OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DHGS: Decoupled Hybrid Gaussian Splatting for Driving Scene
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Existing Gaussian splatting methods often fall short in achieving satisfactory novel view synthesis in driving scenes, primarily due to the absence of crafty designs and geometric constraints for the involved elements. This paper introduces a novel neural rendering method termed Decoupled Hybrid Gaussian Splatting (DHGS), targeting at promoting the rendering quality of novel view synthesis for static driving scenes. The novelty of this work lies in the decoupled and hybrid pixel-level blender for road and non-road layers, without the conventional unified differentiable rendering logic for the entire scene. Still, consistency and continuity in superimposition are preserved through the proposed depth-ordered hybrid rendering strategy. Additionally, an implicit road representation comprised of a Signed Distance Function (SDF) is trained to supervise the road surface with subtle geometric attributes. Accompanied by the use of auxiliary transmittance loss and consistency loss, novel images with imperceptible boundary and elevated fidelity are ultimately obtained. Substantial experiments on the Waymo dataset prove that DHGS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The project page where more video evidences are given is: https://ironbrotherstyle.github.io/dhgs_web.
No-brainer: Morphological Computation driven Adaptive Behavior in Soft Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

It is prevalent in contemporary AI and robotics to separately postulate a brain modeled by neural networks and employ it to learn intelligent and adaptive behavior. While this method has worked very well for many types of tasks, it isn't the only type of intelligence that exists in nature. In this work, we study the ways in which intelligent behavior can be created without a separate and explicit brain for robot control, but rather solely as a result of the computation occurring within the physical body of a robot. Specifically, we show that adaptive and complex behavior can be created in voxel-based virtual soft robots by using simple reactive materials that actively change the shape of the robot, and thus its behavior, under different environmental cues. We demonstrate a proof of concept for the idea of closed-loop morphological computation, and show that in our implementation, it enables behavior mimicking logic gates, enabling us to demonstrate how such behaviors may be combined to build up more complex collective behaviors.
A Tale of Two DL Cities: When Library Tests Meet Compiler
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Learning (DL) compilers typically load a DL model and optimize it with intermediate representation.Existing DL compiler testing techniques mainly focus on model optimization stages, but rarely explore bug detection at the model loading stage. Effectively testing the model loading stage requires covering diverse usages of each DL operator from various DL libraries, which shares a common objective with DL library testing, indicating that the embedded knowledge in DL library tests is beneficial for testing the model loading stage of DL compilers. In this work, we propose OPERA to extract such domain knowledge from the test inputs for DL libraries. OPERA constructs diverse tests from the various test inputs for DL libraries (including the test inputs documented in DL libraries and those generated by recent fuzzers). In addition, it incorporates a diversity-based test prioritization strategy to migrate and execute those test inputs that are more likely to detect diverse bugs earlier. We considered three sources of tests in DL libraries for migration and used eight frontends from three DL compilers (e.g., TVM, TensorRT, and OpenVINO) for evaluation. OPERA detected 170 previously unknown bugs in total, 90 of which have been confirmed/fixed by developers, demonstrating the effectiveness of such the migration-based idea. The test prioritization strategy in OPERA improves testing efficiency with migrated tests by 11.9%~47.4% on average compared to general test prioritization strategies.
ExaWorks Software Development Kit: A Robust and Scalable Collection of Interoperable Workflow Technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Scientific discovery increasingly requires executing heterogeneous scientific workflows on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. Heterogeneous workflows contain different types of tasks (e.g., simulation, analysis, and learning) that need to be mapped, scheduled, and launched on different computing. That requires a software stack that enables users to code their workflows and automate resource management and workflow execution. Currently, there are many workflow technologies with diverse levels of robustness and capabilities, and users face difficult choices of software that can effectively and efficiently support their use cases on HPC machines, especially when considering the latest exascale platforms. We contributed to addressing this issue by developing the ExaWorks Software Development Kit (SDK). The SDK is a curated collection of workflow technologies engineered following current best practices and specifically designed to work on HPC platforms. We present our experience with (1) curating those technologies, (2) integrating them to provide users with new capabilities, (3) developing a continuous integration platform to test the SDK on DOE HPC platforms, (4) designing a dashboard to publish the results of those tests, and (5) devising an innovative documentation platform to help users to use those technologies. Our experience details the requirements and the best practices needed to curate workflow technologies, and it also serves as a blueprint for the capabilities and services that DOE will have to offer to support a variety of scientific heterogeneous workflows on the newly available exascale HPC platforms.
6G at $\frac{1}{6}g$: The Future of Cislunar Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

What will the future of cislunar communications be? The ever-expanding horizons of the space exploration missions, and the need for establishing sustainable space communication and navigation infrastructure necessitate to think this question thoroughly. In this article, we examine how some of the concepts of 6G technologies developed for terrestrial networks can be relevant in the context of cislunar networks. We discuss how 6G concepts, such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, quantum-resistant physical layer security, private information read/write/cache networks, semantic and goal-oriented communications, information freshness based quality of communication metrics, multi-relay and cooperative networks, hold the potential to shape the future of cislunar communications.
Benchmarks as Microscopes: A Call for Model Metrology
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Modern language models (LMs) pose a new challenge in capability assessment. Static benchmarks inevitably saturate without providing confidence in the deployment tolerances of LM-based systems, but developers nonetheless claim that their models have generalized traits such as reasoning or open-domain language understanding based on these flawed metrics. The science and practice of LMs requires a new approach to benchmarking which measures specific capabilities with dynamic assessments. To be confident in our metrics, we need a new discipline of model metrology -- one which focuses on how to generate benchmarks that predict performance under deployment. Motivated by our evaluation criteria, we outline how building a community of model metrology practitioners -- one focused on building tools and studying how to measure system capabilities -- is the best way to meet these needs to and add clarity to the AI discussion.
Towards an Improved Taxonomy of Attacks related to Digital Identities and Identity Management Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Digital transformation with the adoption of cloud technologies, outsourcing, and working-from-home possibilities permits flexibility for organizations and persons. At the same time, it makes it more difficult to secure the IT infrastructure as the IT team needs to keep track of who is accessing what data from where and when on which device. With these changes, identity management as a key element of security becomes more important. Identity management relates to the technologies and policies for the identification, authentication, and authorization of users (humans, devices) in computer networks. Due to the diversity of identity management (i.e., models, protocols, and implementations), different requirements, problems, and attack vectors need to be taken into account. In order to secure identity management systems with their identities, a systematic approach is required. In this article, we propose the improved framework Taxonomy for Identity Management related to Attacks (TaxIdMA). The purpose of TaxIdMA is to classify existing attacks, attack vectors, and vulnerabilities associated with system identities, identity management systems, and end-user identities. In addition, the background of these attacks can be described in a structured and systematic way. The taxonomy is applied to the Internet of Things and self-sovereign identities. It is enhanced by a description language for threat intelligence sharing. Last but not least, TaxIdMA is evaluated and improved based on expert interviews, statistics, and discussions. This step enables broader applicability and level of detail at the same time. The combination of TaxIdMA, which allows a structured way to outline attacks and is applicable to different scenarios, and a description language for threat intelligence help to improve the security identity management systems and processes.
Theoretical Analysis of Privacy Leakage in Trustworthy Federated Learning: A Perspective from Linear Algebra and Optimization Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, recent studies have shown that it is vulnerable to various privacy attacks, such as data reconstruction attacks. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of privacy leakage in federated learning from two perspectives: linear algebra and optimization theory. From the linear algebra perspective, we prove that when the Jacobian matrix of the batch data is not full rank, there exist different batches of data that produce the same model update, thereby ensuring a level of privacy. We derive a sufficient condition on the batch size to prevent data reconstruction attacks. From the optimization theory perspective, we establish an upper bound on the privacy leakage in terms of the batch size, the distortion extent, and several other factors. Our analysis provides insights into the relationship between privacy leakage and various aspects of federated learning, offering a theoretical foundation for designing privacy-preserving federated learning algorithms.
SPLAT: A framework for optimised GPU code-generation for SParse reguLar ATtention
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-head-self-attention (MHSA) mechanisms achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across natural language processing and vision tasks. However, their quadratic dependence on sequence lengths has bottlenecked inference speeds. To circumvent this bottleneck, researchers have proposed various sparse-MHSA models, where a subset of full attention is computed. Despite their promise, current sparse libraries and compilers do not support high-performance implementations for diverse sparse-MHSA patterns due to the underlying sparse formats they operate on. These formats, which are typically designed for high-performance & scientific computing applications, are either curated for extreme amounts of random sparsity (<1% non-zero values), or specific sparsity patterns. However, the sparsity patterns in sparse-MHSA are moderately sparse (10-50% non-zero values) and varied, resulting in existing sparse-formats trading off generality for performance. We bridge this gap, achieving both generality and performance, by proposing a novel sparse format: affine-compressed-sparse-row (ACSR) and supporting code-generation scheme, SPLAT, that generates high-performance implementations for diverse sparse-MHSA patterns on GPUs. Core to our proposed format and code generation algorithm is the observation that common sparse-MHSA patterns have uniquely regular geometric properties. These properties, which can be analyzed just-in-time, expose novel optimizations and tiling strategies that SPLAT exploits to generate high-performance implementations for diverse patterns. To demonstrate SPLAT's efficacy, we use it to generate code for various sparse-MHSA models, achieving geomean speedups of 2.05x and 4.05x over hand-written kernels written in triton and TVM respectively on A100 GPUs. Moreover, its interfaces are intuitive and easy to use with existing implementations of MHSA in JAX.
Covering a Graph with Dense Subgraph Families, via Triangle-Rich Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Graphs are a fundamental data structure used to represent relationships in domains as diverse as the social sciences, bioinformatics, cybersecurity, the Internet, and more. One of the central observations in network science is that real-world graphs are globally sparse, yet contains numerous "pockets" of high edge density. A fundamental task in graph mining is to discover these dense subgraphs. Most common formulations of the problem involve finding a single (or a few) "optimally" dense subsets. But in most real applications, one does not care for the optimality. Instead, we want to find a large collection of dense subsets that covers a significant fraction of the input graph. We give a mathematical formulation of this problem, using a new definition of regularly triangle-rich (RTR) families. These families capture the notion of dense subgraphs that contain many triangles and have degrees comparable to the subgraph size. We design a provable algorithm, RTRExtractor, that can discover RTR families that approximately cover any RTR set. The algorithm is efficient and is inspired by recent results that use triangle counts for community testing and clustering. We show that RTRExtractor has excellent behavior on a large variety of real-world datasets. It is able to process graphs with hundreds of millions of edges within minutes. Across many datasets, RTRExtractor achieves high coverage using high edge density datasets. For example, the output covers a quarter of the vertices with subgraphs of edge density more than (say) $0.5$, for datasets with 10M+ edges. We show an example of how the output of RTRExtractor correlates with meaningful sets of similar vertices in a citation network, demonstrating the utility of RTRExtractor for unsupervised graph discovery tasks.
PathwayBench: Assessing Routability of Pedestrian Pathway Networks Inferred from Multi-City Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Applications to support pedestrian mobility in urban areas require a complete, and routable graph representation of the built environment. Globally available information, including aerial imagery provides a scalable source for constructing these path networks, but the associated learning problem is challenging: Relative to road network pathways, pedestrian network pathways are narrower, more frequently disconnected, often visually and materially variable in smaller areas, and their boundaries are broken up by driveway incursions, alleyways, marked or unmarked crossings through roadways. Existing algorithms to extract pedestrian pathway network graphs are inconsistently evaluated and tend to ignore routability, making it difficult to assess utility for mobility applications: Even if all path segments are available, discontinuities could dramatically and arbitrarily shift the overall path taken by a pedestrian. In this paper, we describe a first standard benchmark for the pedestrian pathway graph extraction problem, comprising the largest available dataset equipped with manually vetted ground truth annotations (covering $3,000 km^2$ land area in regions from 8 cities), and a family of evaluation metrics centering routability and downstream utility. By partitioning the data into polygons at the scale of individual intersections, we compute local routability as an efficient proxy for global routability. We consider multiple measures of polygon-level routability and compare predicted measures with ground truth to construct evaluation metrics. Using these metrics, we show that this benchmark can surface strengths and weaknesses of existing methods that are hidden by simple edge-counting metrics over single-region datasets used in prior work, representing a challenging, high-impact problem in computer vision and machine learning.
Comparative Analysis Vision of Worldwide AI Courses
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This research investigates the curriculum structures of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) education across universities worldwide. By examining the curricula of leading universities, the research seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of AI education on a global scale, facilitating the alignment of educational practices with the evolving needs of the AI landscape. This research delves into the diverse course structures of leading universities, exploring contemporary trends and priorities to reveal the nuanced approaches in AI education. It also investigates the core AI topics and learning contents frequently taught, comparing them with the CS2023 curriculum guidance to identify convergence and divergence. Additionally, it examines how universities across different countries approach AI education, analyzing educational objectives, priorities, potential careers, and methodologies to understand the global landscape and implications of AI pedagogy.
A Standardized Machine-readable Dataset Documentation Format for Responsible AI
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Data is critical to advancing AI technologies, yet its quality and documentation remain significant challenges, leading to adverse downstream effects (e.g., potential biases) in AI applications. This paper addresses these issues by introducing Croissant-RAI, a machine-readable metadata format designed to enhance the discoverability, interoperability, and trustworthiness of AI datasets. Croissant-RAI extends the Croissant metadata format and builds upon existing responsible AI (RAI) documentation frameworks, offering a standardized set of attributes and practices to facilitate community-wide adoption. Leveraging established web-publishing practices, such as Schema.org, Croissant-RAI enables dataset users to easily find and utilize RAI metadata regardless of the platform on which the datasets are published. Furthermore, it is seamlessly integrated into major data search engines, repositories, and machine learning frameworks, streamlining the reading and writing of responsible AI metadata within practitioners' existing workflows. Croissant-RAI was developed through a community-led effort. It has been designed to be adaptable to evolving documentation requirements and is supported by a Python library and a visual editor.
(Unfair) Norms in Fairness Research: A Meta-Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Algorithmic fairness has emerged as a critical concern in artificial intelligence (AI) research. However, the development of fair AI systems is not an objective process. Fairness is an inherently subjective concept, shaped by the values, experiences, and identities of those involved in research and development. To better understand the norms and values embedded in current fairness research, we conduct a meta-analysis of algorithmic fairness papers from two leading conferences on AI fairness and ethics, AIES and FAccT, covering a final sample of 139 papers over the period from 2018 to 2022. Our investigation reveals two concerning trends: first, a US-centric perspective dominates throughout fairness research; and second, fairness studies exhibit a widespread reliance on binary codifications of human identity (e.g., "Black/White", "male/female"). These findings highlight how current research often overlooks the complexities of identity and lived experiences, ultimately failing to represent diverse global contexts when defining algorithmic bias and fairness. We discuss the limitations of these research design choices and offer recommendations for fostering more inclusive and representative approaches to fairness in AI systems, urging a paradigm shift that embraces nuanced, global understandings of human identity and values.
Research on Education Big Data for Students Academic Performance Analysis based on Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The application of the Internet in the field of education is becoming more and more popular, and a large amount of educational data is generated in the process. How to effectively use these data has always been a key issue in the field of educational data mining. In this work, a machine learning model based on Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) was used to conduct an in-depth analysis of educational big data to evaluate student performance. The LSTM model efficiently processes time series data, allowing us to capture time-dependent and long-term trends in students' learning activities. This approach is particularly useful for analyzing student progress, engagement, and other behavioral patterns to support personalized education. In an experimental analysis, we verified the effectiveness of the deep learning method in predicting student performance by comparing the performance of different models. Strict cross-validation techniques are used to ensure the accuracy and generalization of experimental results.
Using Helium Balloon Flying Drones for Introductory CS Education
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

In the rapidly evolving field of computer science education, novel approaches to teaching fundamental concepts are crucial for engaging a diverse student body. Given the growing demand for a computing-skilled workforce, it is essential to adapt educational methods to capture the interest of a broader audience than what current computing education typically targets. Engaging educational experiences have been shown to have a positive impact on learning outcomes and examination performance, especially within computing education. Moreover, physical computing devices have been shown to correlate with increased student motivation when students are studying computer science.
SAR to Optical Image Translation with Color Supervised Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers all-weather, high-resolution imaging capabilities, but its complex imaging mechanism often poses challenges for interpretation. In response to these limitations, this paper introduces an innovative generative model designed to transform SAR images into more intelligible optical images, thereby enhancing the interpretability of SAR images. Specifically, our model backbone is based on the recent diffusion models, which have powerful generative capabilities. We employ SAR images as conditional guides in the sampling process and integrate color supervision to counteract color shift issues effectively. We conducted experiments on the SEN12 dataset and employed quantitative evaluations using peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity, and fréchet inception distance. The results demonstrate that our model not only surpasses previous methods in quantitative assessments but also significantly enhances the visual quality of the generated images.