OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MiddleNet: A Unified, High-Performance NFV and Middlebox Framework with eBPF and DPDK
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Traditional network resident functions (e.g., firewalls, network address translation) and middleboxes (caches, load balancers) have moved from purpose-built appliances to software-based components. However, L2/L3 network functions (NFs) are being implemented on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms that extensively exploit kernel-bypass technology. They often use DPDK for zero-copy delivery and high performance. On the other hand, L4/L7 middleboxes, which have a greater emphasis on functionality, take advantage of a full-fledged kernel-based system. L2/L3 NFs and L4/L7 middleboxes continue to be handled by distinct platforms on different nodes. This paper proposes MiddleNet that develops a unified network resident function framework that supports L2/L3 NFs and L4/L7 middleboxes. MiddleNet supports function chains that are essential in both NFV and middlebox environments. MiddleNet uses the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) library for zero-copy packet delivery without interrupt-based processing, to enable the "bump-in-the-wire" L2/L3 processing performance required of NFV. To support L4/L7 middlebox functionality, MiddleNet utilizes a consolidated, kernel-based protocol stack for processing, avoiding a dedicated protocol stack for each function. MiddleNet fully exploits the event-driven capabilities of the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) and seamlessly integrates it with shared memory for high-performance communication in L4/L7 middlebox function chains. The overheads for MiddleNet in L4/L7 are strictly load-proportional, without needing the dedicated CPU cores of DPDK-based approaches. MiddleNet supports flow-dependent packet processing by leveraging Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) to dynamically select the packet processing needed (Layers 2 - 7). Our experimental results show that MiddleNet achieves high performance in such a unified environment.
Enhanced Sliding Window Superposition Coding for Industrial Automation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The introduction of 5G has changed the wireless communication industry. Whereas previous generations of cellular technology are mainly based on communication for people, the wireless industry is discovering that 5G may be an era of communications that is mainly focused on machine-to-machine communication. The application of Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication in factory automation is an area of great interest as it unlocks potential applications that traditional wired communications did not allow. In particular, the decrease in the inter-device distance has led to the discussion of coding schemes for these interference-filled channels. To meet the latency and accuracy requirements of URLLC, Non-orthogonal multiple access has been proposed but it comes with associated challenges. In order to combat the issue of interference, an enhanced version of Sliding window superposition coding has been proposed as a method of coding that yields performance gains in scenarios with high interference. This paper examines the abilities of this coding scheme in a broadcast network in 5G to evaluate its robustness in situations where interference is treated as noise in a factory automation setting. This work shows improvements of enhanced sliding window superposition coding over benchmark protocols in the high-reliability requirement regions of block error rates $\approx 10^{-6}$.
Grasping Student: semi-supervised learning for robotic manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Gathering real-world data from the robot quickly becomes a bottleneck when constructing a robot learning system for grasping. In this work, we design a semi-supervised grasping system that, on top of a small sample of robot experience, takes advantage of images of products to be picked, which are collected without any interactions with the robot. We validate our findings both in the simulation and in the real world. In the regime of a small number of robot training samples, taking advantage of the unlabeled data allows us to achieve performance at the level of 10-fold bigger dataset size used by the baseline. The code and datasets used in the paper will be released at https://github.com/nomagiclab/grasping-student.
Full Point Encoding for Local Feature Aggregation in 3D Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Point cloud processing methods exploit local point features and global context through aggregation which does not explicity model the internal correlations between local and global features. To address this problem, we propose full point encoding which is applicable to convolution and transformer architectures. Specifically, we propose Full Point Convolution (FPConv) and Full Point Transformer (FPTransformer) architectures. The key idea is to adaptively learn the weights from local and global geometric connections, where the connections are established through local and global correlation functions respectively. FPConv and FPTransformer simultaneously model the local and global geometric relationships as well as their internal correlations, demonstrating strong generalization ability and high performance. FPConv is incorporated in classical hierarchical network architectures to achieve local and global shape-aware learning. In FPTransformer, we introduce full point position encoding in self-attention, that hierarchically encodes each point position in the global and local receptive field. We also propose a shape aware downsampling block which takes into account the local shape and the global context. Experimental comparison to existing methods on benchmark datasets show the efficacy of FPConv and FPTransformer for semantic segmentation, object detection, classification, and normal estimation tasks. In particular, we achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results of 76% mIoU on S3DIS 6-fold and 72.2% on S3DIS Area5.
Radio astronomical images object detection and segmentation: A benchmark on deep learning methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, deep learning has been successfully applied in various scientific domains. Following these promising results and performances, it has recently also started being evaluated in the domain of radio astronomy. In particular, since radio astronomy is entering the Big Data era, with the advent of the largest telescope in the world - the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the task of automatic object detection and instance segmentation is crucial for source finding and analysis. In this work, we explore the performance of the most affirmed deep learning approaches, applied to astronomical images obtained by radio interferometric instrumentation, to solve the task of automatic source detection. This is carried out by applying models designed to accomplish two different kinds of tasks: object detection and semantic segmentation. The goal is to provide an overview of existing techniques, in terms of prediction performance and computational efficiency, to scientists in the astrophysics community who would like to employ machine learning in their research.
Sketching with Spherical Designs for Noisy Data Fitting on Spheres
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a sketching strategy based on spherical designs, which is applied to the classical spherical basis function approach for massive spherical data fitting. We conduct theoretical analysis and numerical verifications to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed { sketching} strategy. From the theoretical side, we prove that sketching based on spherical designs can reduce the computational burden of the spherical basis function approach without sacrificing its approximation capability. In particular, we provide upper and lower bounds for the proposed { sketching} strategy to fit noisy data on spheres. From the experimental side, we numerically illustrate the feasibility of the sketching strategy by showing its comparable fitting performance with the spherical basis function approach. These interesting findings show that the proposed sketching strategy is capable of fitting massive and noisy data on spheres.
Robustness Evaluation in Hand Pose Estimation Models using Metamorphic Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Hand pose estimation (HPE) is a task that predicts and describes the hand poses from images or video frames. When HPE models estimate hand poses captured in a laboratory or under controlled environments, they normally deliver good performance. However, the real-world environment is complex, and various uncertainties may happen, which could degrade the performance of HPE models. For example, the hands could be occluded, the visibility of hands could be reduced by imperfect exposure rate, and the contour of hands prone to be blurred during fast hand movements. In this work, we adopt metamorphic testing to evaluate the robustness of HPE models and provide suggestions on the choice of HPE models for different applications. The robustness evaluation was conducted on four state-of-the-art models, namely MediaPipe hands, OpenPose, BodyHands, and NSRM hand. We found that on average more than 80\% of the hands could not be identified by BodyHands, and at least 50\% of hands could not be identified by MediaPipe hands when diagonal motion blur is introduced, while an average of more than 50\% of strongly underexposed hands could not be correctly estimated by NSRM hand. Similarly, applying occlusions on only four hand joints will also largely degrade the performance of these models. The experimental results show that occlusions, illumination variations, and motion blur are the main obstacles to the performance of existing HPE models. These findings may pave the way for researchers to improve the performance and robustness of hand pose estimation models and their applications.
Safe Machine-Learning-supported Model Predictive Force and Motion Control in Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Many robotic tasks, such as human-robot interactions or the handling of fragile objects, require tight control and limitation of appearing forces and moments alongside sensible motion control to achieve safe yet high-performance operation. We propose a learning-supported model predictive force and motion control scheme that provides stochastic safety guarantees while adapting to changing situations. Gaussian processes are used to learn the uncertain relations that map the robot's states to the forces and moments. The model predictive controller uses these Gaussian process models to achieve precise motion and force control under stochastic constraint satisfaction. As the uncertainty only occurs in the static model parts -- the output equations -- a computationally efficient stochastic MPC formulation is used. Analysis of recursive feasibility of the optimal control problem and convergence of the closed loop system for the static uncertainty case are given. Chance constraint formulation and back-offs are constructed based on the variance of the Gaussian process to guarantee safe operation. The approach is illustrated on a lightweight robot in simulations and experiments.
Towards Self-adaptive Mutation in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Parameter control has succeeded in accelerating the convergence process of evolutionary algorithms. While empirical and theoretical studies have shed light on the behavior of algorithms for single-objective optimization, little is known about how self-adaptation influences multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. In this work, we contribute (1) extensive experimental analysis of the Global Simple Evolutionary Multi-objective Algorithm (GSEMO) variants on classic problems, such as OneMinMax, LOTZ, COCZ, and (2) a novel version of GSEMO with self-adaptive mutation. To enable self-adaptation in GSEMO, we explore three self-adaptive mutation techniques from single-objective optimization and use various performance metrics, such as hypervolume and inverted generational distance, to guide the adaptation. Our experiments show that adapting the mutation rate based on single-objective optimization and hypervolume can speed up the convergence of GSEMO. Moreover, we propose a GSEMO with self-adaptive mutation, which considers optimizing for single objectives and adjusts the mutation rate for each solution individually. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the GSEMO with static mutation rates across all the tested problems. This work provides a comprehensive benchmarking study for MOEAs and complements existing theoretical runtime analysis. Our proposed algorithm addresses interesting issues for designing MOEAs for future practical applications.
Differential Privacy Meets Neural Network Pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

A major challenge in applying differential privacy to training deep neural network models is scalability.The widely-used training algorithm, differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), struggles with training moderately-sized neural network models for a value of epsilon corresponding to a high level of privacy protection. In this paper, we explore the idea of dimensionality reduction inspired by neural network pruning to improve the scalability of DP-SGD. We study the interplay between neural network pruning and differential privacy, through the two modes of parameter updates. We call the first mode, parameter freezing, where we pre-prune the network and only update the remaining parameters using DP-SGD. We call the second mode, parameter selection, where we select which parameters to update at each step of training and update only those selected using DP-SGD. In these modes, we use public data for freezing or selecting parameters to avoid privacy loss incurring in these steps. Naturally, the closeness between the private and public data plays an important role in the success of this paradigm. Our experimental results demonstrate how decreasing the parameter space improves differentially private training. Moreover, by studying two popular forms of pruning which do not rely on gradients and do not incur an additional privacy loss, we show that random selection performs on par with magnitude-based selection when it comes to DP-SGD training.
Continuous Function Structured in Multilayer Perceptron for Global Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The gradient information of multilayer perceptron with a linear neuron is modified with functional derivative for the global minimum search benchmarking problems. From this approach, we show that the landscape of the gradient derived from given continuous function using functional derivative can be the MLP-like form with ax+b neurons. In this extent, the suggested algorithm improves the availability of the optimization process to deal all the parameters in the problem set simultaneously. The functionality of this method could be improved through intentionally designed convex function with Kullack-Liebler divergence applied to cost value as well.
Fairness-driven Skilled Task Assignment with Extra Budget in Spatial Crowdsourcing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

With the prevalence of mobile devices and ubiquitous wireless networks, spatial crowdsourcing has attracted much attention from both academic and industry communities. On spatial crowdsourcing platforms, task requesters can publish spatial tasks and workers need to move to destinations to perform them. In this paper, we formally define the Skilled Task Assignment with Extra Budget (STAEB), which aims to maximize total platform revenue and achieve fairness for workers and task requesters. In the STAEB problem, the complex task needs more than one worker to satisfy its skill requirement and has the extra budget to subsidize extra travel cost of workers to attract more workers. We prove that the STAEB problem is NP-complete. Therefore, two approximation algorithms are proposed to solve it, including a greedy approach and a game-theoretic approach. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approaches.
Mining the contribution of intensive care clinical course to outcome after traumatic brain injury
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Existing methods to characterise the evolving condition of traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) do not capture the context necessary for individualising treatment. Here, we integrate all heterogenous data stored in medical records (1,166 pre-ICU and ICU variables) to model the individualised contribution of clinical course to six-month functional outcome on the Glasgow Outcome Scale - Extended (GOSE). On a prospective cohort (n=1,550, 65 centres) of TBI patients, we train recurrent neural network models to map a token-embedded time series representation of all variables (including missing values) to an ordinal GOSE prognosis every two hours. The full range of variables explains up to 52% (95% CI: 50%-54%) of the ordinal variance in functional outcome. Up to 91% (95% CI: 90%-91%) of this explanation is derived from pre-ICU and admission information (i.e., static variables). Information collected in the ICU (i.e., dynamic variables) increases explanation (by up to 5% [95% CI: 4%-6%]), though not enough to counter poorer overall performance in longer-stay (>5.75 days) patients. Highest-contributing variables include physician-based prognoses, CT features, and markers of neurological function. Whilst static information currently accounts for the majority of functional outcome explanation after TBI, data-driven analysis highlights investigative avenues to improve dynamic characterisation of longer-stay patients. Moreover, our modelling strategy proves useful for converting large patient records into interpretable time series with missing data integration and minimal processing.
EvConv: Fast CNN Inference on Event Camera Inputs For High-Speed Robot Perception
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Event cameras capture visual information with a high temporal resolution and a wide dynamic range. This enables capturing visual information at fine time granularities (e.g., microseconds) in rapidly changing environments. This makes event cameras highly useful for high-speed robotics tasks involving rapid motion, such as high-speed perception, object tracking, and control. However, convolutional neural network inference on event camera streams cannot currently perform real-time inference at the high speeds at which event cameras operate - current CNN inference times are typically closer in order of magnitude to the frame rates of regular frame-based cameras. Real-time inference at event camera rates is necessary to fully leverage the high frequency and high temporal resolution that event cameras offer. This paper presents EvConv, a new approach to enable fast inference on CNNs for inputs from event cameras. We observe that consecutive inputs to the CNN from an event camera have only small differences between them. Thus, we propose to perform inference on the difference between consecutive input tensors, or the increment. This enables a significant reduction in the number of floating-point operations required (and thus the inference latency) because increments are very sparse. We design EvConv to leverage the irregular sparsity in increments from event cameras and to retain the sparsity of these increments across all layers of the network. We demonstrate a reduction in the number of floating operations required in the forward pass by up to 98%. We also demonstrate a speedup of up to 1.6X for inference using CNNs for tasks such as depth estimation, object recognition, and optical flow estimation, with almost no loss in accuracy.
Cost-Effective Hyperparameter Optimization for Large Language Model Generation Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked significant interest in their generative capabilities, leading to the development of various commercial applications. The high cost of using the models drives application builders to maximize the value of generation under a limited inference budget. This paper presents a study of optimizing inference hyperparameters such as the number of responses, temperature and max tokens, which significantly affects the utility/cost of text generation. We design a framework named EcoOptiGen which leverages economical hyperparameter optimization and cost-based pruning. Experiments with the GPT-3.5/GPT-4 models on a variety of tasks verify its effectiveness. EcoOptiGen is implemented in the `autogen' package of the FLAML library: \url{https://aka.ms/autogen}.
Towards Better Web Search Performance: Pre-training, Fine-tuning and Learning to Rank
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes the approach of the THUIR team at the WSDM Cup 2023 Pre-training for Web Search task. This task requires the participant to rank the relevant documents for each query. We propose a new data pre-processing method and conduct pre-training and fine-tuning with the processed data. Moreover, we extract statistical, axiomatic, and semantic features to enhance the ranking performance. After the feature extraction, diverse learning-to-rank models are employed to merge those features. The experimental results show the superiority of our proposal. We finally achieve second place in this competition.
Medical Waste Sorting: a computer vision approach for assisted primary sorting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Medical waste, i.e. waste produced during medical activities in hospitals, clinics and laboratories, represents hazardous waste whose management involves special care and high costs. However, this kind of waste contains a significant fraction of highly valued materials that can enter a circular economy process. To this end, in this paper, we propose a computer vision approach for assisting in the primary sorting of medical waste. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated on a representative dataset we collected and made available to the community, with which we have trained a model that achieves 100\% accuracy, and a new dataset on which the trained model exhibits good generalization.
Fast offset corrected in-memory training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In-memory computing with resistive crossbar arrays has been suggested to accelerate deep-learning workloads in highly efficient manner. To unleash the full potential of in-memory computing, it is desirable to accelerate the training as well as inference for large deep neural networks (DNNs). In the past, specialized in-memory training algorithms have been proposed that not only accelerate the forward and backward passes, but also establish tricks to update the weight in-memory and in parallel. However, the state-of-the-art algorithm (Tiki-Taka version 2 (TTv2)) still requires near perfect offset correction and suffers from potential biases that might occur due to programming and estimation inaccuracies, as well as longer-term instabilities of the device materials. Here we propose and describe two new and improved algorithms for in-memory computing (Chopped-TTv2 (c-TTv2) and Analog Gradient Accumulation with Dynamic reference (AGAD)), that retain the same runtime complexity but correct for any remaining offsets using choppers. These algorithms greatly relax the device requirements and thus expanding the scope of possible materials potentially employed for such fast in-memory DNN training.