OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
NNPP: A Learning-Based Heuristic Model for Accelerating Optimal Path Planning on Uneven Terrain
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Intelligent autonomous path planning is essential for enhancing the exploration efficiency of mobile robots operating in uneven terrains like planetary surfaces and off-road environments.In this paper, we propose the NNPP model for computing the heuristic region, enabling foundation algorithms like Astar to find the optimal path solely within this reduced search space, effectively decreasing the search time. The NNPP model learns semantic information about start and goal locations, as well as map representations, from numerous pre-annotated optimal path demonstrations, and produces a probabilistic distribution over each pixel representing the likelihood of it belonging to an optimal path on the map. More specifically, the paper computes the traversal cost for each grid cell from the slope, roughness and elevation difference obtained from the digital elevation model. Subsequently, the start and goal locations are encoded using a Gaussian distribution and different location encoding parameters are analyzed for their effect on model performance. After training, the NNPP model is able to \textcolor{revision}{accelerate} path planning on novel maps.
InstantAvatar: Efficient 3D Head Reconstruction via Surface Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in full-head reconstruction have been obtained by optimizing a neural field through differentiable surface or volume rendering to represent a single scene. While these techniques achieve an unprecedented accuracy, they take several minutes, or even hours, due to the expensive optimization process required. In this work, we introduce InstantAvatar, a method that recovers full-head avatars from few images (down to just one) in a few seconds on commodity hardware. In order to speed up the reconstruction process, we propose a system that combines, for the first time, a voxel-grid neural field representation with a surface renderer. Notably, a naive combination of these two techniques leads to unstable optimizations that do not converge to valid solutions. In order to overcome this limitation, we present a novel statistical model that learns a prior distribution over 3D head signed distance functions using a voxel-grid based architecture. The use of this prior model, in combination with other design choices, results into a system that achieves 3D head reconstructions with comparable accuracy as the state-of-the-art with a 100x speed-up.
CiFHER: A Chiplet-Based FHE Accelerator with a Resizable Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is in the spotlight as a definitive solution for privacy, but the high computational overhead of FHE poses a challenge to its practical adoption. Although prior studies have attempted to design ASIC accelerators to mitigate the overhead, their designs require excessive chip resources (e.g., areas) to contain and process massive data for FHE operations. We propose CiFHER, a chiplet-based FHE accelerator with a resizable structure, to tackle the challenge with a cost-effective multi-chip module (MCM) design. First, we devise a flexible core architecture whose configuration is adjustable to conform to the global organization of chiplets and design constraints. Its distinctive feature is a composable functional unit providing varying computational throughput for the number-theoretic transform, the most dominant function in FHE. Then, we establish generalized data mapping methodologies to minimize the interconnect overhead when organizing the chips into the MCM package in a tiled manner, which becomes a significant bottleneck due to the packaging constraints. This study demonstrates that a CiFHER package composed of a number of compact chiplets provides performance comparable to state-of-the-art monolithic ASIC accelerators while significantly reducing the package-wide power consumption and manufacturing cost.
Semantic Communications for Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) Toward Effective Content Creation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) Services have significant potential in digital content creation. The distinctive abilities of AIGC, such as content generation based on minimal input, hold huge potential, especially when integrating with semantic communication (SemCom). In this paper, a novel comprehensive conceptual model for the integration of AIGC and SemCom is developed. Particularly, a content generation level is introduced on top of the semantic level that provides a clear outline of how AIGC and SemCom interact with each other to produce meaningful and effective content. Moreover, a novel framework that employs AIGC technology is proposed as an encoder and decoder for semantic information, considering the joint optimization of semantic extraction and evaluation metrics tailored to AIGC services. The framework can adapt to different types of content generated, the required quality, and the semantic information utilized. By employing a Deep Q Network (DQN), a case study is presented that provides useful insights into the feasibility of the optimization problem and its convergence characteristics.
Evaluating SZZ Implementations: An Empirical Study on the Linux Kernel
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The SZZ algorithm is used to connect bug-fixing commits to the earlier commits that introduced bugs. This algorithm has many applications and many variants have been devised. However, there are some types of commits that cannot be traced by the SZZ algorithm, referred to as "ghost commits". The evaluation of how these ghost commits impact the SZZ algorithm remains limited. Moreover, these algorithms have been evaluated on datasets created by software engineering researchers from information in bug trackers and version controlled histories. Since Oct 2013, the Linux kernel developers have started labelling bug-fixing patches with the commit identifiers of the corresponding bug-inducing commit(s) as a standard practice. As of v6.1-rc5, 76,046 pairs of bug-fixing patches and bug-inducing commits are available. This provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the SZZ algorithm on a large dataset that has been created and reviewed by project developers, entirely independently of the biases of software engineering researchers. In this paper, we apply six SZZ algorithms to 76,046 pairs of bug-fixing patches and bug-introducing commits from the Linux kernel. Our findings reveal that SZZ algorithms experience a more significant decline in recall on our dataset (13.8%) as compared to prior findings reported by Rosa et al., and the disparities between the individual SZZ algorithms diminish. Moreover, we find that 17.47% of bug-fixing commits are ghost commits. Finally, we propose Tracing-Commit SZZ (TC-SZZ), that traces all commits in the change history of lines modified or deleted in bug-fixing commits. Applying TC-SZZ to all failure cases, excluding ghost commits, we found that TC-SZZ could identify 17.7% of them. Our further analysis found that 34.6% of bug-inducing commits were in the function history, 27.5% in the file history (but not in the function history), and...
Sound propagation in realistic interactive 3D scenes with parameterized sources using deep neural operators
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

We address the challenge of sound propagation simulations in 3D virtual rooms with moving sources, which have applications in virtual/augmented reality, game audio, and spatial computing. Solutions to the wave equation can describe wave phenomena such as diffraction and interference. However, simulating them using conventional numerical discretization methods with hundreds of source and receiver positions is intractable, making stimulating a sound field with moving sources impractical. To overcome this limitation, we propose using deep operator networks to approximate linear wave-equation operators. This enables the rapid prediction of sound propagation in realistic 3D acoustic scenes with moving sources, achieving millisecond-scale computations. By learning a compact surrogate model, we avoid the offline calculation and storage of impulse responses for all relevant source/listener pairs. Our experiments, including various complex scene geometries, show good agreement with reference solutions, with root mean squared errors ranging from 0.02 Pa to 0.10 Pa. Notably, our method signifies a paradigm shift as no prior machine learning approach has achieved precise predictions of complete wave fields within realistic domains. We anticipate that our findings will drive further exploration of deep neural operator methods, advancing research in immersive user experiences within virtual environments.$
An Exploratory Study of V-Model in Building ML-Enabled Software: A Systems Engineering Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) components are being added to more and more critical and impactful software systems, but the software development process of real-world production systems from prototyped ML models remains challenging with additional complexity and interdisciplinary collaboration challenges. This poses difficulties in using traditional software lifecycle models such as waterfall, spiral, or agile models when building ML-enabled systems. In this research, we apply a Systems Engineering lens to investigate the use of V-Model in addressing the interdisciplinary collaboration challenges when building ML-enabled systems. By interviewing practitioners from software companies, we established a set of 8 propositions for using V-Model to manage interdisciplinary collaborations when building products with ML components. Based on the propositions, we found that despite requiring additional efforts, the characteristics of V-Model align effectively with several collaboration challenges encountered by practitioners when building ML-enabled systems. We recommend future research to investigate new process models, frameworks and tools that leverage the characteristics of V-Model such as the system decomposition, clear system boundary, and consistency of Validation & Verification (V&V) for building ML-enabled systems.
Substitution for Non-Wellfounded Syntax with Binders through Monoidal Categories
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

We describe a generic construction of non-wellfounded syntax involving variable binding and its monadic substitution operation. Our construction of the syntax and its substitution takes place in category theory, notably by using monoidal categories and strong functors between them. A language is specified by a multi-sorted binding signature, say Σ. First, we provide sufficient criteria for Σ to generate a language of possibly infinite terms, through ω-continuity. Second, we construct a monadic substitution operation for the language generated by Σ. A cornerstone in this construction is a mild generalization of the notion of heterogeneous substitution systems developed by Matthes and Uustalu; such a system encapsulates the necessary corecursion scheme for implementing substitution. The results are formalized in the Coq proof assistant, through the UniMath library of univalent mathematics.
Robustifying Point Cloud Networks by Refocusing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The ability to cope with out-of-distribution (OOD) corruptions and adversarial attacks is crucial in real-world safety-demanding applications. In this study, we develop a general mechanism to increase neural network robustness based on focus analysis. Recent studies have revealed the phenomenon of \textit{Overfocusing}, which leads to a performance drop. When the network is primarily influenced by small input regions, it becomes less robust and prone to misclassify under noise and corruptions. However, quantifying overfocusing is still vague and lacks clear definitions. Here, we provide a mathematical definition of \textbf{focus}, \textbf{overfocusing} and \textbf{underfocusing}. The notions are general, but in this study, we specifically investigate the case of 3D point clouds. We observe that corrupted sets result in a biased focus distribution compared to the clean training set. We show that as focus distribution deviates from the one learned in the training phase - classification performance deteriorates. We thus propose a parameter-free \textbf{refocusing} algorithm that aims to unify all corruptions under the same distribution. We validate our findings on a 3D zero-shot classification task, achieving SOTA in robust 3D classification on ModelNet-C dataset, and in adversarial defense against Shape-Invariant attack. Code is available in: https://github.com/yossilevii100/refocusing.
Spintronics for image recognition: performance benchmarking via ultrafast data-driven simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present a demonstration of image classification using an echo-state network (ESN) relying on a single simulated spintronic nanostructure known as the vortex-based spin-torque oscillator (STVO) delayed in time. We employ an ultrafast data-driven simulation framework called the data-driven Thiele equation approach (DD-TEA) to simulate the STVO dynamics. This allows us to avoid the challenges associated with repeated experimental manipulation of such a nanostructured system. We showcase the versatility of our solution by successfully applying it to solve classification challenges with the MNIST, EMNIST-letters and Fashion MNIST datasets. Through our simulations, we determine that within an ESN with numerous learnable parameters the results obtained using the STVO dynamics as an activation function are comparable to the ones obtained with other conventional nonlinear activation functions like the reLU and the sigmoid. While achieving state-of-the-art accuracy levels on the MNIST dataset, our model's performance on EMNIST-letters and Fashion MNIST is lower due to the relative simplicity of the system architecture and the increased complexity of the tasks. We expect that the DD-TEA framework will enable the exploration of deeper architectures, ultimately leading to improved classification accuracy.
Knowledge Propagation over Conditional Independence Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Conditional Independence (CI) graph is a special type of a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) where the feature connections are modeled using an undirected graph and the edge weights show the partial correlation strength between the features. Since the CI graphs capture direct dependence between features, they have been garnering increasing interest within the research community for gaining insights into the systems from various domains, in particular discovering the domain topology. In this work, we propose algorithms for performing knowledge propagation over the CI graphs. Our experiments demonstrate that our techniques improve upon the state-of-the-art on the publicly available Cora and PubMed datasets.
Contrastive Explanations of Centralized Multi-agent Optimization Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In many real-world scenarios, agents are involved in optimization problems. Since most of these scenarios are over-constrained, optimal solutions do not always satisfy all agents. Some agents might be unhappy and ask questions of the form ``Why does solution $S$ not satisfy property $P$?''. We propose CMAoE, a domain-independent approach to obtain contrastive explanations by: (i) generating a new solution $S^\prime$ where property $P$ is enforced, while also minimizing the differences between $S$ and $S^\prime$; and (ii) highlighting the differences between the two solutions, with respect to the features of the objective function of the multi-agent system. Such explanations aim to help agents understanding why the initial solution is better in the context of the multi-agent system than what they expected. We have carried out a computational evaluation that shows that CMAoE can generate contrastive explanations for large multi-agent optimization problems. We have also performed an extensive user study in four different domains that shows that: (i) after being presented with these explanations, humans' satisfaction with the original solution increases; and (ii) the constrastive explanations generated by CMAoE are preferred or equally preferred by humans over the ones generated by state of the art approaches.
Fast Deterministic Black-box Context-free Grammar Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Black-box context-free grammar inference is a hard problem as in many practical settings it only has access to a limited number of example programs. The state-of-the-art approach Arvada heuristically generalizes grammar rules starting from flat parse trees and is non-deterministic to explore different generalization sequences. We observe that many of Arvada's generalization steps violate common language concept nesting rules. We thus propose to pre-structure input programs along these nesting rules, apply learnt rules recursively, and make black-box context-free grammar inference deterministic. The resulting TreeVada yielded faster runtime and higher-quality grammars in an empirical comparison. The TreeVada source code, scripts, evaluation parameters, and training data are open-source and publicly available (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23907738).
Size Lowerbounds for Deep Operator Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Operator Networks are an increasingly popular paradigm for solving regression in infinite dimensions and hence solve families of PDEs in one shot. In this work, we aim to establish a first-of-its-kind data-dependent lowerbound on the size of DeepONets required for them to be able to reduce empirical error on noisy data. In particular, we show that for low training errors to be obtained on $n$ data points it is necessary that the common output dimension of the branch and the trunk net be scaling as $Ω\left ( \sqrt[\leftroot{-1}\uproot{-1}4]{n} \right )$. This inspires our experiments with DeepONets solving the advection-diffusion-reaction PDE, where we demonstrate the possibility that at a fixed model size, to leverage increase in this common output dimension and get monotonic lowering of training error, the size of the training data might necessarily need to scale at least quadratically with it.
A User-centered Security Evaluation of Copilot
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Code generation tools driven by artificial intelligence have recently become more popular due to advancements in deep learning and natural language processing that have increased their capabilities. The proliferation of these tools may be a double-edged sword because while they can increase developer productivity by making it easier to write code, research has shown that they can also generate insecure code. In this paper, we perform a user-centered evaluation GitHub's Copilot to better understand its strengths and weaknesses with respect to code security. We conduct a user study where participants solve programming problems (with and without Copilot assistance) that have potentially vulnerable solutions. The main goal of the user study is to determine how the use of Copilot affects participants' security performance. In our set of participants (n=25), we find that access to Copilot accompanies a more secure solution when tackling harder problems. For the easier problem, we observe no effect of Copilot access on the security of solutions. We also observe no disproportionate impact of Copilot use on particular kinds of vulnerabilities. Our results indicate that there are potential security benefits to using Copilot, but more research is warranted on the effects of the use of code generation tools on technically complex problems with security requirements.
LadleNet: A Two-Stage UNet for Infrared Image to Visible Image Translation Guided by Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The translation of thermal infrared (TIR) images into visible light (VI) images plays a critical role in enhancing model performance and generalization capability, particularly in various fields such as registration and fusion of TIR and VI images. However, current research in this field faces challenges of insufficiently realistic image quality after translation and the difficulty of existing models in adapting to unseen scenarios. In order to develop a more generalizable image translation architecture, we conducted an analysis of existing translation architectures. By exploring the interpretability of intermediate modalities in existing translation architectures, we found that the intermediate modality in the image translation process for street scene images essentially performs semantic segmentation, distinguishing street images based on background and foreground patterns before assigning color information. Based on these principles, we propose an improved algorithm based on U-net called LadleNet. This network utilizes a two-stage U-net concatenation structure, consisting of Handle and Bowl modules. The Handle module is responsible for constructing an abstract semantic space, while the Bowl module decodes the semantic space to obtain the mapped VI image. Due to the characteristic of semantic segmentation, the Handle module has strong extensibility. Therefore, we also propose LadleNet+, which replaces the Handle module in LadleNet with a pre-trained DeepLabv3+ network, enabling the model to have a more powerful capability in constructing semantic space. The proposed methods were trained and tested on the KAIST dataset, followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis. Compared to existing methods, LadleNet and LadleNet+ achieved an average improvement of 12.4% and 15.2% in SSIM metrics, and 37.9% and 50.6% in MS-SSIM metrics, respectively.
TorchQL: A Programming Framework for Integrity Constraints in Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Finding errors in machine learning applications requires a thorough exploration of their behavior over data. Existing approaches used by practitioners are often ad-hoc and lack the abstractions needed to scale this process. We present TorchQL, a programming framework to evaluate and improve the correctness of machine learning applications. TorchQL allows users to write queries to specify and check integrity constraints over machine learning models and datasets. It seamlessly integrates relational algebra with functional programming to allow for highly expressive queries using only eight intuitive operators. We evaluate TorchQL on diverse use-cases including finding critical temporal inconsistencies in objects detected across video frames in autonomous driving, finding data imputation errors in time-series medical records, finding data labeling errors in real-world images, and evaluating biases and constraining outputs of language models. Our experiments show that TorchQL enables up to 13x faster query executions than baselines like Pandas and MongoDB, and up to 40% shorter queries than native Python. We also conduct a user study and find that TorchQL is natural enough for developers familiar with Python to specify complex integrity constraints.
Revocable Anonymous Credentials from Attribute-Based Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a credential verification protocol leveraging on Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption. The protocol supports anonymous proof of predicates and revocation through accumulators.