OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Robust State Estimation for Legged Robots with Dual Beta Kalman Filter
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Existing state estimation algorithms for legged robots that rely on proprioceptive sensors often overlook foot slippage and leg deformation in the physical world, leading to large estimation errors. To address this limitation, we propose a comprehensive measurement model that accounts for both foot slippage and variable leg length by analyzing the relative motion between foot contact points and the robot's body center. We show that leg length is an observable quantity, meaning that its value can be explicitly inferred by designing an auxiliary filter. To this end, we introduce a dual estimation framework that iteratively employs a parameter filter to estimate the leg length parameters and a state filter to estimate the robot's state. To prevent error accumulation in this iterative framework, we construct a partial measurement model for the parameter filter using the leg static equation. This approach ensures that leg length estimation relies solely on joint torques and foot contact forces, avoiding the influence of state estimation errors on the parameter estimation. Unlike leg length which can be directly estimated, foot slippage cannot be measured directly with the current sensor configuration. However, since foot slippage occurs at a low frequency, it can be treated as outliers in the measurement data. To mitigate the impact of these outliers, we propose the beta Kalman filter (beta KF), which redefines the estimation loss in canonical Kalman filtering using beta divergence. This divergence can assign low weights to outliers in an adaptive manner, thereby enhancing the robustness of the estimation algorithm. These techniques together form the dual beta-Kalman filter (Dual beta KF), a novel algorithm for robust state estimation in legged robots. Experimental results on the Unitree GO2 robot demonstrate that the Dual beta KF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Timescale-agnostic characterisation for collective attention events
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Online communications, and in particular social media, are a key component of how society interacts with and promotes content online. Collective attention on such content can vary wildly. The majority of breaking topics quickly fade into obscurity after only a handful of interactions, while the possibility exists for content to ``go viral'', seeing sustained interaction by large audiences over long periods. In this paper we investigate the mechanisms behind such events and introduce a new representation that enables direct comparison of events over diverse time and volume scales. We find four characteristic behaviours in the usage of hashtags on Twitter that are indicative of different patterns of attention to topics. We go on to develop an agent-based model for generating collective attention events to test the factors affecting emergence of these phenomena. This model can reproduce the characteristic behaviours seen in the Twitter dataset using a small set of parameters, and reveal that three of these behaviours instead represent a continuum determined by model parameters rather than discrete categories. These insights suggest that collective attention in social systems develops in line with a set of universal principles independent of effects inherent to system scale, and the techniques we introduce here present a valuable opportunity to infer the possible mechanisms of attention flow in online communications.
CKGFuzzer: LLM-Based Fuzz Driver Generation Enhanced By Code Knowledge Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the programming capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention. Fuzz testing, a highly effective technique, plays a key role in enhancing software reliability and detecting vulnerabilities. However, traditional fuzz testing tools rely on manually crafted fuzz drivers, which can limit both testing efficiency and effectiveness. To address this challenge, we propose an automated fuzz testing method driven by a code knowledge graph and powered by an LLM-based intelligent agent system, referred to as CKGFuzzer. We approach fuzz driver creation as a code generation task, leveraging the knowledge graph of the code repository to automate the generation process within the fuzzing loop, while continuously refining both the fuzz driver and input seeds. The code knowledge graph is constructed through interprocedural program analysis, where each node in the graph represents a code entity, such as a function or a file. The knowledge graph-enhanced CKGFuzzer not only effectively resolves compilation errors in fuzz drivers and generates input seeds tailored to specific API usage scenarios, but also analyzes fuzz driver crash reports, assisting developers in improving code quality. By querying the knowledge graph of the code repository and learning from API usage scenarios, we can better identify testing targets and understand the specific purpose of each fuzz driver. We evaluated our approach using eight open-source software projects. The experimental results indicate that CKGFuzzer achieved an average improvement of 8.73% in code coverage compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, CKGFuzzer reduced the manual review workload in crash case analysis by 84.4% and successfully detected 11 real bugs (including nine previously unreported bugs) across the tested libraries.
An Efficient Multicast Addressing Encoding Scheme for Multi-Core Neuromorphic Processors
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-core neuromorphic processors are becoming increasingly significant due to their energy-efficient local computing and scalable modular architecture, particularly for event-based processing applications. However, minimizing the cost of inter-core communication, which accounts for the majority of energy usage, remains a challenging issue. Beyond optimizing circuit design at lower abstraction levels, an efficient multicast addressing scheme is crucial. We propose a hierarchical bit string encoding scheme that largely expands the addressing capability of state-of-the-art symbol-based schemes for the same number of routing bits. When put at work with a real neuromorphic task, this hierarchical bit string encoding achieves a reduction in area cost by approximately 29% and decreases energy consumption by about 50%.
Simple But Not Secure: An Empirical Security Analysis of Two-factor Authentication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

To protect users from data breaches and phishing attacks, service providers typically implement two-factor authentication (2FA) to add an extra layer of security against suspicious login attempts. However, since 2FA can sometimes hinder user experience by introducing additional steps, many websites aim to reduce inconvenience by minimizing the frequency of 2FA prompts. One approach to achieve this is by storing the user's ``Remember the Device'' preference in a cookie. As a result, users are only prompted for 2FA when this cookie expires or if they log in from a new device. To understand and improve the security of 2FA systems in real-world settings, we propose SE2FA, a vulnerability evaluation framework designed to detect vulnerabilities in 2FA systems. This framework enables us to analyze the security of 407 2FA systems across popular websites from the Tranco Top 10,000 list. Our analysis and evaluation found three zero-day vulnerabilities on three service providers that could allow an attacker to access a victim's account without possessing the victim's second authentication factor, thereby bypassing 2FA protections entirely. A further investigation found that these vulnerabilities stem from design choices aimed at simplifying 2FA for users but that unintentionally reduce its security effectiveness. We have disclosed these findings to the affected websites and assisted them in mitigating the risks. Based on the insights from this research, we provide practical recommendations for countermeasures to strengthen 2FA security and address these newly identified threats.
GNN-Based Code Annotation Logic for Establishing Security Boundaries in C Code
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Securing sensitive operations in today's interconnected software landscape is crucial yet challenging. Modern platforms rely on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX and ARM TrustZone, to isolate security sensitive code from the main system, reducing the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) and providing stronger assurances. However, identifying which code should reside in TEEs is complex and requires specialized expertise, which is not supported by current automated tools. Existing solutions often migrate entire applications to TEEs, leading to suboptimal use and an increased TCB. To address this gap, we propose Code Annotation Logic (CAL), a pioneering tool that automatically identifies security sensitive components for TEE isolation. CAL analyzes codebases, leveraging a graph-based approach with novel feature construction and employing a custom graph neural network model to accurately determine which parts of the code should be isolated. CAL effectively optimizes TCB, reducing the burden of manual analysis and enhancing overall security. Our contributions include the definition of security sensitive code, the construction and labeling of a comprehensive dataset of source files, a feature rich graph based data preparation pipeline, and the CAL model for TEE integration. Evaluation results demonstrate CAL's efficacy in identifying sensitive code with a recall of 86.05%, an F1 score of 81.56%, and an identification rate of 91.59% for security sensitive functions. By enabling efficient code isolation, CAL advances the secure development of applications using TEEs, offering a practical solution for developers to reduce attack vectors.
Exploring LLMs for Verifying Technical System Specifications Against Requirements
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Requirements engineering is a knowledge intensive process and crucial for the success of engineering projects. The field of knowledge-based requirements engineering (KBRE) aims to support engineers by providing knowledge to assist in the elicitation, validation, and management of system requirements. The advent of large language models (LLMs) opens new opportunities in the field of KBRE. This work experimentally investigates the potential of LLMs in requirements verification. Therein, LLMs are provided with a set of requirements and a textual system specification and are prompted to assess which requirements are fulfilled by the system specification. Different experimental variables such as system specification complexity, the number of requirements, and prompting strategies were analyzed. Formal rule-based systems serve as a benchmark to compare LLM performance to. Requirements and system specifications are derived from the smart-grid domain. Results show that advanced LLMs, like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, achieved f1-scores between 79 % and 94 % in identifying non-fulfilled requirements, indicating potential for LLMs to be leveraged for requirements verification.
Automating Equational Proofs in Dirac Notation
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Dirac notation is widely used in quantum physics and quantum programming languages to define, compute and reason about quantum states. This paper considers Dirac notation from the perspective of automated reasoning. We prove two main results: first, the first-order theory of Dirac notation is decidable, by a reduction to the theory of real closed fields and Tarski's theorem. Then, we prove that validity of equations can be decided efficiently, using term-rewriting techniques. We implement our equivalence checking algorithm in Mathematica, and showcase its efficiency across more than 100 examples from the literature.
ST-Tree with Interpretability for Multivariate Time Series Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multivariate time series classification is of great importance in practical applications and is a challenging task. However, deep neural network models such as Transformers exhibit high accuracy in multivariate time series classification but lack interpretability and fail to provide insights into the decision-making process. On the other hand, traditional approaches based on decision tree classifiers offer clear decision processes but relatively lower accuracy. Swin Transformer (ST) addresses these issues by leveraging self-attention mechanisms to capture both fine-grained local patterns and global patterns. It can also model multi-scale feature representation learning, thereby providing a more comprehensive representation of time series features. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose ST-Tree with interpretability for multivariate time series classification. Specifically, the ST-Tree model combines ST as the backbone network with an additional neural tree model. This integration allows us to fully leverage the advantages of ST in learning time series context while providing interpretable decision processes through the neural tree. This enables researchers to gain clear insights into the model's decision-making process and extract meaningful interpretations. Through experimental evaluations on 10 UEA datasets, we demonstrate that the ST-Tree model improves accuracy in multivariate time series classification tasks and provides interpretability through visualizing the decision-making process across different datasets.
Hash & Adjust: Competitive Demand-Aware Consistent Hashing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Distributed systems often serve dynamic workloads and resource demands evolve over time. Such a temporal behavior stands in contrast to the static and demand-oblivious nature of most data structures used by these systems. In this paper, we are particularly interested in consistent hashing, a fundamental building block in many large distributed systems. Our work is motivated by the hypothesis that a more adaptive approach to consistent hashing can leverage structure in the demand, and hence improve storage utilization and reduce access time. We initiate the study of demand-aware consistent hashing. Our main contribution is H&A, a constant-competitive online algorithm (i.e., it comes with provable performance guarantees over time). H&A is demand-aware and optimizes its internal structure to enable faster access times, while offering a high utilization of storage. We further evaluate H&A empirically.
Towards Degradation-Robust Reconstruction in Generalizable NeRF
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generalizable Neural Radiance Field (GNeRF) across scenes has been proven to be an effective way to avoid per-scene optimization by representing a scene with deep image features of source images. However, despite its potential for real-world applications, there has been limited research on the robustness of GNeRFs to different types of degradation present in the source images. The lack of such research is primarily attributed to the absence of a large-scale dataset fit for training a degradation-robust generalizable NeRF model. To address this gap and facilitate investigations into the degradation robustness of 3D reconstruction tasks, we construct the Objaverse Blur Dataset, comprising 50,000 images from over 1000 settings featuring multiple levels of blur degradation. In addition, we design a simple and model-agnostic module for enhancing the degradation robustness of GNeRFs. Specifically, by extracting 3D-aware features through a lightweight depth estimator and denoiser, the proposed module shows improvement on different popular methods in GNeRFs in terms of both quantitative and visual quality over varying degradation types and levels. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available.
Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Reward-guided Tree Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, test-time scaling has garnered significant attention from the research community, largely due to the substantial advancements of the o1 model released by OpenAI. By allocating more computational resources during the inference phase, large language models~(LLMs) can extensively explore the solution space by generating more thought tokens or diverse solutions, thereby producing more accurate responses. However, developing an o1-like reasoning approach is challenging, and researchers have been making various attempts to advance this open area of research. In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration into enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs through reward-guided tree search algorithms. This framework is implemented by integrating the policy model, reward model, and search algorithm. It is primarily constructed around a tree search algorithm, where the policy model navigates a dynamically expanding tree guided by a specially trained reward model. The implemented framework is denoted as \textbf{STILL-1}. We thoroughly explore various design considerations necessary for implementing this framework and provide a detailed report of the technical aspects. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we focus on mathematical reasoning tasks and conduct extensive evaluations on four challenging datasets, significantly enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs.
Integrating Active Sensing and Rearrangement Planning for Efficient Object Retrieval from Unknown, Confined, Cluttered Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Retrieving target objects from unknown, confined spaces remains a challenging task that requires integrated, task-driven active sensing and rearrangement planning. Previous approaches have independently addressed active sensing and rearrangement planning, limiting their practicality in real-world scenarios. This paper presents a new, integrated heuristic-based active sensing and Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based retrieval planning approach. These components provide feedback to one another to actively sense critical, unobserved areas suitable for the retrieval planner to plan a sequence for relocating path-blocking obstacles and a collision-free trajectory for retrieving the target object. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a robot arm equipped with an in-hand camera in both simulated and real-world confined, cluttered scenarios. Our framework is compared against various state-of-the-art methods. The results indicate that our proposed approach outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin in terms of the success rate, the object rearrangement planning time consumption and the number of planning trials before successfully retrieving the target. Videos can be found at https://youtu.be/tea7I-3RtV0.
QARM: Quantitative Alignment Multi-Modal Recommendation at Kuaishou
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, with the significant evolution of multi-modal large models, many recommender researchers realized the potential of multi-modal information for user interest modeling. In industry, a wide-used modeling architecture is a cascading paradigm: (1) first pre-training a multi-modal model to provide omnipotent representations for downstream services; (2) The downstream recommendation model takes the multi-modal representation as additional input to fit real user-item behaviours. Although such paradigm achieves remarkable improvements, however, there still exist two problems that limit model performance: (1) Representation Unmatching: The pre-trained multi-modal model is always supervised by the classic NLP/CV tasks, while the recommendation models are supervised by real user-item interaction. As a result, the two fundamentally different tasks' goals were relatively separate, and there was a lack of consistent objective on their representations; (2) Representation Unlearning: The generated multi-modal representations are always stored in cache store and serve as extra fixed input of recommendation model, thus could not be updated by recommendation model gradient, further unfriendly for downstream training. Inspired by the two difficulties challenges in downstream tasks usage, we introduce a quantitative multi-modal framework to customize the specialized and trainable multi-modal information for different downstream models.
LLM-IE: A Python Package for Generative Information Extraction with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Objectives: Despite the recent adoption of large language models (LLMs) for biomedical information extraction, challenges in prompt engineering and algorithms persist, with no dedicated software available. To address this, we developed LLM-IE: a Python package for building complete information extraction pipelines. Our key innovation is an interactive LLM agent to support schema definition and prompt design. Materials and Methods: The LLM-IE supports named entity recognition, entity attribute extraction, and relation extraction tasks. We benchmarked on the i2b2 datasets and conducted a system evaluation. Results: The sentence-based prompting algorithm resulted in the best performance while requiring a longer inference time. System evaluation provided intuitive visualization. Discussion: LLM-IE was designed from practical NLP experience in healthcare and has been adopted in internal projects. It should hold great value to the biomedical NLP community. Conclusion: We developed a Python package, LLM-IE, that provides building blocks for robust information extraction pipeline construction.
Enabling steep slope walking on Husky using reduced order modeling and quadratic programming
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Wing-assisted inclined running (WAIR) observed in some young birds, is an attractive maneuver that can be extended to legged aerial systems. This study proposes a control method using a modified Variable Length Inverted Pendulum (VLIP) by assuming a fixed zero moment point and thruster forces collocated at the center of mass of the pendulum. A QP MPC is used to find the optimal ground reaction forces and thruster forces to track a reference position and velocity trajectory. Simulation results of this VLIP model on a slope of 40 degrees is maintained and shows thruster forces that can be obtained through posture manipulation. The simulation also provides insight to how the combined efforts of the thrusters and the tractive forces from the legs make WAIR possible in thruster-assisted legged systems.
COST CA20120 INTERACT Framework of Artificial Intelligence Based Channel Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate channel models are the prerequisite for communication-theoretic investigations as well as system design. Channel modeling generally relies on statistical and deterministic approaches. However, there are still significant limits for the traditional modeling methods in terms of accuracy, generalization ability, and computational complexity. The fundamental reason is that establishing a quantified and accurate mapping between physical environment and channel characteristics becomes increasing challenging for modern communication systems. Here, in the context of COST CA20120 Action, we evaluate and discuss the feasibility and implementation of using artificial intelligence (AI) for channel modeling, and explore where the future of this field lies. Firstly, we present a framework of AI-based channel modeling to characterize complex wireless channels. Then, we highlight in detail some major challenges and present the possible solutions: i) estimating the uncertainty of AI-based channel predictions, ii) integrating prior knowledge of propagation to improve generalization capabilities, and iii) interpretable AI for channel modeling. We present and discuss illustrative numerical results to showcase the capabilities of AI-based channel modeling.