OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EnforceSNN: Enabling Resilient and Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Network Inference considering Approximate DRAMs for Embedded Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown capabilities of achieving high accuracy under unsupervised settings and low operational power/energy due to their bio-plausible computations. Previous studies identified that DRAM-based off-chip memory accesses dominate the energy consumption of SNN processing. However, state-of-the-art works do not optimize the DRAM energy-per-access, thereby hindering the SNN-based systems from achieving further energy efficiency gains. To substantially reduce the DRAM energy-per-access, an effective solution is to decrease the DRAM supply voltage, but it may lead to errors in DRAM cells (i.e., so-called approximate DRAM). Towards this, we propose \textit{EnforceSNN}, a novel design framework that provides a solution for resilient and energy-efficient SNN inference using reduced-voltage DRAM for embedded systems. The key mechanisms of our EnforceSNN are: (1) employing quantized weights to reduce the DRAM access energy; (2) devising an efficient DRAM mapping policy to minimize the DRAM energy-per-access; (3) analyzing the SNN error tolerance to understand its accuracy profile considering different bit error rate (BER) values; (4) leveraging the information for developing an efficient fault-aware training (FAT) that considers different BER values and bit error locations in DRAM to improve the SNN error tolerance; and (5) developing an algorithm to select the SNN model that offers good trade-offs among accuracy, memory, and energy consumption. The experimental results show that our EnforceSNN maintains the accuracy (i.e., no accuracy loss for BER less-or-equal 10^-3) as compared to the baseline SNN with accurate DRAM, while achieving up to 84.9\% of DRAM energy saving and up to 4.1x speed-up of DRAM data throughput across different network sizes.
Deep Anti-Regularized Ensembles provide reliable out-of-distribution uncertainty quantification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification in high dimensional regression and classification for which deep ensemble have proven to be promising methods. Recent observations have shown that deep ensemble often return overconfident estimates outside the training domain, which is a major limitation because shifted distributions are often encountered in real-life scenarios. The principal challenge for this problem is to solve the trade-off between increasing the diversity of the ensemble outputs and making accurate in-distribution predictions. In this work, we show that an ensemble of networks with large weights fitting the training data are likely to meet these two objectives. We derive a simple and practical approach to produce such ensembles, based on an original anti-regularization term penalizing small weights and a control process of the weight increase which maintains the in-distribution loss under an acceptable threshold. The developed approach does not require any out-of-distribution training data neither any trade-off hyper-parameter calibration. We derive a theoretical framework for this approach and show that the proposed optimization can be seen as a "water-filling" problem. Several experiments in both regression and classification settings highlight that Deep Anti-Regularized Ensembles (DARE) significantly improve uncertainty quantification outside the training domain in comparison to recent deep ensembles and out-of-distribution detection methods. All the conducted experiments are reproducible and the source code is available at \url{https://github.com/antoinedemathelin/DARE}.
How Does Imperfect Automatic Indexing Affect Semantic Search Performance?
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Documents in the health domain are often annotated with semantic concepts (i.e., terms) from controlled vocabularies. As the volume of these documents gets large, the annotation work is increasingly done by algorithms. Compared to humans, automatic indexing algorithms are imperfect and may assign wrong terms to documents, which affect subsequent search tasks where queries contain these terms. In this work, we aim to understand the performance impact of using imperfectly assigned terms in Boolean semantic searches. We used MeSH terms and biomedical literature search as a case study. We implemented multiple automatic indexing algorithms on real-world Boolean queries that consist of MeSH terms, and found that (1) probabilistic logic can handle inaccurately assigned terms better than traditional Boolean logic, (2) query-level performance is mostly limited by lowest-performing terms in a query, and (3) mixing a small amount of human indexing with automatic indexing can regain excellent query-level performance. These findings provide important implications for future work on automatic indexing.
Word-level Persian Lipreading Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Lip-reading has made impressive progress in recent years, driven by advances in deep learning. Nonetheless, the prerequisite such advances is a suitable dataset. This paper provides a new in-the-wild dataset for Persian word-level lipreading containing 244,000 videos from approximately 1,800 speakers. We evaluated the state-of-the-art method in this field and used a novel approach for word-level lip-reading. In this method, we used the AV-HuBERT model for feature extraction and obtained significantly better performance on our dataset.
No Code AI: Automatic generation of Function Block Diagrams from documentation and associated heuristic for context-aware ML algorithm training
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Industrial process engineering and PLC program development have traditionally favored Function Block Diagram (FBD) programming over classical imperative style programming like the object oriented and functional programming paradigms. The increasing momentum in the adoption and trial of ideas now classified as 'No Code' or 'Low Code' alongside the mainstream success of statistical learning theory or the so-called machine learning is redefining the way in which we structure programs for the digital machine to execute. A principal focus of 'No Code' is deriving executable programs directly from a set of requirement documents or any other documentation that defines consumer or customer expectation. We present a method for generating Function Block Diagram (FBD) programs as either the intermediate or final artifact that can be executed by a target system from a set of requirement documents using a constrained selection algorithm that draws from the top line of an associated recommender system. The results presented demonstrate that this type of No-code generative model is a viable option for industrial process design.
Gradient Sparsification for Efficient Wireless Federated Learning with Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data with each other. However, it suffers the leakage of private information from uploading models. In addition, as the model size grows, the training latency increases due to limited transmission bandwidth and the model performance degrades while using differential privacy (DP) protection. In this paper, we propose a gradient sparsification empowered FL framework over wireless channels, in order to improve training efficiency without sacrificing convergence performance. Specifically, we first design a random sparsification algorithm to retain a fraction of the gradient elements in each client's local training, thereby mitigating the performance degradation induced by DP and and reducing the number of transmission parameters over wireless channels. Then, we analyze the convergence bound of the proposed algorithm, by modeling a non-convex FL problem. Next, we formulate a time-sequential stochastic optimization problem for minimizing the developed convergence bound, under the constraints of transmit power, the average transmitting delay, as well as the client's DP requirement. Utilizing the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty framework, we develop an analytical solution to the optimization problem. Extensive experiments have been implemented on three real life datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. We show that our proposed algorithms can fully exploit the interworking between communication and computation to outperform the baselines, i.e., random scheduling, round robin and delay-minimization algorithms.
Team QUST at SemEval-2023 Task 3: A Comprehensive Study of Monolingual and Multilingual Approaches for Detecting Online News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes the participation of team QUST in the SemEval2023 task 3. The monolingual models are first evaluated with the under-sampling of the majority classes in the early stage of the task. Then, the pre-trained multilingual model is fine-tuned with a combination of the class weights and the sample weights. Two different fine-tuning strategies, the task-agnostic and the task-dependent, are further investigated. All experiments are conducted under the 10-fold cross-validation, the multilingual approaches are superior to the monolingual ones. The submitted system achieves the second best in Italian and Spanish (zero-shot) in subtask-1.
CILIATE: Towards Fairer Class-based Incremental Learning by Dataset and Training Refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the model aging problem, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) need updates to adjust them to new data distributions. The common practice leverages incremental learning (IL), e.g., Class-based Incremental Learning (CIL) that updates output labels, to update the model with new data and a limited number of old data. This avoids heavyweight training (from scratch) using conventional methods and saves storage space by reducing the number of old data to store. But it also leads to poor performance in fairness. In this paper, we show that CIL suffers both dataset and algorithm bias problems, and existing solutions can only partially solve the problem. We propose a novel framework, CILIATE, that fixes both dataset and algorithm bias in CIL. It features a novel differential analysis guided dataset and training refinement process that identifies unique and important samples overlooked by existing CIL and enforces the model to learn from them. Through this process, CILIATE improves the fairness of CIL by 17.03%, 22.46%, and 31.79% compared to state-of-the-art methods, iCaRL, BiC, and WA, respectively, based on our evaluation on three popular datasets and widely used ResNet models.
Dependently Typing R Vectors, Arrays, and Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

The R programming language is widely used in large-scale data analyses. It contains especially rich built-in support for dealing with vectors, arrays, and matrices. These operations feature prominently in the applications that form R's raison d'être, making their behavior worth understanding. Furthermore, ostensibly for programmer convenience, their behavior in R is a notable extension over the corresponding operations in mathematics, thereby offering some challenges for specification and static verification. We report on progress towards statically typing this aspect of the R language. The interesting aspects of typing, in this case, warn programmers about violating bounds, so the types must necessarily be dependent. We explain the ways in which R extends standard mathematical behavior. We then show how R's behavior can be specified in LiquidHaskell, a dependently-typed extension to Haskell. In the general case, actually verifying library and client code is currently beyond LiquidHaskell's reach; therefore, this work provides challenges and opportunities both for typing R and for progress in dependently-typed programming languages.
Ensemble Modeling for Time Series Forecasting: an Adaptive Robust Optimization Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate time series forecasting is critical for a wide range of problems with temporal data. Ensemble modeling is a well-established technique for leveraging multiple predictive models to increase accuracy and robustness, as the performance of a single predictor can be highly variable due to shifts in the underlying data distribution. This paper proposes a new methodology for building robust ensembles of time series forecasting models. Our approach utilizes Adaptive Robust Optimization (ARO) to construct a linear regression ensemble in which the models' weights can adapt over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a series of synthetic experiments and real-world applications, including air pollution management, energy consumption forecasting, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. Our results show that our adaptive ensembles outperform the best ensemble member in hindsight by 16-26% in root mean square error and 14-28% in conditional value at risk and improve over competitive ensemble techniques.
Large Language Models for Business Process Management: Opportunities and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models are deep learning models with a large number of parameters. The models made noticeable progress on a large number of tasks, and as a consequence allowing them to serve as valuable and versatile tools for a diverse range of applications. Their capabilities also offer opportunities for business process management, however, these opportunities have not yet been systematically investigated. In this paper, we address this research problem by foregrounding various management tasks of the BPM lifecycle. We investigate six research directions highlighting problems that need to be addressed when using large language models, including usage guidelines for practitioners.
Split, Merge, and Refine: Fitting Tight Bounding Boxes via Over-Segmentation and Iterative Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Achieving tight bounding boxes of a shape while guaranteeing complete boundness is an essential task for efficient geometric operations and unsupervised semantic part detection. But previous methods fail to achieve both full coverage and tightness. Neural-network-based methods are not suitable for these goals due to the non-differentiability of the objective, while classic iterative search methods suffer from their sensitivity to the initialization. We propose a novel framework for finding a set of tight bounding boxes of a 3D shape via over-segmentation and iterative merging and refinement. Our result shows that utilizing effective search methods with appropriate objectives is the key to producing bounding boxes with both properties. We employ an existing pre-segmentation to split the shape and obtain over-segmentation. Then, we apply hierarchical merging with our novel tightness-aware merging and stopping criteria. To overcome the sensitivity to the initialization, we also define actions to refine the bounding box parameters in an Markov Decision Process (MDP) setup with a soft reward function promoting a wider exploration. Lastly, we further improve the refinement step with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based multi-action space exploration. By thoughtful evaluation on diverse 3D shapes, we demonstrate full coverage, tightness, and an adequate number of bounding boxes of our method without requiring any training data or supervision. It thus can be applied to various downstream tasks in computer vision and graphics.
Towards Real-time Text-driven Image Manipulation with Unconditional Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in diffusion models enable many powerful instruments for image editing. One of these instruments is text-driven image manipulations: editing semantic attributes of an image according to the provided text description. % Popular text-conditional diffusion models offer various high-quality image manipulation methods for a broad range of text prompts. Existing diffusion-based methods already achieve high-quality image manipulations for a broad range of text prompts. However, in practice, these methods require high computation costs even with a high-end GPU. This greatly limits potential real-world applications of diffusion-based image editing, especially when running on user devices. In this paper, we address efficiency of the recent text-driven editing methods based on unconditional diffusion models and develop a novel algorithm that learns image manipulations 4.5-10 times faster and applies them 8 times faster. We carefully evaluate the visual quality and expressiveness of our approach on multiple datasets using human annotators. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm achieves the quality of much more expensive methods. Finally, we show that our approach can adapt the pretrained model to the user-specified image and text description on the fly just for 4 seconds. In this setting, we notice that more compact unconditional diffusion models can be considered as a rational alternative to the popular text-conditional counterparts.
WebBrain: Learning to Generate Factually Correct Articles for Queries by Grounding on Large Web Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we introduce a new NLP task -- generating short factual articles with references for queries by mining supporting evidence from the Web. In this task, called WebBrain, the ultimate goal is to generate a fluent, informative, and factually-correct short article (e.g., a Wikipedia article) for a factual query unseen in Wikipedia. To enable experiments on WebBrain, we construct a large-scale dataset WebBrain-Raw by extracting English Wikipedia articles and their crawlable Wikipedia references. WebBrain-Raw is ten times larger than the previous biggest peer dataset, which can greatly benefit the research community. From WebBrain-Raw, we construct two task-specific datasets: WebBrain-R and WebBrain-G, which are used to train in-domain retriever and generator, respectively. Besides, we empirically analyze the performances of the current state-of-the-art NLP techniques on WebBrain and introduce a new framework ReGen, which enhances the generation factualness by improved evidence retrieval and task-specific pre-training for generation. Experiment results show that ReGen outperforms all baselines in both automatic and human evaluations.
A Deep Analysis of Hybrid-Multikey-PUF
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Unique key generation is essential for encryption purposes between Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To produce a unique key for this encryption, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) might be employed. Also, the Random Number Generator (RNG) is used in many different domains; nonetheless, security is one of the most important areas that require the best RNG. In this article, We investigate the quality of random numbers generated by Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). We have analyzed three Figures of Merit (FoMs), Uniqueness, Randomness, and Reliability of PUFs implemented on different FPGAs. In our experiments, we have operated the test devices at different temperatures (20°F, 40°F, 60°F, 80°F, 120°F, 140°F). In the PUF that we have analyzed, the key is generated in 1 second on average. We also have analyzed and described the essential properties of random number generator that is most vital considering things to secure our Internet of Things(IoT) devices.
QChecker: Detecting Bugs in Quantum Programs via Static Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Static analysis is the process of analyzing software code without executing the software. It can help find bugs and potential problems in software that may only appear at runtime. Although many static analysis tools have been developed for classical software, due to the nature of quantum programs, these existing tools are unsuitable for analyzing quantum programs. This paper presents QChecker, a static analysis tool that supports finding bugs in quantum programs in Qiskit. QChecker consists of two main modules: a module for extracting program information based on abstract syntax tree (AST), and a module for detecting bugs based on patterns. We evaluate the performance of QChecker using the Bugs4Q benchmark. The evaluation results show that QChecker can effectively detect various bugs in quantum programs.
Fluid Antenna-aided Full Duplex Communications: A Macroscopic Point-Of-View
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The synergy of fluid-based reconfigurable antenna (FA) technology and full-duplex (FD) communications can be jointly beneficial, as FD can enhance the spectral efficiency of a point-to-point link, while the new degree of freedom offered by the FA technology can be exploited to handle the overall interference. Hence, in this paper, an analytical framework based on stochastic geometry is developed, aiming to assess both the outage and average sum-rate performance of large-scale FA-aided FD cellular networks. In contrast to existing studies, where perfect channel state information is assumed, the developed framework accurately captures the impact of channel estimation (CE) on the performance of the considered network deployments, as well as the existence of residual loop-interference (LI) at the FD transceivers. Particularly, we focus on a limited coherence interval scenario, where a novel sequential linear minimum-mean-squared-error-based CE method is performed for all FA ports and LI links, followed by data reception from the port with the strongest estimated channel. By using stochastic geometry tools, analytical expressions for the outage and the average sum-rate performance are derived. Our results reveal that FA-aided FD communications experience an improved average sum-rate performance of around 45\% compared to conventional FD communications.
Inferring Fluid Dynamics via Inverse Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Humans have a strong intuitive understanding of physical processes such as fluid falling by just a glimpse of such a scene picture, i.e., quickly derived from our immersive visual experiences in memory. This work achieves such a photo-to-fluid-dynamics reconstruction functionality learned from unannotated videos, without any supervision of ground-truth fluid dynamics. In a nutshell, a differentiable Euler simulator modeled with a ConvNet-based pressure projection solver, is integrated with a volumetric renderer, supporting end-to-end/coherent differentiable dynamic simulation and rendering. By endowing each sampled point with a fluid volume value, we derive a NeRF-like differentiable renderer dedicated from fluid data; and thanks to this volume-augmented representation, fluid dynamics could be inversely inferred from the error signal between the rendered result and ground-truth video frame (i.e., inverse rendering). Experiments on our generated Fluid Fall datasets and DPI Dam Break dataset are conducted to demonstrate both effectiveness and generalization ability of our method.
Kernel Code for DNA Digital Data Storage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The biggest challenge when using DNA as a storage medium is maintaining its stability. The relative occurrence of Guanine (G) and Cytosine (C) is essential for the longevity of DNA. In addition to that, reverse complementary base pairs should not be present in the code. These challenges are overcome by a proper choice of group homomorphisms. Algorithms for storage and retrieval of information in DNA stings are written by using kernel code. Complexities of these algorithms are less compared to the existing algorithms. Construction procedures followed in this paper are capable of constructing codes of required sizes and Reverse complement distance.