OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Evaluating Loss Functions and Learning Data Pre-Processing for Climate Downscaling Deep Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning models have gained popularity in climate science, following their success in computer vision and other domains. For instance, researchers are increasingly employing deep learning techniques for downscaling climate data, drawing inspiration from image super-resolution models. However, there are notable differences between image data and climate data. While image data typically falls within a specific range (e.g., [0, 255]) and exhibits a relatively uniform or normal distribution, climate data can possess arbitrary value ranges and highly uneven distributions, such as precipitation data. This non-uniform distribution presents challenges when attempting to directly apply existing computer vision models to climate science tasks. Few studies have addressed this issue thus far. In this study, we explore the effects of loss functions and non-linear data pre-processing methods for deep learning models in the context of climate downscaling. We employ a climate downscaling experiment as an example to evaluate these factors. Our findings reveal that L1 loss and L2 loss perform similarly on some more balanced data like temperature data while for some imbalanced data like precipitation data, L2 loss performs significantly better than L1 loss. Additionally, we propose an approach to automatically learn the non-linear pre-processing function, which further enhances model accuracy and achieves the best results.
ETL for the integration of remote sensing data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Modern in-orbit satellites and other available remote sensing tools have generated a huge availability of public data waiting to be exploited in different formats hosted on different servers. In this context, ETL formalism becomes relevant for the integration and analysis of the combined information from all these sources. Throughout this work, we present the theoretical and practical foundations to build a modular analysis infrastructure that allows the creation of ETLs to download, transform and integrate data coming from different instruments in different formats. Part of this work is already implemented in a Python library which is intended to be integrated into already available workflow management tools based on acyclic-directed graphs which also have different adapters to impact the combined data in different warehouses.
New Cross-Core Cache-Agnostic and Prefetcher-based Side-Channels and Covert-Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we reveal the existence of a new class of prefetcher, the XPT prefetcher, in the modern Intel processors which has never been officially documented. It speculatively issues a load, bypassing last-level cache (LLC) lookups, when it predicts that a load request will result in an LLC miss. We demonstrate that XPT prefetcher is shared among different cores, which enables an attacker to build cross-core side-channel and covert-channel attacks. We propose PrefetchX, a cross-core attack mechanism, to leak users' sensitive data and activities. We empirically demonstrate that PrefetchX can be used to extract private keys of real-world RSA applications. Furthermore, we show that PrefetchX can enable side-channel attacks that can monitor keystrokes and network traffic patterns of users. Our two cross-core covert-channel attacks also see a low error rate and a 1.7MB/s maximum channel capacity. Due to the cache-independent feature of PrefetchX, current cache-based mitigations are not effective against our attacks. Overall, our work uncovers a significant vulnerability in the XPT prefetcher, which can be exploited to compromise the confidentiality of sensitive information in both crypto and non-crypto-related applications among processor cores.
CoNi-MPC: Cooperative Non-inertial Frame Based Model Predictive Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a novel solution for UAV control in cooperative multi-robot systems, which can be used in various scenarios such as leader-following, landing on a moving base, or specific relative motion with a target. Unlike classical methods that tackle UAV control in the world frame, we directly control the UAV in the target coordinate frame, without making motion assumptions about the target. In detail, we formulate a non-linear model predictive controller of a UAV, referred to as the agent, within a non-inertial frame (i.e., the target frame). The system requires the relative states (pose and velocity), the angular velocity and the accelerations of the target, which can be obtained by relative localization methods and ubiquitous MEMS IMU sensors, respectively. This framework eliminates dependencies that are vital in classical solutions, such as accurate state estimation for both the agent and target, prior knowledge of the target motion model, and continuous trajectory re-planning for some complex tasks. We have performed extensive simulations to investigate the control performance with varying motion characteristics of the target. Furthermore, we conducted real robot experiments, employing either simulated relative pose estimation from motion capture systems indoors or directly from our previous relative pose estimation devices outdoors, to validate the applicability and feasibility of the proposed approach.
LightRidge: An End-to-end Agile Design Framework for Diffractive Optical Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

To lower the barrier to diffractive optical neural networks (DONNs) design, exploration, and deployment, we propose LightRidge, the first end-to-end optical ML compilation framework, which consists of (1) precise and differentiable optical physics kernels that enable complete explorations of DONNs architectures, (2) optical physics computation kernel acceleration that significantly reduces the runtime cost in training, emulation, and deployment of DONNs, and (3) versatile and flexible optical system modeling and user-friendly domain-specific-language (DSL). As a result, LightRidge framework enables efficient end-to-end design and deployment of DONNs, and significantly reduces the efforts for programming, hardware-software codesign, and chip integration. Our results are experimentally conducted with physical optical systems, where we demonstrate: (1) the optical physics kernels precisely correlated to low-level physics and systems, (2) significant speedups in runtime with physics-aware emulation workloads compared to the state-of-the-art commercial system, (3) effective architectural design space exploration verified by the hardware prototype and on-chip integration case study, and (4) novel DONN design principles including successful demonstrations of advanced image classification and image segmentation task using DONNs architecture and topology.
Multi-Scale Occ: 4th Place Solution for CVPR 2023 3D Occupancy Prediction Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this report, we present the 4th place solution for CVPR 2023 3D occupancy prediction challenge. We propose a simple method called Multi-Scale Occ for occupancy prediction based on lift-splat-shoot framework, which introduces multi-scale image features for generating better multi-scale 3D voxel features with temporal fusion of multiple past frames. Post-processing including model ensemble, test-time augmentation, and class-wise thresh are adopted to further boost the final performance. As shown on the leaderboard, our proposed occupancy prediction method ranks the 4th place with 49.36 mIoU.
New Binary Self-Dual Cyclic Codes with Square-Root-Like Minimum Distances
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The construction of self-dual codes over small fields such that their minimum distances are as large as possible is a long-standing challenging problem in the coding theory. In 2009, a family of binary self-dual cyclic codes with lengths $n_i$ and minimum distances $d_i \geq \frac{1}{2} \sqrt{n_i}$, $n_i$ goes to the infinity for $i=1,2, \ldots$, was constructed. In this paper, we construct a family of (repeated-root) binary self-dual cyclic codes with lengths $n$ and minimum distances at least $\sqrt{n}-2$. New families of lengths $n=q^m-1$, $m=3, 5, \ldots$, self-dual codes over ${\bf F}_q$, $q \equiv 1$ $mod$ $4$, with their minimum distances larger than or equal to $\sqrt{\frac{q}{2}}\sqrt{n}-q$ are also constructed.
Plausibility-Based Heuristics for Latent Space Classical Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Recent work on LatPlan has shown that it is possible to learn models for domain-independent classical planners from unlabeled image data. Although PDDL models acquired by LatPlan can be solved using standard PDDL planners, the resulting latent-space plan may be invalid with respect to the underlying, ground-truth domain (e.g., the latent-space plan may include hallucinatory/invalid states). We propose Plausibility-Based Heuristics, which are domain-independent plausibility metrics which can be computed for each state evaluated during search and uses as a heuristic function for best-first search. We show that PBH significantly increases the number of valid found plans on image-based tile puzzle and Towers of Hanoi domains.
Timestamped Embedding-Matching Acoustic-to-Word CTC ASR
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we describe a novel method of training an embedding-matching word-level connectionist temporal classification (CTC) automatic speech recognizer (ASR) such that it directly produces word start times and durations, required by many real-world applications, in addition to the transcription. The word timestamps enable the ASR to output word segmentations and word confusion networks without relying on a secondary model or forced alignment process when testing. Our proposed system has similar word segmentation accuracy as a hybrid DNN-HMM (Deep Neural Network-Hidden Markov Model) system, with less than 3ms difference in mean absolute error in word start times on TIMIT data. At the same time, we observed less than 5% relative increase in the word error rate compared to the non-timestamped system when using the same audio training data and nearly identical model size. We also contribute more rigorous analysis of multiple-hypothesis embedding-matching ASR in general.
One model to rule them all: ranking Slovene summarizers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Text summarization is an essential task in natural language processing, and researchers have developed various approaches over the years, ranging from rule-based systems to neural networks. However, there is no single model or approach that performs well on every type of text. We propose a system that recommends the most suitable summarization model for a given text. The proposed system employs a fully connected neural network that analyzes the input content and predicts which summarizer should score the best in terms of ROUGE score for a given input. The meta-model selects among four different summarization models, developed for the Slovene language, using different properties of the input, in particular its Doc2Vec document representation. The four Slovene summarization models deal with different challenges associated with text summarization in a less-resourced language. We evaluate the proposed SloMetaSum model performance automatically and parts of it manually. The results show that the system successfully automates the step of manually selecting the best model.
Query Encoder Distillation via Embedding Alignment is a Strong Baseline Method to Boost Dense Retriever Online Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

The information retrieval community has made significant progress in improving the efficiency of Dual Encoder (DE) dense passage retrieval systems, making them suitable for latency-sensitive settings. However, many proposed procedures are often too complex or resource-intensive, which makes it difficult for practitioners to adopt them or identify sources of empirical gains. Therefore, in this work, we propose a trivially simple recipe to serve as a baseline method for boosting the efficiency of DE retrievers leveraging an asymmetric architecture. Our results demonstrate that even a 2-layer, BERT-based query encoder can still retain 92.5% of the full DE performance on the BEIR benchmark via unsupervised distillation and proper student initialization. We hope that our findings will encourage the community to re-evaluate the trade-offs between method complexity and performance improvements.
Polytope: An Algorithm for Efficient Feature Extraction on Hypercubes
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Data extraction algorithms on data hypercubes, or datacubes, are traditionally only capable of cutting boxes of data along the datacube axes. For many use cases however, this is not a sufficient approach and returns more data than users might actually need. This not only forces users to apply post-processing after extraction, but more importantly this consumes more I/O resources than is necessary. When considering very large datacubes from which users only want to extract small non-rectangular subsets, the box approach does not scale well. Indeed, with this traditional approach, I/O systems quickly reach capacity, trying to read and return unwanted data to users. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, based on computational geometry concepts, which instead carefully pre-selects the precise bytes of data which the user needs in order to then only read those from the datacube. As we discuss later on, this novel extraction method will considerably help scale access to large petabyte size data hypercubes in a variety of scientific fields.
Learning to Model and Plan for Wheeled Mobility on Vertically Challenging Terrain
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the potential of moving over vertically challenging terrain (e.g., rocky outcroppings, rugged boulders, and fallen tree trunks), invalidate both assumptions. Navigating off-road vehicle chassis with long suspension travel and low tire pressure in places where the boundary between obstacles and free spaces is blurry requires precise 3D modeling of the interaction between the chassis and the terrain, which is complicated by suspension and tire deformation, varying tire-terrain friction, vehicle weight distribution and momentum, etc. In this paper, we present a learning approach to model wheeled mobility, i.e., in terms of vehicle-terrain forward dynamics, and plan feasible, stable, and efficient motion to drive over vertically challenging terrain without rolling over or getting stuck. We present physical experiments on two wheeled robots and show that planning using our learned model can achieve up to 60% improvement in navigation success rate and 46% reduction in unstable chassis roll and pitch angles.
A Responsive Framework for Research Portals Data using Semantic Web Technology
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

As the amount of data on the World Wide Web continues to grow exponentially, access to semantically structured information remains limited. The Semantic Web has emerged as a solution to enhance the machine-readability of data, making it significantly more accessible and interpretable. Various techniques, such as web scraping and mapping, have been employed by different websites to provide semantic access. Web scraping involves the extraction of valuable information from diverse data sources, such as the World Wide Web, utilizing powerful string manipulation operations.In the research field, researchers face the challenge of collecting relevant data from multiple sources, which requires substantial time and effort. This research aims to address this issue by designing a framework for the semantic organization of research portal data. The framework focuses on the extraction of information from two specific research portals, namely Microsoft Academic and IEEE Xplore. Its primary objective is to gather diverse research-related data from these targeted sources.By implementing this framework, researchers can streamline the process of collecting valuable information for their work, saving time and effort. The semantic organization of research portal data offers enhanced accessibility and interpretability, facilitating more effective and efficient knowledge discovery. This research contributes to the advancement of research data management and promotes the utilization of semantic web technologies in the academic community.
Textbooks Are All You Need
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce phi-1, a new large language model for code, with significantly smaller size than competing models: phi-1 is a Transformer-based model with 1.3B parameters, trained for 4 days on 8 A100s, using a selection of ``textbook quality" data from the web (6B tokens) and synthetically generated textbooks and exercises with GPT-3.5 (1B tokens). Despite this small scale, phi-1 attains pass@1 accuracy 50.6% on HumanEval and 55.5% on MBPP. It also displays surprising emergent properties compared to phi-1-base, our model before our finetuning stage on a dataset of coding exercises, and phi-1-small, a smaller model with 350M parameters trained with the same pipeline as phi-1 that still achieves 45% on HumanEval.
Design and simulation of memristor-based neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2023
Year: 2023

In recent times, neural networks have been gaining increasing importance in fields such as pattern recognition and computer vision. However, their usage entails significant energy and hardware costs, limiting the domains in which this technology can be employed. In this context, the feasibility of utilizing analog circuits based on memristors as efficient alternatives in neural network inference is being considered. Memristors stand out for their configurability and low power consumption. To study the feasibility of using these circuits, a physical model has been adapted to accurately simulate the behavior of commercial memristors from KNOWM. Using this model, multiple neural networks have been designed and simulated, yielding highly satisfactory results.
Deterministic Identification Over Multiple-Access Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Deterministic identification over K-input multiple-access channels with average input cost constraints is considered. The capacity region for deterministic identification is determined for an average-error criterion, where arbitrarily large codes are achievable. For a maximal-error criterion, upper and lower bounds on the capacity region are derived. The bounds coincide if all average partial point-to-point channels are injective under the input constraint, i.e. all inputs at one terminal are mapped to distinct output distributions, if averaged over the inputs at all other terminals. The achievability is proved by treating the MAC as an arbitrarily varying channel with average state constraints. For injective average channels, the capacity region is a hyperrectangle. The modulo-2 and modulo-3 binary adder MAC are presented as examples of channels which are injective under suitable input constraints. The binary multiplier MAC is presented as an example of a non-injective channel, where the achievable identification rate region still includes the Shannon capacity region.
Focusing on Relevant Responses for Multi-modal Rumor Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

In the absence of an authoritative statement about a rumor, people may expose the truth behind such rumor through their responses on social media. Most rumor detection methods aggregate the information of all the responses and have made great progress. However, due to the different backgrounds of users, the responses have different relevance for discovering th suspicious points hidden in a rumor claim. The methods that focus on all the responding tweets would dilute the effect of the critical ones. Moreover, for a multi-modal rumor claim, the focus of a user may be on several words in the text or an object in the image, so the different modalities should be considered to select the relevant responses and verify the claim. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal rumor detection model, termed Focal Reasoning Model (FoRM), to filter out the irrelevant responses and further conduct fine-grained reasoning with the multi-modal claim and corresponding responses. Concretely, there are two main components in our FoRM: the coarse-grained selection and the fine-grained reasoning. The coarse-grained selection component leverages the post-level features of the responses to verify the claim and learns a relevant score of each response. Based on the relevant scores, the most relevant responses are reserved as the critical ones to the further reasoning. In the fine-grained reasoning component, we design a relation attention module to explore the fine-grained relations, i.e., token-to-token and token-to-object relations, between the reserved responses and the multi-modal claim for finding out the valuable clues. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms all the baselines.
A Graphical Modeling Language for Artificial Intelligence Applications in Automation Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in automation systems are usually distributed systems whose development and integration involve several experts. Each expert uses its own domain-specific modeling language and tools to model the system elements. An interdisciplinary graphical modeling language that enables the modeling of an AI application as an overall system comprehensible to all disciplines does not yet exist. As a result, there is often a lack of interdisciplinary system understanding, leading to increased development, integration, and maintenance efforts. This paper therefore presents a graphical modeling language that enables consistent and understandable modeling of AI applications in automation systems at system level. This makes it possible to subdivide individual subareas into domain specific subsystems and thus reduce the existing efforts.
EvolveMT: an Ensemble MT Engine Improving Itself with Usage Only
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents EvolveMT for efficiently combining multiple machine translation (MT) engines. The proposed system selects the output from a single engine for each segment by utilizing online learning techniques to predict the most suitable system for every translation request. A neural quality estimation metric supervises the method without requiring reference translations. The online learning capability of this system allows for dynamic adaptation to alterations in the domain or machine translation engines, thereby obviating the necessity for additional training. EvolveMT selects a subset of translation engines to be called based on the source sentence features. The degree of exploration is configurable according to the desired quality-cost trade-off. Results from custom datasets demonstrate that EvolveMT achieves similar translation accuracy at a lower cost than selecting the best translation of each segment from all translations using an MT quality estimator. To our knowledge, EvolveMT is the first meta MT system that adapts itself after deployment to incoming translation requests from the production environment without needing costly retraining on human feedback.