OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Paired 2-disjoint path covers of burnt pancake graphs with faulty elements
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2023
Year: 2023

The burnt pancake graph $BP_n$ is the Cayley graph of the hyperoctahedral group using prefix reversals as generators. Let $\{u,v\}$ and $\{x,y\}$ be any two pairs of distinct vertices of $BP_n$ for $n\geq 4$. We show that there are $u-v$ and $x-y$ paths whose vertices partition the vertex set of $BP_n$ even if $BP_n$ has up to $n-4$ faulty elements. On the other hand, for every $n\ge3$ there is a set of $n-2$ faulty edges or faulty vertices for which such a fault-free disjoint path cover does not exist.
Application of Collaborative Learning Paradigms within Software Engineering Education: A Systematic Mapping Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Collaboration is used in Software Engineering (SE) to develop software. Industry seeks SE graduates with collaboration skills to contribute to productive software development. SE educators can use Collaborative Learning (CL) to help students develop collaboration skills. This paper uses a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) to examine the application of the CL educational theory in SE Education. The SMS identified 14 papers published between 2011 and 2022. We used qualitative analysis to classify the papers into four CL paradigms: Conditions, Effect, Interactions, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). We found a high interest in CSCL, with a shift in student interaction research to computer-mediated technologies. We discussed the 14 papers in depth, describing their goals and further analysing the CSCL research. Almost half the papers did not achieve the appropriate level of supporting evidence; however, calibrating the instruments presented could strengthen findings and support multiple CL paradigms, especially opportunities to learn at the social and community levels, where research was lacking. Though our results demonstrate limited CL educational theory applied in SE Education, we discuss future work to layer the theory on existing study designs for more effective teaching strategies.
Optimizing Task-Specific Timeliness With Edge-Assisted Scheduling for Status Update
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Intelligent real-time applications, such as video surveillance, demand intensive computation to extract status information from raw sensing data. This poses a substantial challenge in orchestrating computation and communication resources to provide fresh status information. In this paper, we consider a scenario where multiple energy-constrained devices served by an edge server. To extract status information, each device can either do the computation locally or offload it to the edge server. A scheduling policy is needed to determine when and where to compute for each device, taking into account communication and computation capabilities, as well as task-specific timeliness requirements. To that end, we first model the timeliness requirements as general penalty functions of Age of Information (AoI). A convex optimization problem is formulated to provide a lower bound of the minimum AoI penalty given system parameters. Using KKT conditions, we proposed a novel scheduling policy which evaluates status update priorities based on communication and computation delays and task-specific timeliness requirements. The proposed policy is applied to an object tracking application and carried out on a large video dataset. Simulation results show that our policy improves tracking accuracy compared with scheduling policies based on video content information.
DCQA: Document-Level Chart Question Answering towards Complex Reasoning and Common-Sense Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Visually-situated languages such as charts and plots are omnipresent in real-world documents. These graphical depictions are human-readable and are often analyzed in visually-rich documents to address a variety of questions that necessitate complex reasoning and common-sense responses. Despite the growing number of datasets that aim to answer questions over charts, most only address this task in isolation, without considering the broader context of document-level question answering. Moreover, such datasets lack adequate common-sense reasoning information in their questions. In this work, we introduce a novel task named document-level chart question answering (DCQA). The goal of this task is to conduct document-level question answering, extracting charts or plots in the document via document layout analysis (DLA) first and subsequently performing chart question answering (CQA). The newly developed benchmark dataset comprises 50,010 synthetic documents integrating charts in a wide range of styles (6 styles in contrast to 3 for PlotQA and ChartQA) and includes 699,051 questions that demand a high degree of reasoning ability and common-sense understanding. Besides, we present the development of a potent question-answer generation engine that employs table data, a rich color set, and basic question templates to produce a vast array of reasoning question-answer pairs automatically. Based on DCQA, we devise an OCR-free transformer for document-level chart-oriented understanding, capable of DLA and answering complex reasoning and common-sense questions over charts in an OCR-free manner. Our DCQA dataset is expected to foster research on understanding visualizations in documents, especially for scenarios that require complex reasoning for charts in the visually-rich document. We implement and evaluate a set of baselines, and our proposed method achieves comparable results.
Optimizing simultaneous autoscaling for serverless cloud computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

This paper explores resource allocation in serverless cloud computing platforms and proposes an optimization approach for autoscaling systems. Serverless computing relieves users from resource management tasks, enabling focus on application functions. However, dynamic resource allocation and function replication based on changing loads remain crucial. Typically, autoscalers in these platforms utilize threshold-based mechanisms to adjust function replicas independently. We model applications as interconnected graphs of functions, where requests probabilistically traverse the graph, triggering associated function execution. Our objective is to develop a control policy that optimally allocates resources on servers, minimizing failed requests and response time in reaction to load changes. Using a fluid approximation model and Separated Continuous Linear Programming (SCLP), we derive an optimal control policy that determines the number of resources per replica and the required number of replicas over time. We evaluate our approach using a simulation framework built with Python and simpy. Comparing against threshold-based autoscaling, our approach demonstrates significant improvements in average response times and failed requests, ranging from 15% to over 300% in most cases. We also explore the impact of system and workload parameters on performance, providing insights into the behavior of our optimization approach under different conditions. Overall, our study contributes to advancing resource allocation strategies, enhancing efficiency and reliability in serverless cloud computing platforms.
Multimodal ChatGPT for Medical Applications: an Experimental Study of GPT-4V
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we critically evaluate the capabilities of the state-of-the-art multimodal large language model, i.e., GPT-4 with Vision (GPT-4V), on Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. Our experiments thoroughly assess GPT-4V's proficiency in answering questions paired with images using both pathology and radiology datasets from 11 modalities (e.g. Microscopy, Dermoscopy, X-ray, CT, etc.) and fifteen objects of interests (brain, liver, lung, etc.). Our datasets encompass a comprehensive range of medical inquiries, including sixteen distinct question types. Throughout our evaluations, we devised textual prompts for GPT-4V, directing it to synergize visual and textual information. The experiments with accuracy score conclude that the current version of GPT-4V is not recommended for real-world diagnostics due to its unreliable and suboptimal accuracy in responding to diagnostic medical questions. In addition, we delineate seven unique facets of GPT-4V's behavior in medical VQA, highlighting its constraints within this complex arena. The complete details of our evaluation cases are accessible at https://github.com/ZhilingYan/GPT4V-Medical-Report.
A multi-modal table tennis robot system
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, robotic table tennis has become a popular research challenge for perception and robot control. Here, we present an improved table tennis robot system with high accuracy vision detection and fast robot reaction. Based on previous work, our system contains a KUKA robot arm with 6 DOF, with four frame-based cameras and two additional event-based cameras. We developed a novel calibration approach to calibrate this multimodal perception system. For table tennis, spin estimation is crucial. Therefore, we introduced a novel, and more accurate spin estimation approach. Finally, we show how combining the output of an event-based camera and a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) can be used for accurate ball detection.
Gauge-optimal approximate learning for small data classification problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Small data learning problems are characterized by a significant discrepancy between the limited amount of response variable observations and the large feature space dimension. In this setting, the common learning tools struggle to identify the features important for the classification task from those that bear no relevant information, and cannot derive an appropriate learning rule which allows to discriminate between different classes. As a potential solution to this problem, here we exploit the idea of reducing and rotating the feature space in a lower-dimensional gauge and propose the Gauge-Optimal Approximate Learning (GOAL) algorithm, which provides an analytically tractable joint solution to the dimension reduction, feature segmentation and classification problems for small data learning problems. We prove that the optimal solution of the GOAL algorithm consists in piecewise-linear functions in the Euclidean space, and that it can be approximated through a monotonically convergent algorithm which presents -- under the assumption of a discrete segmentation of the feature space -- a closed-form solution for each optimization substep and an overall linear iteration cost scaling. The GOAL algorithm has been compared to other state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) tools on both synthetic data and challenging real-world applications from climate science and bioinformatics (i.e., prediction of the El Nino Southern Oscillation and inference of epigenetically-induced gene-activity networks from limited experimental data). The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the reported best competitors for these problems both in learning performance and computational cost.
Updated Standard for Secure Satellite Communications: Analysis of Satellites, Attack Vectors, Existing Standards, and Enterprise and Security Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Satellites play a vital role in remote communication where traditional communication mediums struggle to provide benefits over associated costs and efficiency. In recent years, satellite communication has achieved utter interest in the industry due to the achievement of high data rates through the massive deployment of LEO satellites. Because of the complex diversity in types of satellites, communication methodologies, technological obstacles, environmental limitations, elements in the entire ecosystem, massive financial impact, geopolitical conflict and domination, easier access to satellite communications, and various other reasons, the threat vectors are rising in the threat landscape. To achieve resilience against those, only technological solutions are not enough. An effective approach will be through security standards. However, there is a considerable gap in the industry regarding a generic security standard framework for satellite communication and space data systems. A few countries and space agencies have their own standard framework and private policies. However, many of those are either private, serve the specific requirements of specific missions, or have not been updated for a long time. This project report will focus on identifying, categorizing, comparing, and assessing elements, threat landscape, enterprise security architectures, and available public standards of satellite communication and space data systems. After that, it will utilize the knowledge to propose an updated standard framework for secure satellite communications and space data systems.
PACuna: Automated Fine-Tuning of Language Models for Particle Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Navigating the landscape of particle accelerators has become increasingly challenging with recent surges in contributions. These intricate devices challenge comprehension, even within individual facilities. To address this, we introduce PACuna, a fine-tuned language model refined through publicly available accelerator resources like conferences, pre-prints, and books. We automated data collection and question generation to minimize expert involvement and make the data publicly available. PACuna demonstrates proficiency in addressing intricate accelerator questions, validated by experts. Our approach shows adapting language models to scientific domains by fine-tuning technical texts and auto-generated corpora capturing the latest developments can further produce pre-trained models to answer some intricate questions that commercially available assistants cannot and can serve as intelligent assistants for individual facilities.
Transfer Learning in Transformer-Based Demand Forecasting For Home Energy Management System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Increasingly, homeowners opt for photovoltaic (PV) systems and/or battery storage to minimize their energy bills and maximize renewable energy usage. This has spurred the development of advanced control algorithms that maximally achieve those goals. However, a common challenge faced while developing such controllers is the unavailability of accurate forecasts of household power consumption, especially for shorter time resolutions (15 minutes) and in a data-efficient manner. In this paper, we analyze how transfer learning can help by exploiting data from multiple households to improve a single house's load forecasting. Specifically, we train an advanced forecasting model (a temporal fusion transformer) using data from multiple different households, and then finetune this global model on a new household with limited data (i.e. only a few days). The obtained models are used for forecasting power consumption of the household for the next 24 hours~(day-ahead) at a time resolution of 15 minutes, with the intention of using these forecasts in advanced controllers such as Model Predictive Control. We show the benefit of this transfer learning setup versus solely using the individual new household's data, both in terms of (i) forecasting accuracy ($\sim$15\% MAE reduction) and (ii) control performance ($\sim$2\% energy cost reduction), using real-world household data.
Can we Quantify Trust? Towards a Trust-based Resilient SIoT Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The emerging yet promising paradigm of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) integrates the notion of the Internet of Things with human social networks. In SIoT, objects, i.e., things, have the capability to socialize with the other objects in the SIoT network and can establish their social network autonomously by modeling human behaviour. The notion of trust is imperative in realizing these characteristics of socialization in order to assess the reliability of autonomous collaboration. The perception of trust is evolving in the era of SIoT as an extension to traditional security triads in an attempt to offer secure and reliable services, and is considered as an imperative aspect of any SIoT system for minimizing the probable risk of autonomous decision-making. This research investigates the idea of trust quantification by employing trust measurement in terms of direct trust, indirect trust as a recommendation, and the degree of SIoT relationships in terms of social similarities (community-of-interest, friendship, and co-work relationships). A weighted sum approach is subsequently employed to synthesize all the trust features in order to ascertain a single trust score. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model in segregating trustworthy and untrustworthy objects and via identifying the dynamic behaviour (i.e., trust-related attacks) of the SIoT objects.
Predicting recovery following stroke: deep learning, multimodal data and feature selection using explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning offers great potential for automated prediction of post-stroke symptoms and their response to rehabilitation. Major challenges for this endeavour include the very high dimensionality of neuroimaging data, the relatively small size of the datasets available for learning, and how to effectively combine neuroimaging and tabular data (e.g. demographic information and clinical characteristics). This paper evaluates several solutions based on two strategies. The first is to use 2D images that summarise MRI scans. The second is to select key features that improve classification accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the novel approach of training a convolutional neural network (CNN) on images that combine regions-of-interest extracted from MRIs, with symbolic representations of tabular data. We evaluate a series of CNN architectures (both 2D and a 3D) that are trained on different representations of MRI and tabular data, to predict whether a composite measure of post-stroke spoken picture description ability is in the aphasic or non-aphasic range. MRI and tabular data were acquired from 758 English speaking stroke survivors who participated in the PLORAS study. The classification accuracy for a baseline logistic regression was 0.678 for lesion size alone, rising to 0.757 and 0.813 when initial symptom severity and recovery time were successively added. The highest classification accuracy 0.854 was observed when 8 regions-of-interest was extracted from each MRI scan and combined with lesion size, initial severity and recovery time in a 2D Residual Neural Network.Our findings demonstrate how imaging and tabular data can be combined for high post-stroke classification accuracy, even when the dataset is small in machine learning terms. We conclude by proposing how the current models could be improved to achieve even higher levels of accuracy using images from hospital scanners.
Unveiling the Evolution of Mobile Networks: From 1G to 7G
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

The evolution of cellular networks has played a pivotal role in shaping the modern telecommunications landscape. This paper explores the journey of cellular network generations, beginning with the introduction of Japan's first commercial 1G network by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corporation in 1979. This analog wireless network quickly expanded to become the country's first national 1G network within a remarkably short period. The transition from analog to digital networks marked a significant turning point in the wireless industry, enabled by advancements in MOSFET (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) technology. MOSFET, originally developed at Bell Labs in 1959, underwent modifications to suit cellular networks in the early 1990s, facilitating the shift to digital wireless mobile networks. The advent of the 2G generation brought forth the first commercial digital cellular network in 1991, sparking recognition among manufacturers and mobile network operators of the importance of robust networks and efficient architecture. As the wireless industry continued to experience exponential growth, the significance of effective network infrastructure became increasingly evident. In this research, our aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire spectrum of cellular network generations, ranging from 1G to the potential future of 7G. By tracing the evolution of these networks, we aim to shed light on the transformative developments that have shaped the telecommunications landscape and explore the possibilities that lie ahead in the realm of cellular technology.
Generalized Category Discovery with Clustering Assignment Consistency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Generalized category discovery (GCD) is a recently proposed open-world task. Given a set of images consisting of labeled and unlabeled instances, the goal of GCD is to automatically cluster the unlabeled samples using information transferred from the labeled dataset. The unlabeled dataset comprises both known and novel classes. The main challenge is that unlabeled novel class samples and unlabeled known class samples are mixed together in the unlabeled dataset. To address the GCD without knowing the class number of unlabeled dataset, we propose a co-training-based framework that encourages clustering consistency. Specifically, we first introduce weak and strong augmentation transformations to generate two sufficiently different views for the same sample. Then, based on the co-training assumption, we propose a consistency representation learning strategy, which encourages consistency between feature-prototype similarity and clustering assignment. Finally, we use the discriminative embeddings learned from the semi-supervised representation learning process to construct an original sparse network and use a community detection method to obtain the clustering results and the number of categories simultaneously. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three generic benchmarks and three fine-grained visual recognition datasets. Especially in the ImageNet-100 data set, our method significantly exceeds the best baseline by 15.5\% and 7.0\% on the \texttt{Novel} and \texttt{All} classes, respectively.
Optimal Status Updates for Minimizing Age of Correlated Information in IoT Networks with Energy Harvesting Sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Many real-time applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) need to deal with correlated information generated by multiple sensors. The design of efficient status update strategies that minimize the Age of Correlated Information (AoCI) is a key factor. In this paper, we consider an IoT network consisting of sensors equipped with the energy harvesting (EH) capability. We optimize the average AoCI at the data fusion center (DFC) by appropriately managing the energy harvested by sensors, whose true battery states are unobservable during the decision-making process. Particularly, we first formulate the dynamic status update procedure as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where the environmental dynamics are unknown to the DFC. In order to address the challenges arising from the causality of energy usage, unknown environmental dynamics, unobservability of sensors'true battery states, and large-scale discrete action space, we devise a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based dynamic status update algorithm. The algorithm leverages the advantages of the soft actor-critic and long short-term memory techniques. Meanwhile, it incorporates our proposed action decomposition and mapping mechanism. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm by comparing it with available DRL algorithms for POMDPs.