OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Systematic Review on Reproducibility in Child-Robot Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Research reproducibility - i.e., rerunning analyses on original data to replicate the results - is paramount for guaranteeing scientific validity. However, reproducibility is often very challenging, especially in research fields where multi-disciplinary teams are involved, such as child-robot interaction (CRI). This paper presents a systematic review of the last three years (2020-2022) of research in CRI under the lens of reproducibility, by analysing the field for transparency in reporting. Across a total of 325 studies, we found deficiencies in reporting demographics (e.g. age of participants), study design and implementation (e.g. length of interactions), and open data (e.g. maintaining an active code repository). From this analysis, we distill a set of guidelines and provide a checklist to systematically report CRI studies to help and guide research to improve reproducibility in CRI and beyond.
LoopTune: Optimizing Tensor Computations with Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Advanced compiler technology is crucial for enabling machine learning applications to run on novel hardware, but traditional compilers fail to deliver performance, popular auto-tuners have long search times and expert-optimized libraries introduce unsustainable costs. To address this, we developed LoopTune, a deep reinforcement learning compiler that optimizes tensor computations in deep learning models for the CPU. LoopTune optimizes tensor traversal order while using the ultra-fast lightweight code generator LoopNest to perform hardware-specific optimizations. With a novel graph-based representation and action space, LoopTune speeds up LoopNest by 3.2x, generating an order of magnitude faster code than TVM, 2.8x faster than MetaSchedule, and 1.08x faster than AutoTVM, consistently performing at the level of the hand-tuned library Numpy. Moreover, LoopTune tunes code in order of seconds.
Secure and Efficient Federated Learning in LEO Constellations using Decentralized Key Generation and On-Orbit Model Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Satellite technologies have advanced drastically in recent years, leading to a heated interest in launching small satellites into low Earth orbit (LEOs) to collect massive data such as satellite imagery. Downloading these data to a ground station (GS) to perform centralized learning to build an AI model is not practical due to the limited and expensive bandwidth. Federated learning (FL) offers a potential solution but will incur a very large convergence delay due to the highly sporadic and irregular connectivity between LEO satellites and GS. In addition, there are significant security and privacy risks where eavesdroppers or curious servers/satellites may infer raw data from satellites' model parameters transmitted over insecure communication channels. To address these issues, this paper proposes FedSecure, a secure FL approach designed for LEO constellations, which consists of two novel components: (1) decentralized key generation that protects satellite data privacy using a functional encryption scheme, and (2) on-orbit model forwarding and aggregation that generates a partial global model per orbit to minimize the idle waiting time for invisible satellites to enter the visible zone of the GS. Our analysis and results show that FedSecure preserves the privacy of each satellite's data against eavesdroppers, a curious server, or curious satellites. It is lightweight with significantly lower communication and computation overheads than other privacy-preserving FL aggregation approaches. It also reduces convergence delay drastically from days to only a few hours, yet achieving high accuracy of up to 85.35% using realistic satellite images.
Designing a Security System Administration Course for Cybersecurity with a Companion Project
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In the past few years, an incident response-oriented cybersecurity program has been constructed at University of Central Oklahoma. As a core course in the newly-established curricula, Secure System Administration focuses on the essential knowledge and skill set for system administration. To enrich students with hands-on experience, we also develop a companion coursework project, named PowerGrader. In this paper, we present the course structure as well as the companion project design. Additionally, we survey the pertinent criterion and curriculum requirements from the widely recognized accreditation units. By this means, we demonstrate the importance of a secure system administration course within the context of cybersecurity education.
StereoFlowGAN: Co-training for Stereo and Flow with Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce a novel training strategy for stereo matching and optical flow estimation that utilizes image-to-image translation between synthetic and real image domains. Our approach enables the training of models that excel in real image scenarios while relying solely on ground-truth information from synthetic images. To facilitate task-agnostic domain adaptation and the training of task-specific components, we introduce a bidirectional feature warping module that handles both left-right and forward-backward directions. Experimental results show competitive performance over previous domain translation-based methods, which substantiate the efficacy of our proposed framework, effectively leveraging the benefits of unsupervised domain adaptation, stereo matching, and optical flow estimation.
On the Planning, Search, and Memorization Capabilities of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The rapid advancement of large language models, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series, has had significant implications across various disciplines. In this study, we investigate the potential of the state-of-the-art large language model (GPT-4) for planning tasks. We explore its effectiveness in multiple planning subfields, highlighting both its strengths and limitations. Through a comprehensive examination, we identify areas where large language models excel in solving planning problems and reveal the constraints that limit their applicability. Our empirical analysis focuses on GPT-4's performance in planning domain extraction, graph search path planning, and adversarial planning. We then propose a way of fine-tuning a domain-specific large language model to improve its Chain of Thought (CoT) capabilities for the above-mentioned tasks. The results provide valuable insights into the potential applications of large language models in the planning domain and pave the way for future research to overcome their limitations and expand their capabilities.
SyntheWorld: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Land Cover Mapping and Building Change Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Synthetic datasets, recognized for their cost effectiveness, play a pivotal role in advancing computer vision tasks and techniques. However, when it comes to remote sensing image processing, the creation of synthetic datasets becomes challenging due to the demand for larger-scale and more diverse 3D models. This complexity is compounded by the difficulties associated with real remote sensing datasets, including limited data acquisition and high annotation costs, which amplifies the need for high-quality synthetic alternatives. To address this, we present SyntheWorld, a synthetic dataset unparalleled in quality, diversity, and scale. It includes 40,000 images with submeter-level pixels and fine-grained land cover annotations of eight categories, and it also provides 40,000 pairs of bitemporal image pairs with building change annotations for building change detection task. We conduct experiments on multiple benchmark remote sensing datasets to verify the effectiveness of SyntheWorld and to investigate the conditions under which our synthetic data yield advantages. We will release SyntheWorld to facilitate remote sensing image processing research.
A Survey on Physics Informed Reinforcement Learning: Review and Open Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The inclusion of physical information in machine learning frameworks has revolutionized many application areas. This involves enhancing the learning process by incorporating physical constraints and adhering to physical laws. In this work we explore their utility for reinforcement learning applications. We present a thorough review of the literature on incorporating physics information, as known as physics priors, in reinforcement learning approaches, commonly referred to as physics-informed reinforcement learning (PIRL). We introduce a novel taxonomy with the reinforcement learning pipeline as the backbone to classify existing works, compare and contrast them, and derive crucial insights. Existing works are analyzed with regard to the representation/ form of the governing physics modeled for integration, their specific contribution to the typical reinforcement learning architecture, and their connection to the underlying reinforcement learning pipeline stages. We also identify core learning architectures and physics incorporation biases (i.e., observational, inductive and learning) of existing PIRL approaches and use them to further categorize the works for better understanding and adaptation. By providing a comprehensive perspective on the implementation of the physics-informed capability, the taxonomy presents a cohesive approach to PIRL. It identifies the areas where this approach has been applied, as well as the gaps and opportunities that exist. Additionally, the taxonomy sheds light on unresolved issues and challenges, which can guide future research. This nascent field holds great potential for enhancing reinforcement learning algorithms by increasing their physical plausibility, precision, data efficiency, and applicability in real-world scenarios.
Deep Imitation Learning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation through Human Teleoperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

We tackle the problem of developing humanoid loco-manipulation skills with deep imitation learning. The difficulty of collecting task demonstrations and training policies for humanoids with a high degree of freedom presents substantial challenges. We introduce TRILL, a data-efficient framework for training humanoid loco-manipulation policies from human demonstrations. In this framework, we collect human demonstration data through an intuitive Virtual Reality (VR) interface. We employ the whole-body control formulation to transform task-space commands by human operators into the robot's joint-torque actuation while stabilizing its dynamics. By employing high-level action abstractions tailored for humanoid loco-manipulation, our method can efficiently learn complex sensorimotor skills. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TRILL in simulation and on a real-world robot for performing various loco-manipulation tasks. Videos and additional materials can be found on the project page: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/TRILL.
VFFINDER: A Graph-based Approach for Automated Silent Vulnerability-Fix Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The increasing reliance of software projects on third-party libraries has raised concerns about the security of these libraries due to hidden vulnerabilities. Managing these vulnerabilities is challenging due to the time gap between fixes and public disclosures. Moreover, a significant portion of open-source projects silently fix vulnerabilities without disclosure, impacting vulnerability management. Existing tools like OWASP heavily rely on public disclosures, hindering their effectiveness in detecting unknown vulnerabilities. To tackle this problem, automated identification of vulnerability-fixing commits has emerged. However, identifying silent vulnerability fixes remains challenging. This paper presents VFFINDER, a novel graph-based approach for automated silent vulnerability fix identification. VFFINDER captures structural changes using Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) and represents them in annotated ASTs. VFFINDER distinguishes vulnerability-fixing commits from non-fixing ones using attention-based graph neural network models to extract structural features. We conducted experiments to evaluate VFFINDER on a dataset of 36K+ fixing and non-fixing commits in 507 real-world C/C++ projects. Our results show that VFFINDER significantly improves the state-of-the-art methods by 39-83% in Precision, 19-148% in Recall, and 30-109% in F1. Especially, VFFINDER speeds up the silent fix identification process by up to 47% with the same review effort of 5% compared to the existing approaches.
Linear Regression using Heterogeneous Data Batches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In many learning applications, data are collected from multiple sources, each providing a \emph{batch} of samples that by itself is insufficient to learn its input-output relationship. A common approach assumes that the sources fall in one of several unknown subgroups, each with an unknown input distribution and input-output relationship. We consider one of this setup's most fundamental and important manifestations where the output is a noisy linear combination of the inputs, and there are $k$ subgroups, each with its own regression vector. Prior work~\cite{kong2020meta} showed that with abundant small-batches, the regression vectors can be learned with only few, $\tildeΩ( k^{3/2})$, batches of medium-size with $\tildeΩ(\sqrt k)$ samples each. However, the paper requires that the input distribution for all $k$ subgroups be isotropic Gaussian, and states that removing this assumption is an ``interesting and challenging problem". We propose a novel gradient-based algorithm that improves on the existing results in several ways. It extends the applicability of the algorithm by: (1) allowing the subgroups' underlying input distributions to be different, unknown, and heavy-tailed; (2) recovering all subgroups followed by a significant proportion of batches even for infinite $k$; (3) removing the separation requirement between the regression vectors; (4) reducing the number of batches and allowing smaller batch sizes.
Graph-Based Interaction-Aware Multimodal 2D Vehicle Trajectory Prediction using Diffusion Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Predicting vehicle trajectories is crucial for ensuring automated vehicle operation efficiency and safety, particularly on congested multi-lane highways. In such dynamic environments, a vehicle's motion is determined by its historical behaviors as well as interactions with surrounding vehicles. These intricate interactions arise from unpredictable motion patterns, leading to a wide range of driving behaviors that warrant in-depth investigation. This study presents the Graph-based Interaction-aware Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction (GIMTP) framework, designed to probabilistically predict future vehicle trajectories by effectively capturing these interactions. Within this framework, vehicles' motions are conceptualized as nodes in a time-varying graph, and the traffic interactions are represented by a dynamic adjacency matrix. To holistically capture both spatial and temporal dependencies embedded in this dynamic adjacency matrix, the methodology incorporates the Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (DGCN), thereby providing a graph embedding of both historical states and future states. Furthermore, we employ a driving intention-specific feature fusion, enabling the adaptive integration of historical and future embeddings for enhanced intention recognition and trajectory prediction. This model gives two-dimensional predictions for each mode of longitudinal and lateral driving behaviors and offers probabilistic future paths with corresponding probabilities, addressing the challenges of complex vehicle interactions and multi-modality of driving behaviors. Validation using real-world trajectory datasets demonstrates the efficiency and potential.
Quaternary Conjucyclic Codes with an Application to EAQEC Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Conjucyclic codes are part of a family of codes that includes cyclic, constacyclic, and quasi-cyclic codes, among others. Despite their importance in quantum error correction, they have not received much attention in the literature. This paper focuses on additive conjucyclic (ACC) codes over $\mathbb{F}_4$ and investigates their properties. Specifically, we derive the duals of ACC codes using a trace inner product and obtain the trace hull and its dimension. Also, establish a necessary and sufficient condition for an additive code to have a complementary dual (ACD). Additionally, we identify a necessary condition for an additive conjucyclic complementary pair of codes over $\mathbb{F}_4$. Furthermore, we show that the trace code of an ACC code is cyclic and provide a condition for the trace code of an ACC code to be LCD. To demonstrate the practical application of our findings, we construct some good entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting (EAQEC) codes using the trace code of ACC codes.
Belief revision and incongruity: is it a joke?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Incongruity often makes people laugh. You have to be smart to say stupid things. It requires to be even smarter for understanding them. This paper is a shameless attempt to formalize this intelligent behavior in the case of an agent listening to a joke. All this is a matter of revision of beliefs, surprise and violation of norms.
Data-Juicer: A One-Stop Data Processing System for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The immense evolution in Large Language Models (LLMs) has underscored the importance of massive, heterogeneous, and high-quality data. A data recipe is a mixture of data from different sources for training LLMs, which plays a vital role in LLMs' performance. Existing open-source tools for LLM data processing are mostly tailored for specific data recipes. To continuously uncover the potential of LLMs, incorporate data from new sources, and improve LLMs' performance, we build a new system named Data-Juicer, with which we can efficiently generate diverse data recipes, explore different possibilities in forming data mixtures, and evaluate their effects on model performance. Different from traditional data-analytics pipelines, Data-Juicer faces some unique challenges. Firstly, the possible data sources for forming data recipes are truly heterogeneous and massive with various qualities. Secondly, it is extremely expensive to precisely evaluate data recipes' impact on LLMs' performance. Thirdly, the end users of Data-Juicer, model developers, need sufficient flexibility to configure and evaluate different data recipes. Data-Juicer features a fine-grained abstraction of pipelines for constructing data recipes, with over 50 built-in operators for easy composition and extension. By incorporating visualization and auto-evaluation capabilities, Data-Juicer enables a timely feedback loop for both LLM pre-training and fine-tuning. Further, Data-Juicer is optimized and integrated with ecosystems for LLM training, evaluation, and distributed computing. The data recipes derived with Data-Juicer gain notable improvements on state-of-the-art LLMs, by up to 7.45% increase in averaged score across 16 LLM benchmarks and 17.5% higher win rate in pair-wise GPT-4 evaluations. Our system, data recipes, and tutorials are released, calling for broader data-centric research on training and understanding LLMs.
Diffusion Generative Inverse Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Inverse design refers to the problem of optimizing the input of an objective function in order to enact a target outcome. For many real-world engineering problems, the objective function takes the form of a simulator that predicts how the system state will evolve over time, and the design challenge is to optimize the initial conditions that lead to a target outcome. Recent developments in learned simulation have shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) can be used for accurate, efficient, differentiable estimation of simulator dynamics, and support high-quality design optimization with gradient- or sampling-based optimization procedures. However, optimizing designs from scratch requires many expensive model queries, and these procedures exhibit basic failures on either non-convex or high-dimensional problems. In this work, we show how denoising diffusion models (DDMs) can be used to solve inverse design problems efficiently and propose a particle sampling algorithm for further improving their efficiency. We perform experiments on a number of fluid dynamics design challenges, and find that our approach substantially reduces the number of calls to the simulator compared to standard techniques.
Diffusion-based 3D Object Detection with Random Boxes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

3D object detection is an essential task for achieving autonomous driving. Existing anchor-based detection methods rely on empirical heuristics setting of anchors, which makes the algorithms lack elegance. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of several generative models, among which diffusion models show great potential for learning the transformation of two distributions. Our proposed Diff3Det migrates the diffusion model to proposal generation for 3D object detection by considering the detection boxes as generative targets. During training, the object boxes diffuse from the ground truth boxes to the Gaussian distribution, and the decoder learns to reverse this noise process. In the inference stage, the model progressively refines a set of random boxes to the prediction results. We provide detailed experiments on the KITTI benchmark and achieve promising performance compared to classical anchor-based 3D detection methods.
Towards Individual and Multistakeholder Fairness in Tourism Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

This position paper summarizes our published review on individual and multistakeholder fairness in Tourism Recommender Systems (TRS). Recently, there has been growing attention to fairness considerations in recommender systems (RS). It has been acknowledged in research that fairness in RS is often closely tied to the presence of multiple stakeholders, such as end users, item providers, and platforms, as it raises concerns for the fair treatment of all parties involved. Hence, fairness in RS is a multi-faceted concept that requires consideration of the perspectives and needs of the different stakeholders to ensure fair outcomes for them. However, there may often be instances where achieving the goals of one stakeholder could conflict with those of another, resulting in trade-offs. In this paper, we emphasized addressing the unique challenges of ensuring fairness in RS within the tourism domain. We aimed to discuss potential strategies for mitigating the aforementioned challenges and examine the applicability of solutions from other domains to tackle fairness issues in tourism. By exploring cross-domain approaches and strategies for incorporating S-Fairness, we can uncover valuable insights and determine how these solutions can be adapted and implemented effectively in the context of tourism to enhance fairness in RS.
No-Regret Caching with Noisy Request Estimates
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Online learning algorithms have been successfully used to design caching policies with regret guarantees. Existing algorithms assume that the cache knows the exact request sequence, but this may not be feasible in high load and/or memory-constrained scenarios, where the cache may have access only to sampled requests or to approximate requests' counters. In this paper, we propose the Noisy-Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (NFPL) algorithm, a variant of the classic Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FPL) when request estimates are noisy, and we show that the proposed solution has sublinear regret under specific conditions on the requests estimator. The experimental evaluation compares the proposed solution against classic caching policies and validates the proposed approach under both synthetic and real request traces.