OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Survey on What Developers Think About Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers may not always engage as thoroughly with testing as they should. This observation aligns with the prevailing belief that developers simply do not like writing tests. In order to determine the truth of this belief, we conducted a comprehensive survey with 21 questions aimed at (1) assessing developers' current engagement with testing and (2) identifying factors influencing their inclination toward testing; that is, whether they would actually like to test more but are inhibited by their work environment, or whether they would really prefer to test even less if given the choice. Drawing on 284 responses from professional software developers, we uncover reasons that positively and negatively impact developers' motivation to test. Notably, reasons for motivation to write more tests encompass not only a general pursuit of software quality but also personal satisfaction. However, developers nevertheless perceive testing as mundane and tend to prioritize other tasks. One approach emerging from the responses to mitigate these negative factors is by providing better recognition for developers' testing efforts.
Spatial-temporal Vehicle Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Vehicle re-identification (ReID) in a large-scale camera network is important in public safety, traffic control, and security. However, due to the appearance ambiguities of vehicle, the previous appearance-based ReID methods often fail to track vehicle across multiple cameras. To overcome the challenge, we propose a spatial-temporal vehicle ReID framework that estimates reliable camera network topology based on the adaptive Parzen window method and optimally combines the appearance and spatial-temporal similarities through the fusion network. Based on the proposed methods, we performed superior performance on the public dataset (VeRi776) by 99.64% of rank-1 accuracy. The experimental results support that utilizing spatial and temporal information for ReID can leverage the accuracy of appearance-based methods and effectively deal with appearance ambiguities.
End-to-End Learning on Multimodal Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge graphs enable data scientists to learn end-to-end on heterogeneous knowledge. However, most end-to-end models solely learn from the relational information encoded in graphs' structure: raw values, encoded as literal nodes, are either omitted completely or treated as regular nodes without consideration for their values. In either case we lose potentially relevant information which could have otherwise been exploited by our learning methods. We propose a multimodal message passing network which not only learns end-to-end from the structure of graphs, but also from their possibly divers set of multimodal node features. Our model uses dedicated (neural) encoders to naturally learn embeddings for node features belonging to five different types of modalities, including numbers, texts, dates, images and geometries, which are projected into a joint representation space together with their relational information. We implement and demonstrate our model on node classification and link prediction for artificial and real-worlds datasets, and evaluate the effect that each modality has on the overall performance in an inverse ablation study. Our results indicate that end-to-end multimodal learning from any arbitrary knowledge graph is indeed possible, and that including multimodal information can significantly affect performance, but that much depends on the characteristics of the data.
Zero Trust Real-Time Lightweight Access Control Protocol for Mobile Cloud-Based IoT Sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In IoT, smart sensors enable data collection, real-time monitoring, decision-making, and automation, but their proliferation exposes them to cybersecurity threats. Zero Trust Architecture enhances IoT security by challenging conventional trust models and emphasizing continuous trust verification in the overall \$875.0 billion IoT market projected by 2025. This paper presents a new zero-trust real-time lightweight access control protocol for Cloud-centric dynamic IoT sensor networks. This protocol empowers data owners, referred to as sensor coordinators, to define intricate access policies, blending recipient identifiers and data-related attributes for data encryption. Additionally, the protocol incorporates efficient cryptographic primitives, eliminating the need for reliance on a trusted party. Furthermore, it ensures real-time data access while preserving data confidentiality and user privacy through seamless data upload to the cloud and the offloading of computationally intensive tasks from resource-constrained data owners and sensors. The protocol utilizes Merkle Trees for lightweight, ongoing trust measurement of sensors, ensuring efficient trust assessment by sensor coordinators. Simultaneously, the cloud conducts thorough trust evaluations for network entities including users. Comprehensive security analysis and performance evaluation highlight the protocol's effectiveness in tackling the multifaceted security challenges of IoT ecosystems while ensuring scalability and high availability.
An FPGA smart camera implementation of segmentation models for drone wildfire imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Wildfires represent one of the most relevant natural disasters worldwide, due to their impact on various societal and environmental levels. Thus, a significant amount of research has been carried out to investigate and apply computer vision techniques to address this problem. One of the most promising approaches for wildfire fighting is the use of drones equipped with visible and infrared cameras for the detection, monitoring, and fire spread assessment in a remote manner but in close proximity to the affected areas. However, implementing effective computer vision algorithms on board is often prohibitive since deploying full-precision deep learning models running on GPU is not a viable option, due to their high power consumption and the limited payload a drone can handle. Thus, in this work, we posit that smart cameras, based on low-power consumption field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), in tandem with binarized neural networks (BNNs), represent a cost-effective alternative for implementing onboard computing on the edge. Herein we present the implementation of a segmentation model applied to the Corsican Fire Database. We optimized an existing U-Net model for such a task and ported the model to an edge device (a Xilinx Ultra96-v2 FPGA). By pruning and quantizing the original model, we reduce the number of parameters by 90%. Furthermore, additional optimizations enabled us to increase the throughput of the original model from 8 frames per second (FPS) to 33.63 FPS without loss in the segmentation performance: our model obtained 0.912 in Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC),0.915 in F1 score and 0.870 in Hafiane quality index (HAF), and comparable qualitative segmentation results when contrasted to the original full-precision model. The final model was integrated into a low-cost FPGA, which was used to implement a neural network accelerator.
In-processing User Constrained Dominant Sets for User-Oriented Fairness in Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Recommender systems are typically biased toward a small group of users, leading to severe unfairness in recommendation performance, i.e., User-Oriented Fairness (UOF) issue. The existing research on UOF is limited and fails to deal with the root cause of the UOF issue: the learning process between advantaged and disadvantaged users is unfair. To tackle this issue, we propose an In-processing User Constrained Dominant Sets (In-UCDS) framework, which is a general framework that can be applied to any backbone recommendation model to achieve user-oriented fairness. We split In-UCDS into two stages, i.e., the UCDS modeling stage and the in-processing training stage. In the UCDS modeling stage, for each disadvantaged user, we extract a constrained dominant set (a user cluster) containing some advantaged users that are similar to it. In the in-processing training stage, we move the representations of disadvantaged users closer to their corresponding cluster by calculating a fairness loss. By combining the fairness loss with the original backbone model loss, we address the UOF issue and maintain the overall recommendation performance simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that In-UCDS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, leading to a fairer model with better overall recommendation performance.
Self-driven Grounding: Large Language Model Agents with Automatical Language-aligned Skill Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) show their powerful automatic reasoning and planning capability with a wealth of semantic knowledge about the human world. However, the grounding problem still hinders the applications of LLMs in the real-world environment. Existing studies try to fine-tune the LLM or utilize pre-defined behavior APIs to bridge the LLMs and the environment, which not only costs huge human efforts to customize for every single task but also weakens the generality strengths of LLMs. To autonomously ground the LLM onto the environment, we proposed the Self-Driven Grounding (SDG) framework to automatically and progressively ground the LLM with self-driven skill learning. SDG first employs the LLM to propose the hypothesis of sub-goals to achieve tasks and then verify the feasibility of the hypothesis via interacting with the underlying environment. Once verified, SDG can then learn generalized skills with the guidance of these successfully grounded subgoals. These skills can be further utilized to accomplish more complex tasks which fail to pass the verification phase. Verified in the famous instruction following task set-BabyAI, SDG achieves comparable performance in the most challenging tasks compared with imitation learning methods that cost millions of demonstrations, proving the effectiveness of learned skills and showing the feasibility and efficiency of our framework.
Objcache: An Elastic Filesystem over External Persistent Storage for Container Clusters
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Container virtualization enables emerging AI workloads such as model serving, highly parallelized training, machine learning pipelines, and so on, to be easily scaled on demand on the elastic cloud infrastructure. Particularly, AI workloads require persistent storage to store data such as training inputs, models, and checkpoints. An external storage system like cloud object storage is a common choice because of its elasticity and scalability. To mitigate access latency to external storage, caching at a local filesystem is an essential technique. However, building local caches on scaling clusters must cope with explosive disk usage, redundant networking, and unexpected failures. We propose objcache, an elastic filesystem over external storage. Objcache introduces an internal transaction protocol over Raft logging to enable atomic updates of distributed persistent states with consistent hashing. The proposed transaction protocol can also manage inode dirtiness by maintaining the consistency between the local cache and external storage. Objcache supports scaling down to zero by automatically evicting dirty files to external storage. Our evaluation reports that objcache speeded up model serving startup by 98.9% compared to direct copies via S3 interfaces. Scaling up with dirty files completed from 2 to 14 seconds with 1024 dirty files.
Recognition of Heat-Induced Food State Changes by Time-Series Use of Vision-Language Model for Cooking Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Cooking tasks are characterized by large changes in the state of the food, which is one of the major challenges in robot execution of cooking tasks. In particular, cooking using a stove to apply heat to the foodstuff causes many special state changes that are not seen in other tasks, making it difficult to design a recognizer. In this study, we propose a unified method for recognizing changes in the cooking state of robots by using the vision-language model that can discriminate open-vocabulary objects in a time-series manner. We collected data on four typical state changes in cooking using a real robot and confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method. We also compared the conditions and discussed the types of natural language prompts and the image regions that are suitable for recognizing the state changes.
Incorporating Data Dependencies and Properties in Difference Verification with Conditions (Technical Report)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Software changes frequently. To efficiently deal with such frequent changes, software verification tools must be incremental. Most of today's approaches for incremental verification consider one specific verification approach. One exception is difference verification with conditions recently proposed by Beyer et al. Its underlying idea is to determine an overapproximation of those modified execution paths that may cause a new property violation, which does not exist in the unchanged program, encode the determined paths into a condition, and use the condition to restrict the verification to the analysis of those determined paths. To determine the overapproximation, Beyer et al. propose a syntax-based difference detector that adds any syntactical path of the modified program that does not exist in the original program into the overapproximation. This paper provides a second difference detector diffDP, which computes a more precise overapproximation by taking data dependencies and program properties into account when determining the overapproximation of those modified execution paths that may cause a new property violation. Our evaluation indeed shows that our more precise difference detector improves the effectiveness and efficiency of difference verification with condition on several tasks.
DeViL: Decoding Vision features into Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Post-hoc explanation methods have often been criticised for abstracting away the decision-making process of deep neural networks. In this work, we would like to provide natural language descriptions for what different layers of a vision backbone have learned. Our DeViL method decodes vision features into language, not only highlighting the attribution locations but also generating textual descriptions of visual features at different layers of the network. We train a transformer network to translate individual image features of any vision layer into a prompt that a separate off-the-shelf language model decodes into natural language. By employing dropout both per-layer and per-spatial-location, our model can generalize training on image-text pairs to generate localized explanations. As it uses a pre-trained language model, our approach is fast to train, can be applied to any vision backbone, and produces textual descriptions at different layers of the vision network. Moreover, DeViL can create open-vocabulary attribution maps corresponding to words or phrases even outside the training scope of the vision model. We demonstrate that DeViL generates textual descriptions relevant to the image content on CC3M surpassing previous lightweight captioning models and attribution maps uncovering the learned concepts of the vision backbone. Finally, we show DeViL also outperforms the current state-of-the-art on the neuron-wise descriptions of the MILANNOTATIONS dataset. Code available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/DeViL
Building Footprint Extraction in Dense Areas using Super Resolution and Frame Field Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Despite notable results on standard aerial datasets, current state-of-the-arts fail to produce accurate building footprints in dense areas due to challenging properties posed by these areas and limited data availability. In this paper, we propose a framework to address such issues in polygonal building extraction. First, super resolution is employed to enhance the spatial resolution of aerial image, allowing for finer details to be captured. This enhanced imagery serves as input to a multitask learning module, which consists of a segmentation head and a frame field learning head to effectively handle the irregular building structures. Our model is supervised by adaptive loss weighting, enabling extraction of sharp edges and fine-grained polygons which is difficult due to overlapping buildings and low data quality. Extensive experiments on a slum area in India that mimics a dense area demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
SAF-IS: a Spatial Annotation Free Framework for Instance Segmentation of Surgical Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Instance segmentation of surgical instruments is a long-standing research problem, crucial for the development of many applications for computer-assisted surgery. This problem is commonly tackled via fully-supervised training of deep learning models, requiring expensive pixel-level annotations to train. In this work, we develop a framework for instance segmentation not relying on spatial annotations for training. Instead, our solution only requires binary tool masks, obtainable using recent unsupervised approaches, and binary tool presence labels, freely obtainable in robot-assisted surgery. Based on the binary mask information, our solution learns to extract individual tool instances from single frames, and to encode each instance into a compact vector representation, capturing its semantic features. Such representations guide the automatic selection of a tiny number of instances (8 only in our experiments), displayed to a human operator for tool-type labelling. The gathered information is finally used to match each training instance with a binary tool presence label, providing an effective supervision signal to train a tool instance classifier. We validate our framework on the EndoVis 2017 and 2018 segmentation datasets. We provide results using binary masks obtained either by manual annotation or as predictions of an unsupervised binary segmentation model. The latter solution yields an instance segmentation approach completely free from spatial annotations, outperforming several state-of-the-art fully-supervised segmentation approaches.
ADC/DAC-Free Analog Acceleration of Deep Neural Networks with Frequency Transformation
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

The edge processing of deep neural networks (DNNs) is becoming increasingly important due to its ability to extract valuable information directly at the data source to minimize latency and energy consumption. Frequency-domain model compression, such as with the Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT), has been identified as an efficient alternative. However, the benefits of frequency-domain processing are often offset by the increased multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations required. This paper proposes a novel approach to an energy-efficient acceleration of frequency-domain neural networks by utilizing analog-domain frequency-based tensor transformations. Our approach offers unique opportunities to enhance computational efficiency, resulting in several high-level advantages, including array micro-architecture with parallelism, ADC/DAC-free analog computations, and increased output sparsity. Our approach achieves more compact cells by eliminating the need for trainable parameters in the transformation matrix. Moreover, our novel array micro-architecture enables adaptive stitching of cells column-wise and row-wise, thereby facilitating perfect parallelism in computations. Additionally, our scheme enables ADC/DAC-free computations by training against highly quantized matrix-vector products, leveraging the parameter-free nature of matrix multiplications. Another crucial aspect of our design is its ability to handle signed-bit processing for frequency-based transformations. This leads to increased output sparsity and reduced digitization workload. On a 16$\times$16 crossbars, for 8-bit input processing, the proposed approach achieves the energy efficiency of 1602 tera operations per second per Watt (TOPS/W) without early termination strategy and 5311 TOPS/W with early termination strategy at VDD = 0.8 V.
3D View Prediction Models of the Dorsal Visual Stream
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural network representations align well with brain activity in the ventral visual stream. However, the primate visual system has a distinct dorsal processing stream with different functional properties. To test if a model trained to perceive 3D scene geometry aligns better with neural responses in dorsal visual areas, we trained a self-supervised geometry-aware recurrent neural network (GRNN) to predict novel camera views using a 3D feature memory. We compared GRNN to self-supervised baseline models that have been shown to align well with ventral regions using the large-scale fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD). We found that while the baseline models accounted better for ventral brain regions, GRNN accounted for a greater proportion of variance in dorsal brain regions. Our findings demonstrate the potential for using task-relevant models to probe representational differences across visual streams.
Composite federated learning with heterogeneous data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a novel algorithm for solving the composite Federated Learning (FL) problem. This algorithm manages non-smooth regularization by strategically decoupling the proximal operator and communication, and addresses client drift without any assumptions about data similarity. Moreover, each worker uses local updates to reduce the communication frequency with the server and transmits only a $d$-dimensional vector per communication round. We prove that our algorithm converges linearly to a neighborhood of the optimal solution and demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over state-of-the-art methods in numerical experiments.
Instant Continual Learning of Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have emerged as an effective method for novel-view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction. However, conventional training methods require access to all training views during scene optimization. This assumption may be prohibitive in continual learning scenarios, where new data is acquired in a sequential manner and a continuous update of the NeRF is desired, as in automotive or remote sensing applications. When naively trained in such a continual setting, traditional scene representation frameworks suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where previously learned knowledge is corrupted after training on new data. Prior works in alleviating forgetting with NeRFs suffer from low reconstruction quality and high latency, making them impractical for real-world application. We propose a continual learning framework for training NeRFs that leverages replay-based methods combined with a hybrid explicit--implicit scene representation. Our method outperforms previous methods in reconstruction quality when trained in a continual setting, while having the additional benefit of being an order of magnitude faster.