OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EdgeVision: Towards Collaborative Video Analytics on Distributed Edges for Performance Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based video analytics significantly improves recognition accuracy in computer vision applications. Deploying DNN models at edge nodes, closer to end users, reduces inference delay and minimizes bandwidth costs. However, these resource-constrained edge nodes may experience substantial delays under heavy workloads, leading to imbalanced workload distribution. While previous efforts focused on optimizing hierarchical device-edge-cloud architectures or centralized clusters for video analytics, we propose addressing these challenges through collaborative distributed and autonomous edge nodes. Despite the intricate control involved, we introduce EdgeVision, a Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MARL)- based framework for collaborative video analytics on distributed edges. EdgeVision enables edge nodes to autonomously learn policies for video preprocessing, model selection, and request dispatching. Our approach utilizes an actor-critic-based MARL algorithm enhanced with an attention mechanism to learn optimal policies. To validate EdgeVision, we construct a multi-edge testbed and conduct experiments with real-world datasets. Results demonstrate a performance enhancement of 33.6% to 86.4% compared to baseline methods.
MARS: Message Passing for Antenna and RF Chain Selection for Hybrid Beamforming in MIMO Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we consider a prospective receiving hybrid beamforming structure consisting of several radio frequency (RF) chains and abundant antenna elements in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. Due to conventional costly full connections, we design an enhanced partially connected beamformer employing a low-density parity-check (LDPC)-based structure. As a benefit of the LDPC-based structure, information can be exchanged among clustered RF/antenna groups, which results in a low computational complexity order. Advanced message passing (MP) capable of inferring and transferring information among different paths is designed to support the LDPC-based hybrid beamformer. We propose a message-passing enhanced antenna and RF chain selection (MARS) scheme for minimizing the operational power of antennas and RF chains of the receiver as well as hybrid beamforming. Furthermore, sequential and parallel MP schemes for MARS are designed, namely, MARS-S and MARS-P, respectively, to address the convergence speed issue. A heuristic genetic algorithm is designed for receiving hybrid beamforming, comprising gene generation initialization, elite selection, crossover, and mutation. Simulations validate the convergence of both the MARS-P and the MARS-S algorithms. Due to the asynchronous information transfer of MARS-P, it requires higher power than MARS-S, which strikes a compelling balance among power consumption, convergence, and computational complexity. It is also demonstrated that the proposed MARS scheme outperforms the existing benchmarks using the heuristic method of fully/partially connected architectures in the open literature by requiring the lowest power and realizing the highest energy efficiency.
Retrieval augmentation of large language models for lay language generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent lay language generation systems have used Transformer models trained on a parallel corpus to increase health information accessibility. However, the applicability of these models is constrained by the limited size and topical breadth of available corpora. We introduce CELLS, the largest (63k pairs) and broadest-ranging (12 journals) parallel corpus for lay language generation. The abstract and the corresponding lay language summary are written by domain experts, assuring the quality of our dataset. Furthermore, qualitative evaluation of expert-authored plain language summaries has revealed background explanation as a key strategy to increase accessibility. Such explanation is challenging for neural models to generate because it goes beyond simplification by adding content absent from the source. We derive two specialized paired corpora from CELLS to address key challenges in lay language generation: generating background explanations and simplifying the original abstract. We adopt retrieval-augmented models as an intuitive fit for the task of background explanation generation, and show improvements in summary quality and simplicity while maintaining factual correctness. Taken together, this work presents the first comprehensive study of background explanation for lay language generation, paving the path for disseminating scientific knowledge to a broader audience. CELLS is publicly available at: https://github.com/LinguisticAnomalies/pls_retrieval.
Nearly optimal independence oracle algorithms for edge estimation in hypergraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We study a query model of computation in which an n-vertex k-hypergraph can be accessed only via its independence oracle or via its colourful independence oracle, and each oracle query may incur a cost depending on the size of the query. In each of these models, we obtain oracle algorithms to approximately count the hypergraph's edges, and we unconditionally prove that no oracle algorithm for this problem can have significantly smaller worst-case oracle cost than our algorithms.
A Hypergraph-Based Machine Learning Ensemble Network Intrusion Detection System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) to detect malicious attacks continue to meet challenges. NIDS are often developed offline while they face auto-generated port scan infiltration attempts, resulting in a significant time lag from adversarial adaption to NIDS response. To address these challenges, we use hypergraphs focused on internet protocol addresses and destination ports to capture evolving patterns of port scan attacks. The derived set of hypergraph-based metrics are then used to train an ensemble machine learning (ML) based NIDS that allows for real-time adaption in monitoring and detecting port scanning activities, other types of attacks, and adversarial intrusions at high accuracy, precision and recall performances. This ML adapting NIDS was developed through the combination of (1) intrusion examples, (2) NIDS update rules, (3) attack threshold choices to trigger NIDS retraining requests, and (4) a production environment with no prior knowledge of the nature of network traffic. 40 scenarios were auto-generated to evaluate the ML ensemble NIDS comprising three tree-based models. The resulting ML Ensemble NIDS was extended and evaluated with the CIC-IDS2017 dataset. Results show that under the model settings of an Update-ALL-NIDS rule (specifically retrain and update all the three models upon the same NIDS retraining request) the proposed ML ensemble NIDS evolved intelligently and produced the best results with nearly 100% detection performance throughout the simulation.
ConsPrompt: Exploiting Contrastive Samples for Fewshot Prompt Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The prompt has become an effective linguistic tool for utilizing pre-trained language models. However, in few-shot scenarios, subtle changes in the prompt design always make the result widely different, and the prompt learning methods also make it easy to overfit the limited samples. To alleviate this, we explore utilizing suitable contrastive samples and multi-degree contrastive learning methods to improve the robustness of the prompt representation. Therefore, the proposed Consprompt combined with the prompt encoding network, contrastive sampling modules, and contrastive scoring modules, is introduced to realize differential contrastive learning. Our results exhibit state-of-the-art performance in different few-shot settings, and the ablation experiments also certify the effectiveness of utilizing multi-degree contrastive learning in the prompt-based fine-tuning process.
Accelerating Time Series Analysis via Processing using Non-Volatile Memories
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Time Series Analysis (TSA) is a critical workload to extract valuable information from collections of sequential data, e.g., detecting anomalies in electrocardiograms. Subsequence Dynamic Time Warping (sDTW) is the state-of-the-art algorithm for high-accuracy TSA. We find that the performance and energy efficiency of sDTW on conventional CPU and GPU platforms are heavily burdened by the latency and energy overheads of data movement between the compute and the memory units. sDTW exhibits low arithmetic intensity and low data reuse on conventional platforms, stemming from poor amortization of the data movement overheads. To improve the performance and energy efficiency of the sDTW algorithm, we propose MATSA, the first Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM)-based Accelerator for TSA. MATSA leverages Processing-Using-Memory (PUM) based on MRAM crossbars to minimize data movement overheads and exploit parallelism in sDTW. MATSA improves performance by 7.35x/6.15x/6.31x and energy efficiency by 11.29x/4.21x/2.65x over server-class CPU, GPU, and Processing-Near-Memory platforms, respectively.
Sampling from convex sets with a cold start using multiscale decompositions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Running a random walk in a convex body $K\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$ is a standard approach to sample approximately uniformly from the body. The requirement is that from a suitable initial distribution, the distribution of the walk comes close to the uniform distribution $π_K$ on $K$ after a number of steps polynomial in $n$ and the aspect ratio $R/r$ (i.e., when $rB_2 \subseteq K \subseteq RB_{2}$). Proofs of rapid mixing of such walks often require the probability density $η_0$ of the initial distribution with respect to $π_K$ to be at most $\mathrm{poly}(n)$: this is called a "warm start". Achieving a warm start often requires non-trivial pre-processing before starting the random walk. This motivates proving rapid mixing from a "cold start", wherein $η_0$ can be as high as $\exp(\mathrm{poly}(n))$. Unlike warm starts, a cold start is usually trivial to achieve. However, a random walk need not mix rapidly from a cold start: an example being the well-known "ball walk". On the other hand, Lovász and Vempala proved that the "hit-and-run" random walk mixes rapidly from a cold start. For the related coordinate hit-and-run (CHR) walk, which has been found to be promising in computational experiments, rapid mixing from a warm start was proved only recently but the question of rapid mixing from a cold start remained open. We construct a family of random walks inspired by classical decompositions of subsets of $\mathbb{R}^n$ into countably many axis-aligned dyadic cubes. We show that even with a cold start, the mixing times of these walks are bounded by a polynomial in $n$ and the aspect ratio. Our main technical ingredient is an isoperimetric inequality for $K$ for a metric that magnifies distances between points close to the boundary of $K$. As a corollary, we show that the CHR walk also mixes rapidly both from a cold start and from a point not too close to the boundary of $K$.
Soft Augmentation for Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Modern neural networks are over-parameterized and thus rely on strong regularization such as data augmentation and weight decay to reduce overfitting and improve generalization. The dominant form of data augmentation applies invariant transforms, where the learning target of a sample is invariant to the transform applied to that sample. We draw inspiration from human visual classification studies and propose generalizing augmentation with invariant transforms to soft augmentation where the learning target softens non-linearly as a function of the degree of the transform applied to the sample: e.g., more aggressive image crop augmentations produce less confident learning targets. We demonstrate that soft targets allow for more aggressive data augmentation, offer more robust performance boosts, work with other augmentation policies, and interestingly, produce better calibrated models (since they are trained to be less confident on aggressively cropped/occluded examples). Combined with existing aggressive augmentation strategies, soft target 1) doubles the top-1 accuracy boost across Cifar-10, Cifar-100, ImageNet-1K, and ImageNet-V2, 2) improves model occlusion performance by up to $4\times$, and 3) halves the expected calibration error (ECE). Finally, we show that soft augmentation generalizes to self-supervised classification tasks. Code available at https://github.com/youngleox/soft_augmentation
Resource-Aware Heterogeneous Federated Learning using Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) is extensively used to train AI/ML models in distributed and privacy-preserving settings. Participant edge devices in FL systems typically contain non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) private data and unevenly distributed computational resources. Preserving user data privacy while optimizing AI/ML models in a heterogeneous federated network requires us to address data and system/resource heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose Resource-aware Federated Learning (RaFL). RaFL allocates resource-aware specialized models to edge devices using Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and allows heterogeneous model architecture deployment by knowledge extraction and fusion. Combining NAS and FL enables on-demand customized model deployment for resource-diverse edge devices. Furthermore, we propose a multi-model architecture fusion scheme allowing the aggregation of the distributed learning results. Results demonstrate RaFL's superior resource efficiency compared to SoTA.
IK-Geo: Unified Robot Inverse Kinematics Using Subproblem Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the open-source robot inverse kinematics (IK) solver IK-Geo, the fastest general IK solver based on published literature. In this unifying approach, IK for any 6-DOF all-revolute (6R) manipulator is decomposed into six canonical geometric subproblems solved by intersecting circles with other geometric objects. We present new efficient and singularity-robust solutions to these subproblems using geometric and linear algebra methods. IK-Geo finds all IK solutions including singular solutions and sometimes least-squares solutions by solving for subproblem solutions in all cases, including in a continuous and sometimes least-squares sense when a solution does not exist. Robots are classified into kinematic families based on cases of intersecting or parallel joint axes, and robots in the same family use the same IK algorithm. 6R robots with three intersecting or parallel axes are solved in closed form, and all solutions are found exactly without iteration. Other 6R robots are efficiently solved by searching for zeros of an error function of one or two joint angles. The subproblem and IK solutions are easy to understand, implement, test, and modify, meaning this method is readily ported to new languages and environments. We connect our geometric method with less efficient but more robust polynomial-based methods: rather than using search, subproblems and error functions may be written in terms of the tangent half-angle of one joint. This results in a system of multivariate polynomial equations from which the univariate polynomial with zeros corresponding to IK solutions is readily derived.
GCondNet: A Novel Method for Improving Neural Networks on Small High-Dimensional Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks often struggle with high-dimensional but small sample-size tabular datasets. One reason is that current weight initialisation methods assume independence between weights, which can be problematic when there are insufficient samples to estimate the model's parameters accurately. In such small data scenarios, leveraging additional structures can improve the model's performance and training stability. To address this, we propose GCondNet, a general approach to enhance neural networks by leveraging implicit structures present in tabular data. We create a graph between samples for each data dimension, and utilise Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to extract this implicit structure, and for conditioning the parameters of the first layer of an underlying predictor network. By creating many small graphs, GCondNet exploits the data's high-dimensionality, and thus improves the performance of an underlying predictor network. We demonstrate GCondNet's effectiveness on 12 real-world datasets, where it outperforms 14 standard and state-of-the-art methods. The results show that GCondNet is a versatile framework for injecting graph-regularisation into various types of neural networks, including MLPs and tabular Transformers. Code is available at https://github.com/andreimargeloiu/GCondNet.
Online Search with Predictions: Pareto-optimal Algorithm and its Applications in Energy Markets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper develops learning-augmented algorithms for energy trading in volatile electricity markets. The basic problem is to sell (or buy) $k$ units of energy for the highest revenue (lowest cost) over uncertain time-varying prices, which can framed as a classic online search problem in the literature of competitive analysis. State-of-the-art algorithms assume no knowledge about future market prices when they make trading decisions in each time slot, and aim for guaranteeing the performance for the worst-case price sequence. In practice, however, predictions about future prices become commonly available by leveraging machine learning. This paper aims to incorporate machine-learned predictions to design competitive algorithms for online search problems. An important property of our algorithms is that they achieve performances competitive with the offline algorithm in hindsight when the predictions are accurate (i.e., consistency) and also provide worst-case guarantees when the predictions are arbitrarily wrong (i.e., robustness). The proposed algorithms achieve the Pareto-optimal trade-off between consistency and robustness, where no other algorithms for online search can improve on the consistency for a given robustness. Further, we extend the basic online search problem to a more general inventory management setting that can capture storage-assisted energy trading in electricity markets. In empirical evaluations using traces from real-world applications, our learning-augmented algorithms improve the average empirical performance compared to benchmark algorithms, while also providing improved worst-case performance.
Line Drawing Guided Progressive Inpainting of Mural Damage
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Mural image inpainting is far less explored compared to its natural image counterpart and remains largely unsolved. Most existing image-inpainting methods tend to take the target image as the only input and directly repair the damage to generate a visually plausible result. These methods obtain high performance in restoration or completion of some pre-defined objects, e.g., human face, fabric texture, and printed texts, etc., however, are not suitable for repairing murals with varying subjects and large damaged areas. Moreover, due to discrete colors in paints, mural inpainting may suffer from apparent color bias. To this end, in this paper, we propose a line drawing guided progressive mural inpainting method. It divides the inpainting process into two steps: structure reconstruction and color correction, implemented by a structure reconstruction network (SRN) and a color correction network (CCN), respectively. In structure reconstruction, SRN utilizes the line drawing as an assistant to achieve large-scale content authenticity and structural stability. In color correction, CCN operates a local color adjustment for missing pixels which reduces the negative effects of color bias and edge jumping. The proposed approach is evaluated against the current state-of-the-art image inpainting methods. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in mural image inpainting. The codes and data are available at https://github.com/qinnzou/mural-image-inpainting.
Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Contrastive learning has shown remarkable success in the field of multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose a pipeline of contrastive language-audio pretraining to develop an audio representation by combining audio data with natural language descriptions. To accomplish this target, we first release LAION-Audio-630K, a large collection of 633,526 audio-text pairs from different data sources. Second, we construct a contrastive language-audio pretraining model by considering different audio encoders and text encoders. We incorporate the feature fusion mechanism and keyword-to-caption augmentation into the model design to further enable the model to process audio inputs of variable lengths and enhance the performance. Third, we perform comprehensive experiments to evaluate our model across three tasks: text-to-audio retrieval, zero-shot audio classification, and supervised audio classification. The results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance in text-to-audio retrieval task. In audio classification tasks, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot setting and is able to obtain performance comparable to models' results in the non-zero-shot setting. LAION-Audio-630K and the proposed model are both available to the public.
FedTracker: Furnishing Ownership Verification and Traceability for Federated Learning Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm allowing multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their local data. However, FL entails exposing the model to various participants. This poses a risk of unauthorized model distribution or resale by the malicious client, compromising the intellectual property rights of the FL group. To deter such misbehavior, it is essential to establish a mechanism for verifying the ownership of the model and as well tracing its origin to the leaker among the FL participants. In this paper, we present FedTracker, the first FL model protection framework that provides both ownership verification and traceability. FedTracker adopts a bi-level protection scheme consisting of global watermark mechanism and local fingerprint mechanism. The former authenticates the ownership of the global model, while the latter identifies which client the model is derived from. FedTracker leverages Continual Learning (CL) principles to embed the watermark in a way that preserves the utility of the FL model on both primitive task and watermark task. FedTracker also devises a novel metric to better discriminate different fingerprints. Experimental results show FedTracker is effective in ownership verification, traceability, and maintains good fidelity and robustness against various watermark removal attacks.