OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Client Orchestration and Cost-Efficient Joint Optimization for NOMA-Enabled Hierarchical Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) shows great advantages over conventional two-layer federated learning (FL) in reducing network overhead and interaction latency while still retaining the data privacy of distributed FL clients. However, the communication and energy overhead still pose a bottleneck for HFL performance, especially as the number of clients raises dramatically. To tackle this issue, we propose a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enabled HFL system under semi-synchronous cloud model aggregation in this paper, aiming to minimize the total cost of time and energy at each HFL global round. Specifically, we first propose a novel fuzzy logic based client orchestration policy considering client heterogenerity in multiple aspects, including channel quality, data quantity and model staleness. Subsequently, given the fuzzy based client-edge association, a joint edge server scheduling and resource allocation problem is formulated. Utilizing problem decomposition, we firstly derive the closed-form solution for the edge server scheduling subproblem via the penalty dual decomposition (PDD) method. Next, a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based algorithm is proposed to tackle the resource allocation subproblem considering time-varying environments. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the considered benchmarks regarding HFL performance improvement and total cost reduction.
Rock Climbing Route Generation and Grading as Computational Creativity
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we bridge work in rock climbing route generation and grading into the computational creativity community. We provide the necessary background to situate that literature and demonstrate the domain's intellectual merit in the computational creativity community. We provide a guiding set of desiderata for future work in this area. We propose an approach to computational route grading. Finally, we identify important gaps in the literature and consider how they may be filled. This paper thus also serves as a pilot study, planting a flag for our ongoing research in this domain.
Towards model-free RL algorithms that scale well with unstructured data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms exhibit broad generality in their theoretical formulation and high performance on several challenging domains when combined with powerful function approximation. However, developing RL algorithms that perform well across problems with unstructured observations at scale remains challenging because most function approximation methods rely on externally provisioned knowledge about the structure of the input for good performance (e.g. convolutional networks, graph neural networks, tile-coding). A common practice in RL is to evaluate algorithms on a single problem, or on problems with limited variation in the observation scale. RL practitioners lack a systematic way to study how well a single RL algorithm performs when instantiated across a range of problem scales, and they lack function approximation techniques that scale well with unstructured observations. We address these limitations by providing environments and algorithms to study scaling for unstructured observation vectors and flat action spaces. We introduce a family of combinatorial RL problems with an exponentially large state space and high-dimensional dynamics but where linear computation is sufficient to learn a (nonlinear) value function estimate for performant control. We provide an algorithm that constructs reward-relevant general value function (GVF) questions to find and exploit predictive structure directly from the experience stream. In an empirical evaluation of the approach on synthetic problems, we observe a sample complexity that scales linearly with the observation size. The proposed algorithm reliably outperforms a conventional deep RL algorithm on these scaling problems, and they exhibit several desirable auxiliary properties. These results suggest new algorithmic mechanisms by which algorithms can learn at scale from unstructured data.
Exploring the Numerical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models: A Comprehensive Analysis on Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Numbers are crucial for various real-world domains such as finance, economics, and science. Thus, understanding and reasoning with numbers are essential skills for language models to solve different tasks. While different numerical benchmarks have been introduced in recent years, they are limited to specific numerical aspects mostly. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical taxonomy for numerical reasoning skills with more than ten reasoning types across four levels: representation, number sense, manipulation, and complex reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models to identify reasoning challenges specific to them. Henceforth, we develop a diverse set of numerical probes employing a semi-automated approach. We focus on the tabular Natural Language Inference (TNLI) task as a case study and measure models' performance shifts. Our results show that no model consistently excels across all numerical reasoning types. Among the probed models, FlanT5 (few-/zero-shot) and GPT-3.5 (few-shot) demonstrate strong overall numerical reasoning skills compared to other models. Label-flipping probes indicate that models often exploit dataset artifacts to predict the correct labels.
Structural Properties of Search Trees with 2-way Comparisons
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Optimal 3-way comparison search trees (3WCST's) can be computed using standard dynamic programming in time O(n^3), and this can be further improved to O(n^2) by taking advantage of the Monge property. In contrast, the fastest algorithm in the literature for computing optimal 2-way comparison search trees (2WCST's) runs in time O(n^4). To shed light on this discrepancy, we study structure properties of 2WCST's. On one hand, we show some new threshold bounds involving key weights that can be helpful in deciding which type of comparison should be at the root of the optimal tree. On the other hand, we also show that the standard techniques for speeding up dynamic programming (the Monge property / quadrangle inequality) do not apply to 2WCST's.
Robust Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models for Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Transfer learning enables the sharing of common knowledge among models for a variety of downstream tasks, but traditional methods suffer in limited training data settings and produce narrow models incapable of effectively generalizing under distribution shifts. Foundation models have recently demonstrated impressive zero-shot inference capabilities and robustness under distribution shifts. However, zero-shot evaluation for these models has been predominantly confined to benchmarks with simple distribution shifts, limiting our understanding of their effectiveness under the more realistic shifts found in practice. Moreover, common fine-tuning methods for these models have yet to be evaluated against vision models in few-shot scenarios where training data is limited. To address these gaps, we present a new recipe for few-shot fine-tuning of the popular vision-language foundation model CLIP and evaluate its performance on challenging benchmark datasets with realistic distribution shifts from the WILDS collection. Our experimentation demonstrates that, while zero-shot CLIP fails to match performance of trained vision models on more complex benchmarks, few-shot CLIP fine-tuning outperforms its vision-only counterparts in terms of in-distribution and out-of-distribution accuracy at all levels of training data availability. This provides a strong incentive for adoption of foundation models within few-shot learning applications operating with real-world data. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-ll/robust-vision-language-finetuning
Enabling Cross-Language Data Integration and Scalable Analytics in Decentralized Finance
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

With the agile development process of most academic and corporate entities, designing a robust computational back-end system that can support their ever-changing data needs is a constantly evolving challenge. We propose the implementation of a data and language-agnostic system design that handles different data schemes and sources while subsequently providing researchers and developers a way to connect to it that is supported by a vast majority of programming languages. To validate the efficacy of a system with this proposed architecture, we integrate various data sources throughout the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, specifically from DeFi lending protocols, retrieving tens of millions of data points to perform analytics through this system. We then access and process the retrieved data through several different programming languages (R-Lang, Python, and Java). Finally, we analyze the performance of the proposed architecture in relation to other high-performance systems and explore how this system performs under a high computational load.
Patch-based Selection and Refinement for Early Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Early object detection (OD) is a crucial task for the safety of many dynamic systems. Current OD algorithms have limited success for small objects at a long distance. To improve the accuracy and efficiency of such a task, we propose a novel set of algorithms that divide the image into patches, select patches with objects at various scales, elaborate the details of a small object, and detect it as early as possible. Our approach is built upon a transformer-based network and integrates the diffusion model to improve the detection accuracy. As demonstrated on BDD100K, our algorithms enhance the mAP for small objects from 1.03 to 8.93, and reduce the data volume in computation by more than 77\%. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/destiny301/dpr}{https://github.com/destiny301/dpr}
Objectives Are All You Need: Solving Deceptive Problems Without Explicit Diversity Maintenance
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Navigating deceptive domains has often been a challenge in machine learning due to search algorithms getting stuck at sub-optimal local optima. Many algorithms have been proposed to navigate these domains by explicitly maintaining diversity or equivalently promoting exploration, such as Novelty Search or other so-called Quality Diversity algorithms. In this paper, we present an approach with promise to solve deceptive domains without explicit diversity maintenance by optimizing a potentially large set of defined objectives. These objectives can be extracted directly from the environment by sub-aggregating the raw performance of individuals in a variety of ways. We use lexicase selection to optimize for these objectives as it has been shown to implicitly maintain population diversity. We compare this technique with a varying number of objectives to a commonly used quality diversity algorithm, MAP-Elites, on a set of discrete optimization as well as reinforcement learning domains with varying degrees of deception. We find that decomposing objectives into many objectives and optimizing them outperforms MAP-Elites on the deceptive domains that we explore. Furthermore, we find that this technique results in competitive performance on the diversity-focused metrics of QD-Score and Coverage, without explicitly optimizing for these things. Our ablation study shows that this technique is robust to different subaggregation techniques. However, when it comes to non-deceptive, or ``illumination" domains, quality diversity techniques generally outperform our objective-based framework with respect to exploration (but not exploitation), hinting at potential directions for future work.
FragXsiteDTI: Revealing Responsible Segments in Drug-Target Interaction with Transformer-Driven Interpretation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Drug-Target Interaction (DTI) prediction is vital for drug discovery, yet challenges persist in achieving model interpretability and optimizing performance. We propose a novel transformer-based model, FragXsiteDTI, that aims to address these challenges in DTI prediction. Notably, FragXsiteDTI is the first DTI model to simultaneously leverage drug molecule fragments and protein pockets. Our information-rich representations for both proteins and drugs offer a detailed perspective on their interaction. Inspired by the Perceiver IO framework, our model features a learnable latent array, initially interacting with protein binding site embeddings using cross-attention and later refined through self-attention and used as a query to the drug fragments in the drug's cross-attention transformer block. This learnable query array serves as a mediator and enables seamless information translation, preserving critical nuances in drug-protein interactions. Our computational results on three benchmarking datasets demonstrate the superior predictive power of our model over several state-of-the-art models. We also show the interpretability of our model in terms of the critical components of both target proteins and drug molecules within drug-target pairs.
ECMD: An Event-Centric Multisensory Driving Dataset for SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Leveraging multiple sensors enhances complex environmental perception and increases resilience to varying luminance conditions and high-speed motion patterns, achieving precise localization and mapping. This paper proposes, ECMD, an event-centric multisensory dataset containing 81 sequences and covering over 200 km of various challenging driving scenarios including high-speed motion, repetitive scenarios, dynamic objects, etc. ECMD provides data from two sets of stereo event cameras with different resolutions (640*480, 346*260), stereo industrial cameras, an infrared camera, a top-installed mechanical LiDAR with two slanted LiDARs, two consumer-level GNSS receivers, and an onboard IMU. Meanwhile, the ground-truth of the vehicle was obtained using a centimeter-level high-accuracy GNSS-RTK/INS navigation system. All sensors are well-calibrated and temporally synchronized at the hardware level, with recording data simultaneously. We additionally evaluate several state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms for benchmarking visual and LiDAR SLAM and identifying their limitations. The dataset is available at https://arclab-hku.github.io/ecmd/.
Potato Leaf Disease Classification using Deep Learning: A Convolutional Neural Network Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to classify potato leaf illnesses using Deep Learning. The suggested approach entails preprocessing the leaf image data, training a CNN model on that data, and assessing the model's success on a test set. The experimental findings show that the CNN model, with an overall accuracy of 99.1%, is highly accurate in identifying two kinds of potato leaf diseases, including Early Blight, Late Blight, and Healthy. The suggested method may offer a trustworthy and effective remedy for identifying potato diseases, which is essential for maintaining food security and minimizing financial losses in agriculture. The model can accurately recognize the various disease types even when there are severe infections present. This work highlights the potential of deep learning methods for categorizing potato diseases, which can help with effective and automated disease management in potato farming.
Software in P2P way: a software model without central software and enabling any software to join or leave freely
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

The P2P model encompasses a network of equal peers, whether in hardware or software, operating autonomously without central control, allowing individual peer failure while ensuring high availability. Nevertheless, current P2P technologies primarily focus on hardware-level resilience, often referred to as P2P networks, which do not safeguard against software failures. This paper introduces a pioneering Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software model aimed at enhancing software-level high availability. Diverging from prevalent hardware-centric P2P technologies, this model accentuates the decentralized nature of various software components, or "software peers," which function independently, enabling seamless network entry and exit without relying on central software. The model's collaborative approach cultivates a network topology with multiple autonomous processing paths, ensuring continuous operation through dynamic task allocation in a distributed manner. By surpassing the limitations of traditional redundancy methods, this P2P model provides an adaptive and scalable solution for achieving robust availability. Validation results underscore the model's effectiveness in enhancing the probabilities of successful task processing while ensuring high availability.
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communication with Movable Elements
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been recognized as a powerful technology for boosting communication performance. To reduce manufacturing and control costs, it is preferable to consider discrete phase shifts (DPSs) for IRS, which are set by default as uniformly distributed in the range of $[ - π,π)$ in the literature. Such setting, however, cannot achieve a desirable performance over the general Rician fading where the channel phase concentrates in a narrow range with a higher probability. Motivated by this drawback, we in this paper design optimal non-uniform DPSs for IRS to achieve a desirable performance level. The fundamental challenge is the \textit{possible offset in phase distribution across different cascaded source-element-destination channels}, if adopting conventional IRS where the position of each element is fixed. Such phenomenon leads to different patterns of optimal non-uniform DPSs for each IRS element and thus causes huge manufacturing costs especially when the number of IRS elements is large. Driven by the recently emerging fluid antenna system (or movable antenna technology), we demonstrate that if the position of each IRS element can be flexibly adjusted, the above phase distribution offset can be surprisingly eliminated, leading to the same pattern of DPSs for each IRS element. Armed with this, we then determine the form of unified non-uniform DPSs based on a low-complexity iterative algorithm. Simulations show that our proposed design significantly improves the system performance compared to competitive benchmarks.
AI-based Self-healing Solutions Applied to Cellular Networks: An Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In this article, we provide an overview of machine learning (ML) methods, both classical and deep variants, that are used to implement self-healing for cell outages in cellular networks. Self-healing is a promising approach to network management, which aims to detect and compensate for cell outages in an autonomous way. This technology aims to decrease the expenses associated with the installation and maintenance of existing 4G and 5G, i.e. emerging 6G networks by simplifying operational tasks through its ability to heal itself. We provide an overview of the basic concepts and taxonomy for SON, self-healing, and ML techniques, in network management. Moreover, we review the state-of-the-art in literature for cell outages, with a particular emphasis on ML-based approaches.
Citance-Contextualized Summarization of Scientific Papers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Current approaches to automatic summarization of scientific papers generate informative summaries in the form of abstracts. However, abstracts are not intended to show the relationship between a paper and the references cited in it. We propose a new contextualized summarization approach that can generate an informative summary conditioned on a given sentence containing the citation of a reference (a so-called "citance"). This summary outlines the content of the cited paper relevant to the citation location. Thus, our approach extracts and models the citances of a paper, retrieves relevant passages from cited papers, and generates abstractive summaries tailored to each citance. We evaluate our approach using $\textbf{Webis-Context-SciSumm-2023}$, a new dataset containing 540K~computer science papers and 4.6M~citances therein.
Expressive Power of Hypergraph Lambek Grammars
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2023
Year: 2023

Hypergraph Lambek grammars (HL-grammars) is a novel logical approach to generating graph languages based on the hypergraph Lambek calculus. In this paper, we establish a precise relation between HL-grammars and hypergraph grammars based on the double pushout (DPO) approach: we prove that HL-grammars generate the same class of languages as DPO grammars with the linear restriction on lengths of derivations. This can be viewed as a complete description of the expressive power of HL-grammars and also as an analogue of the Pentus theorem, which states that Lambek grammars generate the same class of languages as context-free grammars. As a corollary, we prove that HL-grammars subsume contextual hyperedge replacement grammars.
Quantized-but-uncoded Distributed Detection (QDD) with Unreliable Reporting Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Distributed detection primarily centers around two approaches: Unquantized Distributed Detection (UDD), where each sensor reports its complete observation to the fusion center (FC), and quantized-and-Coded DD (CDD), where each sensor first partitions the observation space and then reports to the FC a codeword. In this paper, we introduce Quantized-but-uncoded DD (QDD), where each sensor, after quantization, transmits a summarized value, instead of a codeword, to the FC. We show that QDD well adapts to the constraint of transmission power when compared to CDD, albeit with increased complexity in parameter selection. Moreover, we establish that, in the presence of independent observations, QDD upholds a necessary condition inherent in CDD. Specifically, the optimal sensor decision rules are the likelihood ratio quantizers (LRQ), irrelevant to the channel conditions. In the context of a single-sensor scenario involving binary decision at the sensor, we find that the optimal sensor rule in QDD is in general no longer ``channel blind", a feature presented in CDD. In addition, we compare these systems numerically under the same transmission power and bandwidth, while assuming additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) in both sensing and reporting stages. Finally, we present some potential directions for future research.
Utilizing Imperfect Resolution of Near-Field Beamforming: A Hybrid-NOMA Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This letter studies how the imperfect resolution of near-field beamforming, the key feature of near-field communications, can be used to improve the throughput and connectivity of wireless networks. In particular, a hybrid non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission strategy is developed to use preconfigured near-field beams for serving additional users. An energy consumption minimization problem is first formulated and then solved by using different successive interference cancellation strategies. Both analytical and simulation results are presented to illustrate the impact of the resolution of near-field beamforming on the design of hybrid NOMA transmission.