OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Point-supervised Brain Tumor Segmentation with Box-prompted MedSAM
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Delineating lesions and anatomical structure is important for image-guided interventions. Point-supervised medical image segmentation (PSS) has great potential to alleviate costly expert delineation labeling. However, due to the lack of precise size and boundary guidance, the effectiveness of PSS often falls short of expectations. Although recent vision foundational models, such as the medical segment anything model (MedSAM), have made significant advancements in bounding-box-prompted segmentation, it is not straightforward to utilize point annotation, and is prone to semantic ambiguity. In this preliminary study, we introduce an iterative framework to facilitate semantic-aware point-supervised MedSAM. Specifically, the semantic box-prompt generator (SBPG) module has the capacity to convert the point input into potential pseudo bounding box suggestions, which are explicitly refined by the prototype-based semantic similarity. This is then succeeded by a prompt-guided spatial refinement (PGSR) module that harnesses the exceptional generalizability of MedSAM to infer the segmentation mask, which also updates the box proposal seed in SBPG. Performance can be progressively improved with adequate iterations. We conducted an evaluation on BraTS2018 for the segmentation of whole brain tumors and demonstrated its superior performance compared to traditional PSS methods and on par with box-supervised methods.
Litmus: Fair Pricing for Serverless Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Serverless computing has emerged as a market-dominant paradigm in modern cloud computing, benefiting both cloud providers and tenants. While service providers can optimize their machine utilization, tenants only need to pay for the resources they use. To maximize resource utilization, these serverless systems co-run numerous short-lived functions, bearing frequent system condition shifts. When the system gets overcrowded, a tenant's function may suffer from disturbing slowdowns. Ironically, tenants also incur higher costs during these slowdowns, as commercial serverless platforms determine costs proportional to their execution times. This paper argues that cloud providers should compensate tenants for losses incurred when the server is over-provisioned. However, estimating tenants' losses is challenging without pre-profiled information about their functions. Prior studies have indicated that assessing tenant losses leads to heavy overheads. As a solution, this paper introduces a new pricing model that offers discounts based on the machine's state while presuming the tenant's loss under that state. To monitor the machine state accurately, Litmus pricing frequently conducts Litmus tests, an effective and lightweight solution for measuring system congestion. Our experiments show that Litmus pricing can accurately gauge the impact of system congestion and offer nearly ideal prices, with only a 0.2% price difference on average, in a heavily congested system.
DynamoLLM: Designing LLM Inference Clusters for Performance and Energy Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid evolution and widespread adoption of generative large language models (LLMs) have made them a pivotal workload in various applications. Today, LLM inference clusters receive a large number of queries with strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs). To achieve the desired performance, these models execute on power-hungry GPUs causing the inference clusters to consume large amount of energy and, consequently, result in excessive carbon emissions. Fortunately, we find that there is a great opportunity to exploit the heterogeneity in inference compute properties and fluctuations in inference workloads, to significantly improve energy-efficiency. However, such a diverse and dynamic environment creates a large search-space where different system configurations (e.g., number of instances, model parallelism, and GPU frequency) translate into different energy-performance trade-offs. To address these challenges, we propose DynamoLLM, the first energy-management framework for LLM inference environments. DynamoLLM automatically and dynamically reconfigures the inference cluster to optimize for energy and cost of LLM serving under the service's performance SLOs. We show that at a service-level, DynamoLLM conserves 53% energy and 38% operational carbon emissions, and reduces 61% cost to the customer, while meeting the latency SLOs.
Quantification and Validation for Degree of Understanding in M2M Semantic Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, network communications based on the Shannon-Nyquist theorem gradually reveal their limitations due to the neglect of semantic information in the transmitted content. Semantic communication (SemCom) provides a solution for extracting information meanings from the transmitted content. The semantic information can be successfully interpreted by a receiver with the help of a shared knowledge base (KB). This paper proposes a two-stage hierarchical qualification and validation model for natural language-based machine-to-machine (M2M) SemCom. The approach can be applied in various applications, such as autonomous driving and edge computing. In the proposed model, we quantitatively measure the degree of understanding (DoU) between two communication parties at the word and sentence levels. The DoU is validated and ensured at each level before moving to the next step. The model's effectiveness is verified through a series of experiments, and the results show that the quantification and validation method proposed in this paper can significantly improve the DoU of inter-machine SemCom.
Comparing Optical Flow and Deep Learning to Enable Computationally Efficient Traffic Event Detection with Space-Filling Curves
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Gathering data and identifying events in various traffic situations remains an essential challenge for the systematic evaluation of a perception system's performance. Analyzing large-scale, typically unstructured, multi-modal, time series data obtained from video, radar, and LiDAR is computationally demanding, particularly when meta-information or annotations are missing. We compare Optical Flow (OF) and Deep Learning (DL) to feed computationally efficient event detection via space-filling curves on video data from a forward-facing, in-vehicle camera. Our first approach leverages unexpected disturbances in the OF field from vehicle surroundings; the second approach is a DL model trained on human visual attention to predict a driver's gaze to spot potential event locations. We feed these results to a space-filling curve to reduce dimensionality and achieve computationally efficient event retrieval. We systematically evaluate our concept by obtaining characteristic patterns for both approaches from a large-scale virtual dataset (SMIRK) and applied our findings to the Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD), a large multi-modal, real-world dataset, collected over two years in 14 different European countries. Our results yield that the OF approach excels in specificity and reduces false positives, while the DL approach demonstrates superior sensitivity. Both approaches offer comparable processing speed, making them suitable for real-time applications.
Decoding AI and Human Authorship: Nuances Revealed Through NLP and Statistical Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

This research explores the nuanced differences in texts produced by AI and those written by humans, aiming to elucidate how language is expressed differently by AI and humans. Through comprehensive statistical data analysis, the study investigates various linguistic traits, patterns of creativity, and potential biases inherent in human-written and AI- generated texts. The significance of this research lies in its contribution to understanding AI's creative capabilities and its impact on literature, communication, and societal frameworks. By examining a meticulously curated dataset comprising 500K essays spanning diverse topics and genres, generated by LLMs, or written by humans, the study uncovers the deeper layers of linguistic expression and provides insights into the cognitive processes underlying both AI and human-driven textual compositions. The analysis revealed that human-authored essays tend to have a higher total word count on average than AI-generated essays but have a shorter average word length compared to AI- generated essays, and while both groups exhibit high levels of fluency, the vocabulary diversity of Human authored content is higher than AI generated content. However, AI- generated essays show a slightly higher level of novelty, suggesting the potential for generating more original content through AI systems. The paper addresses challenges in assessing the language generation capabilities of AI models and emphasizes the importance of datasets that reflect the complexities of human-AI collaborative writing. Through systematic preprocessing and rigorous statistical analysis, this study offers valuable insights into the evolving landscape of AI-generated content and informs future developments in natural language processing (NLP).
Fuzzy Logic Approach For Visual Analysis Of Websites With K-means Clustering-based Color Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Websites form the foundation of the Internet, serving as platforms for disseminating information and accessing digital resources. They allow users to engage with a wide range of content and services, enhancing the Internet's utility for all. The aesthetics of a website play a crucial role in its overall effectiveness and can significantly impact user experience, engagement, and satisfaction. This paper examines the importance of website design aesthetics in enhancing user experience, given the increasing number of internet users worldwide. It emphasizes the significant impact of first impressions, often formed within 50 milliseconds, on users' perceptions of a website's appeal and usability. We introduce a novel method for measuring website aesthetics based on color harmony and font popularity, using fuzzy logic to predict aesthetic preferences. We collected our own dataset, consisting of nearly 200 popular and frequently used website designs, to ensure relevance and adaptability to the dynamic nature of web design trends. Dominant colors from website screenshots were extracted using k-means clustering. The findings aim to improve understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and usability in website design.
Frontend Diffusion: Exploring Intent-Based User Interfaces through Abstract-to-Detailed Task Transitions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The emergence of Generative AI is catalyzing a paradigm shift in user interfaces from command-based to intent-based outcome specification. In this paper, we explore abstract-to-detailed task transitions in the context of frontend code generation as a step towards intent-based user interfaces, aiming to bridge the gap between abstract user intentions and concrete implementations. We introduce Frontend Diffusion, an end-to-end LLM-powered tool that generates high-quality websites from user sketches. The system employs a three-stage task transition process: sketching, writing, and coding. We demonstrate the potential of task transitions to reduce human intervention and communication costs in complex tasks. Our work also opens avenues for exploring similar approaches in other domains, potentially extending to more complex, interdependent tasks such as video production.
Learning Structurally Stabilized Representations for Multi-modal Lossless DNA Storage
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present Reed-Solomon coded single-stranded representation learning (RSRL), a novel end-to-end model for learning representations for multi-modal lossless DNA storage. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, the proposed RSRL is inspired by both error-correction codec and structural biology. Specifically, RSRL first learns the representations for the subsequent storage from the binary data transformed by the Reed-Solomon codec. Then, the representations are masked by an RS-code-informed mask to focus on correcting the burst errors occurring in the learning process. With the decoded representations with error corrections, a novel biologically stabilized loss is formulated to regularize the data representations to possess stable single-stranded structures. By incorporating these novel strategies, the proposed RSRL can learn highly durable, dense, and lossless representations for the subsequent storage tasks into DNA sequences. The proposed RSRL has been compared with a number of strong baselines in real-world tasks of multi-modal data storage. The experimental results obtained demonstrate that RSRL can store diverse types of data with much higher information density and durability but much lower error rates.
Data-driven Verification of DNNs for Object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The paper proposes a new testing approach for Deep Neural Networks (DNN) using gradient-free optimization to find perturbation chains that successfully falsify the tested DNN, going beyond existing grid-based or combinatorial testing. Applying it to an image segmentation task of detecting railway tracks in images, we demonstrate that the approach can successfully identify weaknesses of the tested DNN regarding particular combinations of common perturbations (e.g., rain, fog, blur, noise) on specific clusters of test images.
CCSRP: Robust Pruning of Spiking Neural Networks through Cooperative Coevolution
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have shown promise in various dynamic visual tasks, yet those ready for practical deployment often lack the compactness and robustness essential in resource-limited and safety-critical settings. Prior research has predominantly concentrated on enhancing the compactness or robustness of artificial neural networks through strategies like network pruning and adversarial training, with little exploration into similar methodologies for SNNs. Robust pruning of SNNs aims to reduce computational overhead while preserving both accuracy and robustness. Current robust pruning approaches generally necessitate expert knowledge and iterative experimentation to establish suitable pruning criteria or auxiliary modules, thus constraining their broader application. Concurrently, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been employed to automate the pruning of artificial neural networks, delivering remarkable outcomes yet overlooking the aspect of robustness. In this work, we propose CCSRP, an innovative robust pruning method for SNNs, underpinned by cooperative co-evolution. Robust pruning is articulated as a tri-objective optimization challenge, striving to balance accuracy, robustness, and compactness concurrently, resolved through a cooperative co-evolutionary pruning framework that independently prunes filters across layers using EAs. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and SVHN demonstrate that CCSRP can match or exceed the performance of the latest methodologies.
A Comprehensive Survey on Root Cause Analysis in (Micro) Services: Methodologies, Challenges, and Trends
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The complex dependencies and propagative faults inherent in microservices, characterized by a dense network of interconnected services, pose significant challenges in identifying the underlying causes of issues. Prompt identification and resolution of disruptive problems are crucial to ensure rapid recovery and maintain system stability. Numerous methodologies have emerged to address this challenge, primarily focusing on diagnosing failures through symptomatic data. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive, structured review of root cause analysis (RCA) techniques within microservices, exploring methodologies that include metrics, traces, logs, and multi-model data. It delves deeper into the methodologies, challenges, and future trends within microservices architectures. Positioned at the forefront of AI and automation advancements, it offers guidance for future research directions.
An FDA for AI? Pitfalls and Plausibility of Approval Regulation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Observers and practitioners of artificial intelligence (AI) have proposed an FDA-style licensing regime for the most advanced AI models, or 'frontier' models. In this paper, we explore the applicability of approval regulation -- that is, regulation of a product that combines experimental minima with government licensure conditioned partially or fully upon that experimentation -- to the regulation of frontier AI. There are a number of reasons to believe that approval regulation, simplistically applied, would be inapposite for frontier AI risks. Domains of weak fit include the difficulty of defining the regulated product, the presence of Knightian uncertainty or deep ambiguity about harms from AI, the potentially transmissible nature of risks, and distributed activities among actors involved in the AI lifecycle. We conclude by highlighting the role of policy learning and experimentation in regulatory development, describing how learning from other forms of AI regulation and improvements in evaluation and testing methods can help to overcome some of the challenges we identify.
Multi-Aspect Reviewed-Item Retrieval via LLM Query Decomposition and Aspect Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

While user-generated product reviews often contain large quantities of information, their utility in addressing natural language product queries has been limited, with a key challenge being the need to aggregate information from multiple low-level sources (reviews) to a higher item level during retrieval. Existing methods for reviewed-item retrieval (RIR) typically take a late fusion (LF) approach which computes query-item scores by simply averaging the top-K query-review similarity scores for an item. However, we demonstrate that for multi-aspect queries and multi-aspect items, LF is highly sensitive to the distribution of aspects covered by reviews in terms of aspect frequency and the degree of aspect separation across reviews. To address these LF failures, we propose several novel aspect fusion (AF) strategies which include Large Language Model (LLM) query extraction and generative reranking. Our experiments show that for imbalanced review corpora, AF can improve over LF by a MAP@10 increase from 0.36 to 0.52, while achieving equivalent performance for balanced review corpora.
Annotator in the Loop: A Case Study of In-Depth Rater Engagement to Create a Bridging Benchmark Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

With the growing prevalence of large language models, it is increasingly common to annotate datasets for machine learning using pools of crowd raters. However, these raters often work in isolation as individual crowdworkers. In this work, we regard annotation not merely as inexpensive, scalable labor, but rather as a nuanced interpretative effort to discern the meaning of what is being said in a text. We describe a novel, collaborative, and iterative annotator-in-the-loop methodology for annotation, resulting in a 'Bridging Benchmark Dataset' of comments relevant to bridging divides, annotated from 11,973 textual posts in the Civil Comments dataset. The methodology differs from popular anonymous crowd-rating annotation processes due to its use of an in-depth, iterative engagement with seven US-based raters to (1) collaboratively refine the definitions of the to-be-annotated concepts and then (2) iteratively annotate complex social concepts, with check-in meetings and discussions. This approach addresses some shortcomings of current anonymous crowd-based annotation work, and we present empirical evidence of the performance of our annotation process in the form of inter-rater reliability. Our findings indicate that collaborative engagement with annotators can enhance annotation methods, as opposed to relying solely on isolated work conducted remotely. We provide an overview of the input texts, attributes, and annotation process, along with the empirical results and the resulting benchmark dataset, categorized according to the following attributes: Alienation, Compassion, Reasoning, Curiosity, Moral Outrage, and Respect.
Benchmarking Attacks on Learning with Errors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Lattice cryptography schemes based on the learning with errors (LWE) hardness assumption have been standardized by NIST for use as post-quantum cryptosystems, and by HomomorphicEncryption.org for encrypted compute on sensitive data. Thus, understanding their concrete security is critical. Most work on LWE security focuses on theoretical estimates of attack performance, which is important but may overlook attack nuances arising in real-world implementations. The sole existing concrete benchmarking effort, the Darmstadt Lattice Challenge, does not include benchmarks relevant to the standardized LWE parameter choices - such as small secret and small error distributions, and Ring-LWE (RLWE) and Module-LWE (MLWE) variants. To improve our understanding of concrete LWE security, we provide the first benchmarks for LWE secret recovery on standardized parameters, for small and low-weight (sparse) secrets. We evaluate four LWE attacks in these settings to serve as a baseline: the Search-LWE attacks uSVP, SALSA, and Cool & Cruel, and the Decision-LWE attack: Dual Hybrid Meet-in-the-Middle (MitM). We extend the SALSA and Cool & Cruel attacks in significant ways, and implement and scale up MitM attacks for the first time. For example, we recover hamming weight $9-11$ binomial secrets for KYBER ($κ=2$) parameters in $28-36$ hours with SALSA and Cool\&Cruel, while we find that MitM can solve Decision-LWE instances for hamming weights up to $4$ in under an hour for Kyber parameters, while uSVP attacks do not recover any secrets after running for more than $1100$ hours. We also compare concrete performance against theoretical estimates. Finally, we open source the code to enable future research.
Expressive MIDI-format Piano Performance Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This work presents a generative neural network that's able to generate expressive piano performance in MIDI format. The musical expressivity is reflected by vivid micro-timing, rich polyphonic texture, varied dynamics, and the sustain pedal effects. This model is innovative from many aspects of data processing to neural network design. We claim that this symbolic music generation model overcame the common critics of symbolic music and is able to generate expressive music flows as good as, if not better than generations with raw audio. One drawback is that, due to the limited time for submission, the model is not fine-tuned and sufficiently trained, thus the generation may sound incoherent and random at certain points. Despite that, this model shows its powerful generative ability to generate expressive piano pieces.