OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SymphonyQG: Towards Symphonious Integration of Quantization and Graph for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search in high-dimensional Euclidean space has a broad range of applications. Among existing ANN algorithms, graph-based methods have shown superior performance in terms of the time-accuracy trade-off. However, they face performance bottlenecks due to the random memory accesses caused by the searching process on the graph indices and the costs of computing exact distances to guide the searching process. To relieve the bottlenecks, a recent method named NGT-QG makes an attempt by integrating quantization and graph. It (1) replicates and stores the quantization codes of a vertex's neighbors compactly so that they can be accessed sequentially, and (2) uses a SIMD-based implementation named FastScan to efficiently estimate distances based on the quantization codes in batch for guiding the searching process. While NGT-QG achieves promising improvements over the vanilla graph-based methods, it has not fully unleashed the potential of integrating quantization and graph. For instance, it entails a re-ranking step to compute exact distances at the end, which introduces extra random memory accesses; its graph structure is not jointly designed considering the in-batch nature of FastScan, which causes wastes of computation in searching. In this work, following NGT-QG, we present a new method named SymphonyQG, which achieves more symphonious integration of quantization and graph (e.g., it avoids the explicit re-ranking step and refines the graph structure to be more aligned with FastScan). Based on extensive experiments on real-world datasets, SymphonyQG establishes the new state-of-the-art in terms of the time-accuracy trade-off.
Hyper-parameter Optimization for Federated Learning with Step-wise Adaptive Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized learning approach that protects sensitive information by utilizing local model parameters rather than sharing clients' raw datasets. While this privacy-preserving method is widely employed across various applications, it still requires significant development and optimization. Automated Machine Learning (Auto-ML) has been adapted for reducing the need for manual adjustments. Previous studies have explored the integration of AutoML with different FL algorithms to evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing FL settings. However, Automated FL (Auto-FL) faces additional challenges due to the involvement of a large cohort of clients and global training rounds between clients and the server, rendering the tuning process time-consuming and nearly impossible on resource-constrained edge devices (e.g., IoT devices). This paper investigates the deployment and integration of two lightweight Hyper-Parameter Optimization (HPO) tools, Raytune and Optuna, within the context of FL settings. A step-wise feedback mechanism has also been designed to accelerate the hyper-parameter tuning process and coordinate AutoML toolkits with the FL server. To this end, both local and global feedback mechanisms are integrated to limit the search space and expedite the HPO process. Further, a novel client selection technique is introduced to mitigate the straggler effect in Auto-FL. The selected hyper-parameter tuning tools are evaluated using two benchmark datasets, FEMNIST, and CIFAR10. Further, the paper discusses the essential properties of successful HPO tools, the integration mechanism with the FL pipeline, and the challenges posed by the distributed and heterogeneous nature of FL environments.
Building Trust: Foundations of Security, Safety and Transparency in AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the rapidly evolving ecosystem of publicly available AI models, and their potential implications on the security and safety landscape. As AI models become increasingly prevalent, understanding their potential risks and vulnerabilities is crucial. We review the current security and safety scenarios while highlighting challenges such as tracking issues, remediation, and the apparent absence of AI model lifecycle and ownership processes. Comprehensive strategies to enhance security and safety for both model developers and end-users are proposed. This paper aims to provide some of the foundational pieces for more standardized security, safety, and transparency in the development and operation of AI models and the larger open ecosystems and communities forming around them.
libcll: an Extendable Python Toolkit for Complementary-Label Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Complementary-label learning (CLL) is a weakly supervised learning paradigm for multiclass classification, where only complementary labels -- indicating classes an instance does not belong to -- are provided to the learning algorithm. Despite CLL's increasing popularity, previous studies highlight two main challenges: (1) inconsistent results arising from varied assumptions on complementary label generation, and (2) high barriers to entry due to the lack of a standardized evaluation platform across datasets and algorithms. To address these challenges, we introduce \texttt{libcll}, an extensible Python toolkit for CLL research. \texttt{libcll} provides a universal interface that supports a wide range of generation assumptions, both synthetic and real-world datasets, and key CLL algorithms. The toolkit is designed to mitigate inconsistencies and streamline the research process, with easy installation, comprehensive usage guides, and quickstart tutorials that facilitate efficient adoption and implementation of CLL techniques. Extensive ablation studies conducted with \texttt{libcll} demonstrate its utility in generating valuable insights to advance future CLL research.
DT-RaDaR: Digital Twin Assisted Robot Navigation using Differential Ray-Tracing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous system navigation is a well-researched and evolving field. Recent advancements in improving robot navigation have sparked increased interest among researchers and practitioners, especially in the use of sensing data. However, this heightened focus has also raised significant privacy concerns, particularly for robots that rely on cameras and LiDAR for navigation. Our innovative concept of Radio Frequency (RF) map generation through ray-tracing (RT) within digital twin environments effectively addresses these concerns. In this paper, we propose DT-RaDaR, a robust privacy-preserving, deep reinforcement learning-based framework for robot navigation that leverages RF ray-tracing in both static and dynamic indoor scenarios as well as in smart cities. We introduce a streamlined framework for generating RF digital twins using open-source tools like Blender and NVIDIA's Sionna RT. This approach allows for high-fidelity replication of real-world environments and RF propagation models, optimized for service robot navigation. Several experimental validations and results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework in indoor environments and smart cities, positioning our work as a significant advancement toward the practical implementation of robot navigation using ray-tracing-generated data.
Graph as a feature: improving node classification with non-neural graph-aware logistic regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and their message passing framework that leverages both structural and feature information, have become a standard method for solving graph-based machine learning problems. However, these approaches still struggle to generalise well beyond datasets that exhibit strong homophily, where nodes of the same class tend to connect. This limitation has led to the development of complex neural architectures that pose challenges in terms of efficiency and scalability. In response to these limitations, we focus on simpler and more scalable approaches and introduce Graph-aware Logistic Regression (GLR), a non-neural model designed for node classification tasks. Unlike traditional graph algorithms that use only a fraction of the information accessible to GNNs, our proposed model simultaneously leverages both node features and the relationships between entities. However instead of relying on message passing, our approach encodes each node's relationships as an additional feature vector, which is then combined with the node's self attributes. Extensive experimental results, conducted within a rigorous evaluation framework, show that our proposed GLR approach outperforms both foundational and sophisticated state-of-the-art GNN models in node classification tasks. Going beyond the traditional limited benchmarks, our experiments indicate that GLR increases generalisation ability while reaching performance gains in computation time up to two orders of magnitude compared to it best neural competitor.
DiM: $f$-Divergence Minimization Guided Sharpness-Aware Optimization for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As a technique to alleviate the pressure of data annotation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has attracted widespread attention. In the specific domain of medical image segmentation, semi-supervised methods (SSMIS) have become a research hotspot due to their ability to reduce the need for large amounts of precisely annotated data. SSMIS focuses on enhancing the model's generalization performance by leveraging a small number of labeled samples and a large number of unlabeled samples. The latest sharpness-aware optimization (SAM) technique, which optimizes the model by reducing the sharpness of the loss function, has shown significant success in SSMIS. However, SAM and its variants may not fully account for the distribution differences between different datasets. To address this issue, we propose a sharpness-aware optimization method based on $f$-divergence minimization (DiM) for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. This method enhances the model's stability by fine-tuning the sensitivity of model parameters and improves the model's adaptability to different datasets through the introduction of $f$-divergence. By reducing $f$-divergence, the DiM method not only improves the performance balance between the source and target datasets but also prevents performance degradation due to overfitting on the source dataset.
Breathless: An 8-hour Performance Contrasting Human and Robot Expressiveness
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper describes the robot technology behind an original performance that pairs a human dancer (Cuan) with an industrial robot arm for an eight-hour dance that unfolds over the timespan of an American workday. To control the robot arm, we combine a range of sinusoidal motions with varying amplitude, frequency and offset at each joint to evoke human motions common in physical labor such as stirring, digging, and stacking. More motions were developed using deep learning techniques for video-based human-pose tracking and extraction. We combine these pre-recorded motions with improvised robot motions created live by putting the robot into teach-mode and triggering force sensing from the robot joints onstage. All motions are combined with commercial and original music using a custom suite of python software with AppleScript, Keynote, and Zoom to facilitate on-stage communication with the dancer. The resulting performance contrasts the expressivity of the human body with the precision of robot machinery. Video, code and data are available on the project website: https://sites.google.com/playing.studio/breathless
Non-IID data in Federated Learning: A Survey with Taxonomy, Metrics, Methods, Frameworks and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in machine learning have highlighted Federated Learning (FL) as a promising approach that enables multiple distributed users (so-called clients) to collectively train ML models without sharing their private data. While this privacy-preserving method shows potential, it struggles when data across clients is not independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data. The latter remains an unsolved challenge that can result in poorer model performance and slower training times. Despite the significance of non-IID data in FL, there is a lack of consensus among researchers about its classification and quantification. This technical survey aims to fill that gap by providing a detailed taxonomy for non-IID data, partition protocols, and metrics to quantify data heterogeneity. Additionally, we describe popular solutions to address non-IID data and standardized frameworks employed in FL with heterogeneous data. Based on our state-of-the-art survey, we present key lessons learned and suggest promising future research directions.
Classification of Geographical Land Structure Using Convolution Neural Network and Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Satellite imagery has dramatically revolutionized the field of geography by giving academics, scientists, and policymakers unprecedented global access to spatial data. Manual methods typically require significant time and effort to detect the generic land structure in satellite images. This study can produce a set of applications such as urban planning and development, environmental monitoring, disaster management, etc. Therefore, the research presents a methodology to minimize human labor, reducing the expenses and duration needed to identify the land structure. This article developed a deep learning-based approach to automate the process of classifying geographical land structures. We used a satellite image dataset acquired from MLRSNet. The study compared the performance of three architectures, namely CNN, ResNet-50, and Inception-v3. We used three optimizers with any model: Adam, SGD, and RMSProp. We conduct the training process for a fixed number of epochs, specifically 100 epochs, with a batch size of 64. The ResNet-50 achieved an accuracy of 76.5% with the ADAM optimizer, the Inception-v3 with RMSProp achieved an accuracy of 93.8%, and the proposed approach, CNN with RMSProp optimizer, achieved the highest level of performance and an accuracy of 94.8%. Moreover, a thorough examination of the CNN model demonstrated its exceptional accuracy, recall, and F1 scores for all categories, confirming its resilience and dependability in precisely detecting various terrain formations. The results highlight the potential of deep learning models in scene understanding, as well as their significance in efficiently identifying and categorizing land structures from satellite imagery.
Towards Unifying Feature Interaction Models for Click-Through Rate Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Modeling feature interactions plays a crucial role in accurately predicting click-through rates (CTR) in advertising systems. To capture the intricate patterns of interaction, many existing models employ matrix-factorization techniques to represent features as lower-dimensional embedding vectors, enabling the modeling of interactions as products between these embeddings. In this paper, we propose a general framework called IPA to systematically unify these models. Our framework comprises three key components: the Interaction Function, which facilitates feature interaction; the Layer Pooling, which constructs higher-level interaction layers; and the Layer Aggregator, which combines the outputs of all layers to serve as input for the subsequent classifier. We demonstrate that most existing models can be categorized within our framework by making specific choices for these three components. Through extensive experiments and a dimensional collapse analysis, we evaluate the performance of these choices. Furthermore, by leveraging the most powerful components within our framework, we introduce a novel model that achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art CTR models. PFL gets significant GMV lift during online A/B test in Tencent's advertising platform and has been deployed as the production model in several primary scenarios.
Advancing Cloud Computing Capabilities on gem5 by Implementing the RISC-V Hypervisor Extension
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of the H (hypervisor) extension for the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) on top of the gem5 microarchitectural simulator. The RISC-V ISA, known for its simplicity and modularity, has seen widespread adoption in various computing domains. The H extension aims to enhance RISC-V's capabilities for cloud computing and virtualization. In this paper, we present the architectural integration of the H extension into gem5, an open-source, modular platform for computer system architecture research. We detail the modifications required in gem5's CPU models and virtualization support to accommodate the H extension. We also present evaluation results regarding the performance impact and functional correctness of the extension's implementation on gem5. This study not only provides a pathway for further research and development of RISC-V extensions but also contributes valuable insights into the optimization of the gem5 simulator for advanced architectural features.
Emulating a computing grid in a local environment for feature evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The necessity for complex calculations in high-energy physics and large-scale data analysis has led to the development of computing grids, such as the ALICE computing grid at CERN. These grids outperform traditional supercomputers but present challenges in directly evaluating new features, as changes can disrupt production operations and require comprehensive assessments, entailing significant time investments across all components. This paper proposes a solution to this challenge by introducing a novel approach for emulating a computing grid within a local environment. This emulation, resembling a mini clone of the original computing grid, encompasses its essential components and functionalities. Local environments provide controlled settings for emulating grid components, enabling researchers to evaluate system features without impacting production environments. This investigation contributes to the evolving field of computing grids and distributed systems, offering insights into the emulation of a computing grid in a local environment for feature evaluation.
Topological Symmetry Enhanced Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Skeleton-based action recognition has achieved remarkable performance with the development of graph convolutional networks (GCNs). However, most of these methods tend to construct complex topology learning mechanisms while neglecting the inherent symmetry of the human body. Additionally, the use of temporal convolutions with certain fixed receptive fields limits their capacity to effectively capture dependencies in time sequences. To address the issues, we (1) propose a novel Topological Symmetry Enhanced Graph Convolution (TSE-GC) to enable distinct topology learning across different channel partitions while incorporating topological symmetry awareness and (2) construct a Multi-Branch Deformable Temporal Convolution (MBDTC) for skeleton-based action recognition. The proposed TSE-GC emphasizes the inherent symmetry of the human body while enabling efficient learning of dynamic topologies. Meanwhile, the design of MBDTC introduces the concept of deformable modeling, leading to more flexible receptive fields and stronger modeling capacity of temporal dependencies. Combining TSE-GC with MBDTC, our final model, TSE-GCN, achieves competitive performance with fewer parameters compared with state-of-the-art methods on three large datasets, NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA. On the cross-subject and cross-set evaluations of NTU RGB+D 120, the accuracies of our model reach 90.0\% and 91.1\%, with 1.1M parameters and 1.38 GFLOPS for one stream.
Maps from Motion (MfM): Generating 2D Semantic Maps from Sparse Multi-view Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

World-wide detailed 2D maps require enormous collective efforts. OpenStreetMap is the result of 11 million registered users manually annotating the GPS location of over 1.75 billion entries, including distinctive landmarks and common urban objects. At the same time, manual annotations can include errors and are slow to update, limiting the map's accuracy. Maps from Motion (MfM) is a step forward to automatize such time-consuming map making procedure by computing 2D maps of semantic objects directly from a collection of uncalibrated multi-view images. From each image, we extract a set of object detections, and estimate their spatial arrangement in a top-down local map centered in the reference frame of the camera that captured the image. Aligning these local maps is not a trivial problem, since they provide incomplete, noisy fragments of the scene, and matching detections across them is unreliable because of the presence of repeated pattern and the limited appearance variability of urban objects. We address this with a novel graph-based framework, that encodes the spatial and semantic distribution of the objects detected in each image, and learns how to combine them to predict the objects' poses in a global reference system, while taking into account all possible detection matches and preserving the topology observed in each image. Despite the complexity of the problem, our best model achieves global 2D registration with an average accuracy within 4 meters (i.e., below GPS accuracy) even on sparse sequences with strong viewpoint change, on which COLMAP has an 80% failure rate. We provide extensive evaluation on synthetic and real-world data, showing how the method obtains a solution even in scenarios where standard optimization techniques fail.
ChemSICal: Evaluating a Stochastic Chemical Reaction Network for Molecular Multiple Access
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Proposals for molecular communication networks as part of a future internet of bio-nano-things have become more intricate and the question of practical implementation is gaining more importance. One option is to apply detailed chemical modeling to capture more realistic effects of computing processes in biological systems. In this paper, we present ChemSICal, a detailed model for implementing the successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm for molecular multiple access in diffusion-based molecular communication networks as a chemical reaction network (CRN). We describe the structure of the model as a number of smaller reaction blocks, their speed controlled by reaction rate constants (RRCs). Deterministic and stochastic methods are utilized to first iteratively improve the choice of RRCs and subsequently investigate the performance of the model in terms of an error probability. We analyze the model's sensitivity to parameter changes and find that the analytically optimal values for the non-chemical model do not necessarily translate to the chemical domain. This necessitates careful optimization, especially of the RRCs, which are crucial for the successful operation of the ChemSICal system.
Reconstructing Graph Signals from Noisy Dynamical Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate the dynamical sampling space-time trade-off problem within a graph setting. Specifically, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for space-time sampling that enable the reconstruction of an initial band-limited signal on a graph. Additionally, we develop and test numerical algorithms for approximating the optimal placement of sensors on the graph to minimize the mean squared error when recovering signals from time-space measurements corrupted by i.i.d.~additive noise. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previously proposed algorithms for related problems.