OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Comparing 2D and Augmented Reality Visualizations for Microservice System Understandability: A Controlled Experiment
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Microservice-based systems are often complex to understand, especially when their sizes grow. Abstracted views help practitioners with the system understanding from a certain perspective. Recent advancement in interactive data visualization begs the question of whether established software engineering models to visualize system design remain the most suited approach for the service-oriented design of microservices. Our recent work proposed presenting a 3D visualization for microservices in augmented reality. This paper analyzes whether such an approach brings any benefits to practitioners when dealing with selected architectural questions related to system design quality. For this purpose, we conducted a controlled experiment involving 20 participants investigating their performance in identifying service dependency, service cardinality, and bottlenecks. Results show that the 3D enables novices to perform as well as experts in the detection of service dependencies, especially in large systems, while no differences are reported for the identification of service cardinality and bottlenecks. We recommend industry and researchers to further investigate AR for microservice architectural analysis, especially to ease the onboarding of new developers in microservice~projects.
Real-time SLAM Pipeline in Dynamics Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Inspired by the recent success of application of dense data approach by using ORB-SLAM and RGB-D SLAM, we propose a better pipeline of real-time SLAM in dynamics environment. Different from previous SLAM which can only handle static scenes, we are presenting a solution which use RGB-D SLAM as well as YOLO real-time object detection to segment and remove dynamic scene and then construct static scene 3D. We gathered a dataset which allows us to jointly consider semantics, geometry, and physics and thus enables us to reconstruct the static scene while filtering out all dynamic objects.
MetaGrad: Adaptive Gradient Quantization with Hypernetworks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

A popular track of network compression approach is Quantization aware Training (QAT), which accelerates the forward pass during the neural network training and inference. However, not much prior efforts have been made to quantize and accelerate the backward pass during training, even though that contributes around half of the training time. This can be partly attributed to the fact that errors of low-precision gradients during backward cannot be amortized by the training objective as in the QAT setting. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by incorporating the gradients into the computation graph of the next training iteration via a hypernetwork. Various experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset with different CNN network architectures demonstrate that our hypernetwork-based approach can effectively reduce the negative effect of gradient quantization noise and successfully quantizes the gradients to INT4 with only 0.64 accuracy drop for VGG-16 on CIFAR-10.
Multi-GPU aggregation-based AMG preconditioner for iterative linear solvers
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

We present and release in open source format a sparse linear solver which efficiently exploits heterogeneous parallel computers. The solver can be easily integrated into scientific applications that need to solve large and sparse linear systems on modern parallel computers made of hybrid nodes hosting NVIDIA Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerators. The work extends our previous efforts in the exploitation of a single GPU accelerator and proposes an implementation, based on the hybrid MPI-CUDA software environment, of a Krylov-type linear solver relying on an efficient Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) preconditioner already available in the BootCMatchG library. Our design for the hybrid implementation has been driven by the best practices for minimizing data communication overhead when multiple GPUs are employed, yet preserving the efficiency of the single GPU kernels. Strong and weak scalability results on well-known benchmark test cases of the new version of the library are discussed. Comparisons with the Nvidia AmgX solution show an improvement of up to 2.0x in the solve phase.
Graph-based Representation for Image based on Granular-ball
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Current image processing methods usually operate on the finest-granularity unit; that is, the pixel, which leads to challenges in terms of efficiency, robustness, and understandability in deep learning models. We present an improved granular-ball computing method to represent the image as a graph, in which each node expresses a structural block in the image and each edge represents the association between two nodes. Specifically:(1) We design a gradient-based strategy for the adaptive reorganization of all pixels in the image into numerous rectangular regions, each of which can be regarded as one node. (2) Each node has a connection edge with the nodes with which it shares regions. (3) We design a low-dimensional vector as the attribute of each node. All nodes and their corresponding edges form a graphical representation of a digital image. In the experiments, our proposed graph representation is applied to benchmark datasets for image classification tasks, and the efficiency and good understandability demonstrate that our proposed method offers significant potential in artificial intelligence theory and application.
RweetMiner: Automatic identification and categorization of help requests on twitter during disasters
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Catastrophic events create uncertain situations for humanitarian organizations locating and providing aid to affected people. Many people turn to social media during disasters for requesting help and/or providing relief to others. However, the majority of social media posts seeking help could not properly be detected and remained concealed because often they are noisy and ill-formed. Existing systems lack in planning an effective strategy for tweet preprocessing and grasping the contexts of tweets. This research, first of all, formally defines request tweets in the context of social networking sites, hereafter rweets, along with their different primary types and sub-types. Our main contributions are the identification and categorization of rweets. For rweet identification, we employ two approaches, namely a rule-based and logistic regression, and show their high precision and F1 scores. The rweets classification into sub-types such as medical, food, and shelter, using logistic regression shows promising results and outperforms existing works. Finally, we introduce an architecture to store intermediate data to accelerate the development process of the machine learning classifiers.
The Contribution of Knowledge in Visiolinguistic Learning: A Survey on Tasks and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advancements in visiolinguistic (VL) learning have allowed the development of multiple models and techniques that offer several impressive implementations, able to currently resolve a variety of tasks that require the collaboration of vision and language. Current datasets used for VL pre-training only contain a limited amount of visual and linguistic knowledge, thus significantly limiting the generalization capabilities of many VL models. External knowledge sources such as knowledge graphs (KGs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are able to cover such generalization gaps by filling in missing knowledge, resulting in the emergence of hybrid architectures. In the current survey, we analyze tasks that have benefited from such hybrid approaches. Moreover, we categorize existing knowledge sources and types, proceeding to discussion regarding the KG vs LLM dilemma and its potential impact to future hybrid approaches.
Improving the quality of dental crown using a Transformer-based method
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Designing a synthetic crown is a time-consuming, inconsistent, and labor-intensive process. In this work, we present a fully automatic method that not only learns human design dental crowns, but also improves the consistency, functionality, and esthetic of the crowns. Following success in point cloud completion using the transformer-based network, we tackle the problem of the crown generation as a point-cloud completion around a prepared tooth. To this end, we use a geometry-aware transformer to generate dental crowns. Our main contribution is to add a margin line information to the network, as the accuracy of generating a precise margin line directly,determines whether the designed crown and prepared tooth are closely matched to allowappropriateadhesion.Using our ground truth crown, we can extract the margin line as a spline and sample the spline into 1000 points. We feed the obtained margin line along with two neighbor teeth of the prepared tooth and three closest teeth in the opposing jaw. We also add the margin line points to our ground truth crown to increase the resolution at the margin line. Our experimental results show an improvement in the quality of the designed crown when considering the actual context composed of the prepared tooth along with the margin line compared with a crown generated in an empty space as was done by other studies in the literature.
Integration of Feature Selection Techniques using a Sleep Quality Dataset for Comparing Regression Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This research aims to examine the usefulness of integrating various feature selection methods with regression algorithms for sleep quality prediction. A publicly accessible sleep quality dataset is used to analyze the effect of different feature selection techniques on the performance of four regression algorithms - Linear regression, Ridge regression, Lasso Regression and Random Forest Regressor. The results are compared to determine the optimal combination of feature selection techniques and regression algorithms. The conclusion of the study enriches the current literature on using machine learning for sleep quality prediction and has practical significance for personalizing sleep recommendations for individuals.
PRECISION: Decentralized Constrained Min-Max Learning with Low Communication and Sample Complexities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, min-max optimization problems have received increasing attention due to their wide range of applications in machine learning (ML). However, most existing min-max solution techniques are either single-machine or distributed algorithms coordinated by a central server. In this paper, we focus on the decentralized min-max optimization for learning with domain constraints, where multiple agents collectively solve a nonconvex-strongly-concave min-max saddle point problem without coordination from any server. Decentralized min-max optimization problems with domain constraints underpins many important ML applications, including multi-agent ML fairness assurance, and policy evaluations in multi-agent reinforcement learning. We propose an algorithm called PRECISION (proximal gradient-tracking and stochastic recursive variance reduction) that enjoys a convergence rate of $O(1/T)$, where $T$ is the maximum number of iterations. To further reduce sample complexity, we propose PRECISION$^+$ with an adaptive batch size technique. We show that the fast $O(1/T)$ convergence of PRECISION and PRECISION$^+$ to an $ε$-stationary point imply $O(ε^{-2})$ communication complexity and $O(m\sqrt{n}ε^{-2})$ sample complexity, where $m$ is the number of agents and $n$ is the size of dataset at each agent. To our knowledge, this is the first work that achieves $O(ε^{-2})$ in both sample and communication complexities in decentralized min-max learning with domain constraints. Our experiments also corroborate the theoretical results.
Regexes are Hard: Decision-making, Difficulties, and Risks in Programming Regular Expressions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Regular expressions (regexes) are a powerful mechanism for solving string-matching problems. They are supported by all modern programming languages, and have been estimated to appear in more than a third of Python and JavaScript projects. Yet existing studies have focused mostly on one aspect of regex programming: readability. We know little about how developers perceive and program regexes, nor the difficulties that they face. In this paper, we provide the first study of the regex development cycle, with a focus on (1) how developers make decisions throughout the process, (2) what difficulties they face, and (3) how aware they are about serious risks involved in programming regexes. We took a mixed-methods approach, surveying 279 professional developers from a diversity of backgrounds (including top tech firms) for a high-level perspective, and interviewing 17 developers to learn the details about the difficulties that they face and the solutions that they prefer. In brief, regexes are hard. Not only are they hard to read, our participants said that they are hard to search for, hard to validate, and hard to document. They are also hard to master: the majority of our studied developers were unaware of critical security risks that can occur when using regexes, and those who knew of the risks did not deal with them in effective manners. Our findings provide multiple implications for future work, including semantic regex search engines for regex reuse and improved input generators for regex validation.
The First Comprehensive Dataset with Multiple Distortion Types for Visual Just-Noticeable Differences
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, with the development of deep learning, a number of Just Noticeable Difference (JND) datasets have been built for JND modeling. However, all the existing JND datasets only label the JND points based on the level of compression distortion. Hence, JND models learned from such datasets can only be used for image/video compression. As known, JND is a major characteristic of the human visual system (HVS), which reflects the maximum visual distortion that the HVS can tolerate. Hence, a generalized JND modeling should take more kinds of distortion types into account. To benefit JND modeling, this work establishes a generalized JND dataset with a coarse-to-fine JND selection, which contains 106 source images and 1,642 JND maps, covering 25 distortion types. To this end, we proposed a coarse JND candidate selection scheme to select the distorted images from the existing Image Quality Assessment (IQA) datasets as JND candidates instead of generating JND maps ourselves. Then, a fine JND selection is carried out on the JND candidates with a crowdsourced subjective assessment.
SatIn: Hardware for Boolean Satisfiability Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes SatIn, a hardware accelerator for determining boolean satisfiability (SAT) -- an important problem in many domains including verification, security analysis, and planning. SatIn is based on a distributed associative array which performs short, atomic operations that can be composed into high level operations. To overcome scaling limitations imposed by wire delay, we extended the algorithms used in software solvers to function efficiently on a distributed set of nodes communicating with message passing. A cycle-level simulation on real benchmarks shows that SatIn achieves an average 72x speedup against Glucose, the winner of 2016 SAT competition, with the potential to achieve a 113x speedup using two contexts. To quantify SatIn's physical requirements, we placed and routed a single clause using the Synopsys 32nm} educational development kit. We were able to meet a 1ns cycle constraint with our target clause fitting in 4867um^2 and consuming 63.8uW of dynamic power; with a network, this corresponds to 100k clauses consuming 8.3W of dynamic power (not including leakage or global clock power) in a 500mm^2 32nm chip.
On Probability Shaping for 5G MIMO Wireless Channel with Realistic LDPC Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Probability Shaping (PS) is a method to improve a Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) in order to increase reliability of data transmission. It is already implemented in some modern radio broadcasting and optic systems, but not yet in wireless communication systems. Here we adapt PS for the 5G wireless protocol, namely, for relatively small transport block size, strict complexity requirements and actual low-density parity-check codes (LDPC). We support our proposal by a numerical experiment results in Sionna simulator, showing 0.6 dB gain of PS based MCS versus commonly used MCS.
D-HAL: Distributed Hierarchical Adversarial Learning for Multi-Agent Interaction in Autonomous Intersection Management
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM) provides a signal-free intersection scheduling paradigm for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Distributed learning method has emerged as an attractive branch of AIM research. Compared with centralized AIM, distributed AIM can be deployed to CAVs at a lower cost, and compared with rule-based and optimization-based method, learning-based method can treat various complicated real-time intersection scenarios more flexibly. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is the mainstream approach in distributed learning to address AIM problems. However, the large-scale simultaneous interactive decision of multiple agents and the rapid changes of environment caused by interactions pose challenges for DRL, making its reward curve oscillating and hard to converge, and ultimately leading to a compromise in safety and computing efficiency. For this, we propose a non-RL learning framework, called Distributed Hierarchical Adversarial Learning (D-HAL). The framework includes an actor network that generates the actions of each CAV at each step. The immediate discriminator evaluates the interaction performance of the actor network at the current step, while the final discriminator makes the final evaluation of the overall trajectory from a series of interactions. In this framework, the long-term outcome of the behavior no longer motivates the actor network in terms of discounted rewards, but rather through a designed adversarial loss function with discriminative labels. The proposed model is evaluated at a four-way-six-lane intersection, and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on ensuring safety and reducing travel time.
Comparative study of Transformer and LSTM Network with attention mechanism on Image Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In a globalized world at the present epoch of generative intelligence, most of the manual labour tasks are automated with increased efficiency. This can support businesses to save time and money. A crucial component of generative intelligence is the integration of vision and language. Consequently, image captioning become an intriguing area of research. There have been multiple attempts by the researchers to solve this problem with different deep learning architectures, although the accuracy has increased, but the results are still not up to standard. This study buckles down to the comparison of Transformer and LSTM with attention block model on MS-COCO dataset, which is a standard dataset for image captioning. For both the models we have used pretrained Inception-V3 CNN encoder for feature extraction of the images. The Bilingual Evaluation Understudy score (BLEU) is used to checked the accuracy of caption generated by both models. Along with the transformer and LSTM with attention block models,CLIP-diffusion model, M2-Transformer model and the X-Linear Attention model have been discussed with state of the art accuracy.
Time-frequency Network for Robust Speaker Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

The wide deployment of speech-based biometric systems usually demands high-performance speaker recognition algorithms. However, most of the prior works for speaker recognition either process the speech in the frequency domain or time domain, which may produce suboptimal results because both time and frequency domains are important for speaker recognition. In this paper, we attempt to analyze the speech signal in both time and frequency domains and propose the time-frequency network~(TFN) for speaker recognition by extracting and fusing the features in the two domains. Based on the recent advance of deep neural networks, we propose a convolution neural network to encode the raw speech waveform and the frequency spectrum into domain-specific features, which are then fused and transformed into a classification feature space for speaker recognition. Experimental results on the publicly available datasets TIMIT and LibriSpeech show that our framework is effective to combine the information in the two domains and performs better than the state-of-the-art methods for speaker recognition.
Mining both Commonality and Specificity from Multiple Documents for Multi-Document Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The multi-document summarization task requires the designed summarizer to generate a short text that covers the important information of original documents and satisfies content diversity. This paper proposes a multi-document summarization approach based on hierarchical clustering of documents. It utilizes the constructed class tree of documents to extract both the sentences reflecting the commonality of all documents and the sentences reflecting the specificity of some subclasses of these documents for generating a summary, so as to satisfy the coverage and diversity requirements of multi-document summarization. Comparative experiments with different variant approaches on DUC'2002-2004 datasets prove the effectiveness of mining both the commonality and specificity of documents for multi-document summarization. Experiments on DUC'2004 and Multi-News datasets show that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised approaches.
Revisiting Weighted Strategy for Non-stationary Parametric Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Non-stationary parametric bandits have attracted much attention recently. There are three principled ways to deal with non-stationarity, including sliding-window, weighted, and restart strategies. As many non-stationary environments exhibit gradual drifting patterns, the weighted strategy is commonly adopted in real-world applications. However, previous theoretical studies show that its analysis is more involved and the algorithms are either computationally less efficient or statistically suboptimal. This paper revisits the weighted strategy for non-stationary parametric bandits. In linear bandits (LB), we discover that this undesirable feature is due to an inadequate regret analysis, which results in an overly complex algorithm design. We propose a refined analysis framework, which simplifies the derivation and importantly produces a simpler weight-based algorithm that is as efficient as window/restart-based algorithms while retaining the same regret as previous studies. Furthermore, our new framework can be used to improve regret bounds of other parametric bandits, including Generalized Linear Bandits (GLB) and Self-Concordant Bandits (SCB). For example, we develop a simple weighted GLB algorithm with an $\widetilde{O}(k_μ^{\frac{5}{4}} c_μ^{-\frac{3}{4}} d^{\frac{3}{4}} P_T^{\frac{1}{4}}T^{\frac{3}{4}})$ regret, improving the $\widetilde{O}(k_μ^{2} c_μ^{-1}d^{\frac{9}{10}} P_T^{\frac{1}{5}}T^{\frac{4}{5}})$ bound in prior work, where $k_μ$ and $c_μ$ characterize the reward model's nonlinearity, $P_T$ measures the non-stationarity, $d$ and $T$ denote the dimension and time horizon.