OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Realizing Stabilized Landing for Computation-Limited Reusable Rockets: A Quantum Reinforcement Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The advent of reusable rockets has heralded a new era in space exploration, reducing the costs of launching satellites by a significant factor. Traditional rockets were disposable, but the design of reusable rockets for repeated use has revolutionized the financial dynamics of space missions. The most critical phase of reusable rockets is the landing stage, which involves managing the tremendous speed and attitude for safe recovery. The complexity of this task presents new challenges for control systems, specifically in terms of precision and adaptability. Classical control systems like the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller lack the flexibility to adapt to dynamic system changes, making them costly and time-consuming to redesign of controller. This paper explores the integration of quantum reinforcement learning into the control systems of reusable rockets as a promising alternative. Unlike classical reinforcement learning, quantum reinforcement learning uses quantum bits that can exist in superposition, allowing for more efficient information encoding and reducing the number of parameters required. This leads to increased computational efficiency, reduced memory requirements, and more stable and predictable performance. Due to the nature of reusable rockets, which must be light, heavy computers cannot fit into them. In the reusable rocket scenario, quantum reinforcement learning, which has reduced memory requirements due to fewer parameters, is a good solution.
Energy-Efficient Visual Search by Eye Movement and Low-Latency Spiking Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Human vision incorporates non-uniform resolution retina, efficient eye movement strategy, and spiking neural network (SNN) to balance the requirements in visual field size, visual resolution, energy cost, and inference latency. These properties have inspired interest in developing human-like computer vision. However, existing models haven't fully incorporated the three features of human vision, and their learned eye movement strategies haven't been compared with human's strategy, making the models' behavior difficult to interpret. Here, we carry out experiments to examine human visual search behaviors and establish the first SNN-based visual search model. The model combines an artificial retina with spiking feature extraction, memory, and saccade decision modules, and it employs population coding for fast and efficient saccade decisions. The model can learn either a human-like or a near-optimal fixation strategy, outperform humans in search speed and accuracy, and achieve high energy efficiency through short saccade decision latency and sparse activation. It also suggests that the human search strategy is suboptimal in terms of search speed. Our work connects modeling of vision in neuroscience and machine learning and sheds light on developing more energy-efficient computer vision algorithms.
No Pitch Left Behind: Addressing Gender Unbalance in Automatic Speech Recognition through Pitch Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are known to be sensitive to the sociolinguistic variability of speech data, in which gender plays a crucial role. This can result in disparities in recognition accuracy between male and female speakers, primarily due to the under-representation of the latter group in the training data. While in the context of hybrid ASR models several solutions have been proposed, the gender bias issue has not been explicitly addressed in end-to-end neural architectures. To fill this gap, we propose a data augmentation technique that manipulates the fundamental frequency (f0) and formants. This technique reduces the data unbalance among genders by simulating voices of the under-represented female speakers and increases the variability within each gender group. Experiments on spontaneous English speech show that our technique yields a relative WER improvement up to 9.87% for utterances by female speakers, with larger gains for the least-represented f0 ranges.
How (not) to ensemble LVLMs for VQA
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper studies ensembling in the era of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Ensembling is a classical method to combine different models to get increased performance. In the recent work on Encyclopedic-VQA the authors examine a wide variety of models to solve their task: from vanilla LVLMs, to models including the caption as extra context, to models augmented with Lens-based retrieval of Wikipedia pages. Intuitively these models are highly complementary, which should make them ideal for ensembling. Indeed, an oracle experiment shows potential gains from 48.8% accuracy (the best single model) all the way up to 67% (best possible ensemble). So it is a trivial exercise to create an ensemble with substantial real gains. Or is it?
Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Online Handwriting Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised learning offers an efficient way of extracting rich representations from various types of unlabeled data while avoiding the cost of annotating large-scale datasets. This is achievable by designing a pretext task to form pseudo labels with respect to the modality and domain of the data. Given the evolving applications of online handwritten texts, in this study, we propose the novel Part of Stroke Masking (POSM) as a pretext task for pretraining models to extract informative representations from the online handwriting of individuals in English and Chinese languages, along with two suggested pipelines for fine-tuning the pretrained models. To evaluate the quality of the extracted representations, we use both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods. The pretrained models are fine-tuned to achieve state-of-the-art results in tasks such as writer identification, gender classification, and handedness classification, also highlighting the superiority of utilizing the pretrained models over the models trained from scratch.
SEER : A Knapsack approach to Exemplar Selection for In-Context HybridQA
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Question answering over hybrid contexts is a complex task, which requires the combination of information extracted from unstructured texts and structured tables in various ways. Recently, In-Context Learning demonstrated significant performance advances for reasoning tasks. In this paradigm, a large language model performs predictions based on a small set of supporting exemplars. The performance of In-Context Learning depends heavily on the selection procedure of the supporting exemplars, particularly in the case of HybridQA, where considering the diversity of reasoning chains and the large size of the hybrid contexts becomes crucial. In this work, we present Selection of ExEmplars for hybrid Reasoning (SEER), a novel method for selecting a set of exemplars that is both representative and diverse. The key novelty of SEER is that it formulates exemplar selection as a Knapsack Integer Linear Program. The Knapsack framework provides the flexibility to incorporate diversity constraints that prioritize exemplars with desirable attributes, and capacity constraints that ensure that the prompt size respects the provided capacity budgets. The effectiveness of SEER is demonstrated on FinQA and TAT-QA, two real-world benchmarks for HybridQA, where it outperforms previous exemplar selection methods.
Modelling and Performance Analysis of the Over-the-Air Computing in Cellular IoT Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Ultra-fast wireless data aggregation (WDA) of distributed data has emerged as a critical design challenge in the ultra-densely deployed cellular internet of things network (CITN) due to limited spectral resources. Over-the-air computing (AirComp) has been proposed as an effective solution for ultra-fast WDA by exploiting the superposition property of wireless channels. However, the effect of access radius of access point (AP) on the AirComp performance has not been investigated yet. Therefore, in this work, the mean square error (MSE) performance of AirComp in the ultra-densely deployed CITN is analyzed with the AP access radius. By modelling the spatial locations of internet of things devices as a Poisson point process, the expression of MSE is derived in an analytical form, which is validated by Monte Carlo simulations. Based on the analytical MSE, we investigate the effect of AP access radius on the MSE of AirComp numerically. The results show that there exists an optimal AP access radius for AirComp, which can decrease the MSE by up to 12.7%. It indicates that the AP access radius should be carefully chosen to improve the AirComp performance in the ultra-densely deployed CITN.
Status Quo and Problems of Requirements Engineering for Machine Learning: Results from an International Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Systems that use Machine Learning (ML) have become commonplace for companies that want to improve their products and processes. Literature suggests that Requirements Engineering (RE) can help address many problems when engineering ML-enabled systems. However, the state of empirical evidence on how RE is applied in practice in the context of ML-enabled systems is mainly dominated by isolated case studies with limited generalizability. We conducted an international survey to gather practitioner insights into the status quo and problems of RE in ML-enabled systems. We gathered 188 complete responses from 25 countries. We conducted quantitative statistical analyses on contemporary practices using bootstrapping with confidence intervals and qualitative analyses on the reported problems involving open and axial coding procedures. We found significant differences in RE practices within ML projects. For instance, (i) RE-related activities are mostly conducted by project leaders and data scientists, (ii) the prevalent requirements documentation format concerns interactive Notebooks, (iii) the main focus of non-functional requirements includes data quality, model reliability, and model explainability, and (iv) main challenges include managing customer expectations and aligning requirements with data. The qualitative analyses revealed that practitioners face problems related to lack of business domain understanding, unclear goals and requirements, low customer engagement, and communication issues. These results help to provide a better understanding of the adopted practices and of which problems exist in practical environments. We put forward the need to adapt further and disseminate RE-related practices for engineering ML-enabled systems.
Graph-Based Analysis and Visualisation of Mobility Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2023
Year: 2023

Urban mobility forecast and analysis can be addressed through grid-based and graph-based models. However, graph-based representations have the advantage of more realistically depicting the mobility networks and being more robust since they allow the implementation of Graph Theory machinery, enhancing the analysis and visualisation of mobility flows. We define two types of mobility graphs: Region Adjacency graphs and Origin-Destination graphs. Several node centrality metrics of graphs are applied to identify the most relevant nodes of the network in terms of graph connectivity. Additionally, the Perron vector associated with a strongly connected graph is applied to define a circulation function on the mobility graph. Such node values are visualised in the geographically embedded graphs, showing clustering patterns within the network. Since mobility graphs can be directed or undirected, we define several Graph Laplacian for both cases and show that these matrices and their spectral properties provide insightful information for network analysis. The computation of node centrality metrics and Perron-induced circulation functions for three different geographical regions demonstrate that basic elements from Graph Theory applied to mobility networks can lead to structure analysis for graphs of different connectivity, size, and orientation properties.
A Supervised Embedding and Clustering Anomaly Detection method for classification of Mobile Network Faults
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The paper introduces Supervised Embedding and Clustering Anomaly Detection (SEMC-AD), a method designed to efficiently identify faulty alarm logs in a mobile network and alleviate the challenges of manual monitoring caused by the growing volume of alarm logs. SEMC-AD employs a supervised embedding approach based on deep neural networks, utilizing historical alarm logs and their labels to extract numerical representations for each log, effectively addressing the issue of imbalanced classification due to a small proportion of anomalies in the dataset without employing one-hot encoding. The robustness of the embedding is evaluated by plotting the two most significant principle components of the embedded alarm logs, revealing that anomalies form distinct clusters with similar embeddings. Multivariate normal Gaussian clustering is then applied to these components, identifying clusters with a high ratio of anomalies to normal alarms (above 90%) and labeling them as the anomaly group. To classify new alarm logs, we check if their embedded vectors' two most significant principle components fall within the anomaly-labeled clusters. If so, the log is classified as an anomaly. Performance evaluation demonstrates that SEMC-AD outperforms conventional random forest and gradient boosting methods without embedding. SEMC-AD achieves 99% anomaly detection, whereas random forest and XGBoost only detect 86% and 81% of anomalies, respectively. While supervised classification methods may excel in labeled datasets, the results demonstrate that SEMC-AD is more efficient in classifying anomalies in datasets with numerous categorical features, significantly enhancing anomaly detection, reducing operator burden, and improving network maintenance.
OpenWebMath: An Open Dataset of High-Quality Mathematical Web Text
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

There is growing evidence that pretraining on high quality, carefully thought-out tokens such as code or mathematics plays an important role in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. For example, Minerva, a PaLM model finetuned on billions of tokens of mathematical documents from arXiv and the web, reported dramatically improved performance on problems that require quantitative reasoning. However, because all known open source web datasets employ preprocessing that does not faithfully preserve mathematical notation, the benefits of large scale training on quantitive web documents are unavailable to the research community. We introduce OpenWebMath, an open dataset inspired by these works containing 14.7B tokens of mathematical webpages from Common Crawl. We describe in detail our method for extracting text and LaTeX content and removing boilerplate from HTML documents, as well as our methods for quality filtering and deduplication. Additionally, we run small-scale experiments by training 1.4B parameter language models on OpenWebMath, showing that models trained on 14.7B tokens of our dataset surpass the performance of models trained on over 20x the amount of general language data. We hope that our dataset, openly released on the Hugging Face Hub, will help spur advances in the reasoning abilities of large language models.
Mistral 7B
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce Mistral 7B v0.1, a 7-billion-parameter language model engineered for superior performance and efficiency. Mistral 7B outperforms Llama 2 13B across all evaluated benchmarks, and Llama 1 34B in reasoning, mathematics, and code generation. Our model leverages grouped-query attention (GQA) for faster inference, coupled with sliding window attention (SWA) to effectively handle sequences of arbitrary length with a reduced inference cost. We also provide a model fine-tuned to follow instructions, Mistral 7B -- Instruct, that surpasses the Llama 2 13B -- Chat model both on human and automated benchmarks. Our models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Asymptote-based scientific animation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

This article discusses a universal way to create animation using Asymptote the language for vector graphics. The Asymptote language itself has a built-in library for creating animations, but its practical use is complicated by an extremely brief description in the official documentation and unstable execution of existing examples. The purpose of this article is to eliminate this gap. The method we describe is based on creating a PDF file with frames using Asymptote, with further converting it into a set of PNG images and merging them into a video using FFmpeg. All stages are described in detail, which allows the reader to use the described method without being familiar with the used utilities.
Extended Reality via Cooperative NOMA in Hybrid Cloud/Mobile-Edge Computing Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Extended reality (XR) applications often perform resource-intensive tasks, which are computed remotely, a process that prioritizes the latency criticality aspect. To this end, this paper shows that through leveraging the power of the central cloud (CC), the close proximity of edge computers (ECs), and the flexibility of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), a UAV-aided hybrid cloud/mobile-edge computing architecture promises to handle the intricate requirements of future XR applications. In this context, this paper distinguishes between two types of XR devices, namely, strong and weak devices. The paper then introduces a cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (Co-NOMA) scheme, pairing strong and weak devices, so as to aid the XR devices quality-of-user experience by intelligently selecting either the direct or the relay links toward the weak XR devices. A sum logarithmic-rate maximization problem is, thus, formulated so as to jointly determine the computation and communication resources, and link-selection strategy as a means to strike a trade-off between the system throughput and fairness. Subject to realistic network constraints, e.g., power consumption and delay, the optimization problem is then solved iteratively via discrete relaxations, successive-convex approximation, and fractional programming, an approach which can be implemented in a distributed fashion across the network. Simulation results validate the proposed algorithms performance in terms of log-rate maximization, delay-sensitivity, scalability, and runtime performance. The practical distributed Co-NOMA implementation is particularly shown to offer appreciable benefits over traditional multiple access and NOMA methods, highlighting its applicability in decentralized XR systems.
Sparse Fine-tuning for Inference Acceleration of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of accurate sparse fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), that is, fine-tuning pretrained LLMs on specialized tasks, while inducing sparsity in their weights. On the accuracy side, we observe that standard loss-based fine-tuning may fail to recover accuracy, especially at high sparsities. To address this, we perform a detailed study of distillation-type losses, determining an L2-based distillation approach we term SquareHead which enables accurate recovery even at higher sparsities, across all model types. On the practical efficiency side, we show that sparse LLMs can be executed with speedups by taking advantage of sparsity, for both CPU and GPU runtimes. While the standard approach is to leverage sparsity for computational reduction, we observe that in the case of memory-bound LLMs sparsity can also be leveraged for reducing memory bandwidth. We exhibit end-to-end results showing speedups due to sparsity, while recovering accuracy, on T5 (language translation), Whisper (speech translation), and open GPT-type (MPT for text generation). For MPT text generation, we show for the first time that sparse fine-tuning can reach 75% sparsity without accuracy drops, provide notable end-to-end speedups for both CPU and GPU inference, and highlight that sparsity is also compatible with quantization approaches. Models and software for reproducing our results are provided in Section 6.
Eclares: Energy-Aware Clarity-Driven Ergodic Search
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Planning informative trajectories while considering the spatial distribution of the information over the environment, as well as constraints such as the robot's limited battery capacity, makes the long-time horizon persistent coverage problem complex. Ergodic search methods consider the spatial distribution of environmental information while optimizing robot trajectories; however, current methods lack the ability to construct the target information spatial distribution for environments that vary stochastically across space and time. Moreover, current coverage methods dealing with battery capacity constraints either assume simple robot and battery models, or are computationally expensive. To address these problems, we propose a framework called Eclares, in which our contribution is two-fold. 1) First, we propose a method to construct the target information spatial distribution for ergodic trajectory optimization using clarity, an information measure bounded between [0,1]. The clarity dynamics allows us to capture information decay due to lack of measurements and to quantify the maximum attainable information in stochastic spatiotemporal environments. 2) Second, instead of directly tracking the ergodic trajectory, we introduce the energy-aware (eware) filter, which iteratively validates the ergodic trajectory to ensure that the robot has enough energy to return to the charging station when needed. The proposed eware filter is applicable to nonlinear robot models and is computationally lightweight. We demonstrate the working of the framework through a simulation case study.
Data Distillation Can Be Like Vodka: Distilling More Times For Better Quality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Dataset distillation aims to minimize the time and memory needed for training deep networks on large datasets, by creating a small set of synthetic images that has a similar generalization performance to that of the full dataset. However, current dataset distillation techniques fall short, showing a notable performance gap when compared to training on the original data. In this work, we are the first to argue that using just one synthetic subset for distillation will not yield optimal generalization performance. This is because the training dynamics of deep networks drastically change during the training. Hence, multiple synthetic subsets are required to capture the training dynamics at different phases of training. To address this issue, we propose Progressive Dataset Distillation (PDD). PDD synthesizes multiple small sets of synthetic images, each conditioned on the previous sets, and trains the model on the cumulative union of these subsets without requiring additional training time. Our extensive experiments show that PDD can effectively improve the performance of existing dataset distillation methods by up to 4.3%. In addition, our method for the first time enable generating considerably larger synthetic datasets.