-Time Disaster Reporting
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Real-time social media data can provide useful information on evolving hazards. Alongside traditional methods of disaster detection, the integration of social media data can considerably enhance disaster management. In this paper, we investigate the problem of detecting geolocation-content communities on Twitter and propose a novel distributed system that provides in near real-time information on hazard-related events and their evolution. We show that content-based community analysis leads to better and faster dissemination of reports on hazards. Our distributed disaster reporting system analyzes the social relationship among worldwide geolocated tweets, and applies topic modeling to group tweets by topics. Considering for each tweet the following information: user, timestamp, geolocation, retweets, and replies, we create a publisher-subscriber distribution model for topics. We use content similarity and the proximity of nodes to create a new model for geolocation-content based communities. Users can subscribe to different topics in specific geographical areas or worldwide and receive real-time reports regarding these topics. As misinformation can lead to increase damage if propagated in hazards related tweets, we propose a new deep learning model to detect fake news. The misinformed tweets are then removed from display. We also show empirically the scalability capabilities of the proposed system.
Identifying Expert Behavior in Offline Training Datasets Improves Behavioral Cloning of Robotic Manipulation Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents our solution for the Real Robot Challenge (RRC) III, a competition featured in the NeurIPS 2022 Competition Track, aimed at addressing dexterous robotic manipulation tasks through learning from pre-collected offline data. Participants were provided with two types of datasets for each task: expert and mixed datasets with varying skill levels. While the simplest offline policy learning algorithm, Behavioral Cloning (BC), performed remarkably well when trained on expert datasets, it outperformed even the most advanced offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, BC's performance deteriorated when applied to mixed datasets, and the performance of offline RL algorithms was also unsatisfactory. Upon examining the mixed datasets, we observed that they contained a significant amount of expert data, although this data was unlabeled. To address this issue, we proposed a semi-supervised learning-based classifier to identify the underlying expert behavior within mixed datasets, effectively isolating the expert data. To further enhance BC's performance, we leveraged the geometric symmetry of the RRC arena to augment the training dataset through mathematical transformations. In the end, our submission surpassed that of all other participants, even those who employed complex offline RL algorithms and intricate data processing and feature engineering techniques.
CS-JEDI: Required DEI Education, by CS PhD Students, for CS PhD Students
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Computer science (CS) has historically struggled with issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Based on how these issues were affecting PhD students in our department, we identified required DEI education for PhD students as a potentially high-impact approach to improving the PhD student experience in our program. Given that no existing curriculum met the desired criteria, we (PhD students) - along with many others at our school - developed and implemented CS-JEDI: Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Computer Science. CS-JEDI is a 6-week DEI curriculum that is now taken by all first-year PhD students in our department. This paper covers CS-JEDI's motivation and goals; describes how its evidence-based curriculum is tailored to these goals and to the CS PhD context; and gives a data-driven evaluation of the extent to which CS-JEDI's first offering, in Spring 2022, achieved these goals.
Is Writing Prompts Really Making Art?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years Generative Machine Learning systems have advanced significantly. A current wave of generative systems use text prompts to create complex imagery, video, even 3D datasets. The creators of these systems claim a revolution in bringing creativity and art to anyone who can type a prompt. In this position paper, we question the basis for these claims, dividing our analysis into three areas: the limitations of linguistic descriptions, implications of the dataset, and lastly, matters of materiality and embodiment. We conclude with an analysis of the creative possibilities enabled by prompt-based systems, asking if they can be considered a new artistic medium.
Optimal Approximation Complexity of High-Dimensional Functions with Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We investigate properties of neural networks that use both ReLU and $x^2$ as activation functions and build upon previous results to show that both analytic functions and functions in Sobolev spaces can be approximated by such networks of constant depth to arbitrary accuracy, demonstrating optimal order approximation rates across all nonlinear approximators, including standard ReLU networks. We then show how to leverage low local dimensionality in some contexts to overcome the curse of dimensionality, obtaining approximation rates that are optimal for unknown lower-dimensional subspaces.
Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V (Technical Report)
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

In multi-user environments in which data science and analysis is collaborative, multiple versions of the same datasets are generated. While managing and storing data versions has received some attention in the research literature, the semantic nature of such changes has remained under-explored. In this work, we introduce \texttt{Explain-Da-V}, a framework aiming to explain changes between two given dataset versions. \texttt{Explain-Da-V} generates \emph{explanations} that use \emph{data transformations} to explain changes. We further introduce a set of measures that evaluate the validity, generalizability, and explainability of these explanations. We empirically show, using an adapted existing benchmark and a newly created benchmark, that \texttt{Explain-Da-V} generates better explanations than existing data transformation synthesis methods.
PACED-5G: Predictive Autonomous Control using Edge for Drones over 5G
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

With the advent of technologies such as Edge computing, the horizons of remote computational applications have broadened multidimensionally. Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) mission is a vital application to utilize remote computation to catalyze its performance. However, offloading computational complexity to a remote system increases the latency in the system. Though technologies such as 5G networking minimize communication latency, the effects of latency on the control of UAVs are inevitable and may destabilize the system. Hence, it is essential to consider the delays in the system and compensate for them in the control design. Therefore, we propose a novel Edge-based predictive control architecture enabled by 5G networking, PACED-5G (Predictive Autonomous Control using Edge for Drones over 5G). In the proposed control architecture, we have designed a state estimator for estimating the current states based on the available knowledge of the time-varying delays, devised a Model Predictive controller (MPC) for the UAV to track the reference trajectory while avoiding obstacles, and provided an interface to offload the high-level tasks over Edge systems. The proposed architecture is validated in two experimental test cases using a quadrotor UAV.