OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Enhancing MBSE Education with Version Control and Automated Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents an innovative approach to conducting a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) course, engaging over 80 participants annually. The course is structured around collaborative group assignments, where students utilize Enterprise Architect to complete complex systems engineering tasks across six submissions. This year, we introduced several technological advancements to enhance the learning experience, including the use of LemonTree, SmartGit, and GitHub. Students collaborated on shared repositories in GitHub, received continuous feedback via automated checks through LemonTree Automation, and documented their progress with pre-rendered, continuously updating diagrams. Additionally, they managed 2-way and 3-way merges directly in SmartGit, with merge issues, updates, and model statistics readily available for each Work-in-Progress submission. The process of correcting and providing manual feedback was streamlined, thanks to accessible changelogs and renders in GitHub. An end-of-course feedback form revealed high student satisfaction.
Geometric Relational Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Relational representation learning transforms relational data into continuous and low-dimensional vector representations. However, vector-based representations fall short in capturing crucial properties of relational data that are complex and symbolic. We propose geometric relational embeddings, a paradigm of relational embeddings that respect the underlying symbolic structures. Specifically, this dissertation introduces various geometric relational embedding models capable of capturing: 1) complex structured patterns like hierarchies and cycles in networks and knowledge graphs; 2) logical structures in ontologies and logical constraints applicable for constraining machine learning model outputs; and 3) high-order structures between entities and relations. Our results obtained from benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of geometric relational embeddings in adeptly capturing these discrete, symbolic, and structured properties inherent in relational data.
Fuzzy Rule based Intelligent Cardiovascular Disease Prediction using Complex Event Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Cardiovascular disease (CVDs) is a rapidly rising global concern due to unhealthy diets, lack of physical activity, and other factors. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), primary risk factors include elevated blood pressure, glucose, blood lipids, and obesity. Recent research has focused on accurate and timely disease prediction to reduce risk and fatalities, often relying on predictive models trained on large datasets, which require intensive training. An intelligent system for CVDs patients could greatly assist in making informed decisions by effectively analyzing health parameters. Complex Event Processing (CEP) has emerged as a valuable method for solving real-time challenges by aggregating patterns of interest and their causes and effects on end users. In this work, we propose a fuzzy rule-based system for monitoring clinical data to provide real-time decision support. We designed fuzzy rules based on clinical and WHO standards to ensure accurate predictions. Our integrated approach uses Apache Kafka and Spark for data streaming, and the Siddhi CEP engine for event processing. Additionally, we pass numerous cardiovascular disease-related parameters through CEP engines to ensure fast and reliable prediction decisions. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we simulated real-time, unseen data to predict cardiovascular disease. Using synthetic data (1000 samples), we categorized it into "Very Low Risk, Low Risk, Medium Risk, High Risk, and Very High Risk." Validation results showed that 20% of samples were categorized as very low risk, 15-45% as low risk, 35-65% as medium risk, 55-85% as high risk, and 75% as very high risk.
Enhancing Performance and Scalability of Large-Scale Recommendation Systems with Jagged Flash Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The integration of hardware accelerators has significantly advanced the capabilities of modern recommendation systems, enabling the exploration of complex ranking paradigms previously deemed impractical. However, the GPU-based computational costs present substantial challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate our development of an efficiency-driven approach to explore these paradigms, moving beyond traditional reliance on native PyTorch modules. We address the specific challenges posed by ranking models' dependence on categorical features, which vary in length and complicate GPU utilization. We introduce Jagged Feature Interaction Kernels, a novel method designed to extract fine-grained insights from long categorical features through efficient handling of dynamically sized tensors. We further enhance the performance of attention mechanisms by integrating Jagged tensors with Flash Attention. Our novel Jagged Flash Attention achieves up to 9x speedup and 22x memory reduction compared to dense attention. Notably, it also outperforms dense flash attention, with up to 3x speedup and 53% more memory efficiency. In production models, we observe 10% QPS improvement and 18% memory savings, enabling us to scale our recommendation systems with longer features and more complex architectures.
Custodial and Non-Custodial Wallets
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Non-custodial wallets are a type of cryptocurrency wallet wherein the owner has full control over the private keys and is solely responsible for managing and securing the digital assets that it contains. Unlike custodial wallets, which are managed by third parties, such as exchanges, non-custodial wallets ensure that funds are controlled exclusively by the end user. We characterise the difference between custodial and non-custodial wallets and examine their key features and related risks.
Neural Control Variates with Automatic Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a method to leverage arbitrary neural network architecture for control variates. Control variates are crucial in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo integration, but they hinge on finding a function that both correlates with the integrand and has a known analytical integral. Traditional approaches rely on heuristics to choose this function, which might not be expressive enough to correlate well with the integrand. Recent research alleviates this issue by modeling the integrands with a learnable parametric model, such as a neural network. However, the challenge remains in creating an expressive parametric model with a known analytical integral. This paper proposes a novel approach to construct learnable parametric control variates functions from arbitrary neural network architectures. Instead of using a network to approximate the integrand directly, we employ the network to approximate the anti-derivative of the integrand. This allows us to use automatic differentiation to create a function whose integration can be constructed by the antiderivative network. We apply our method to solve partial differential equations using the Walk-on-sphere algorithm. Our results indicate that this approach is unbiased and uses various network architectures to achieve lower variance than other control variate methods.
Steward: Natural Language Web Automation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in serving as the foundation for AI assistants. One emerging application of LLMs, navigating through websites and interacting with UI elements across various web pages, remains somewhat underexplored. We introduce Steward, a novel LLM-powered web automation tool designed to serve as a cost-effective, scalable, end-to-end solution for automating web interactions. Traditional browser automation frameworks like Selenium, Puppeteer, and Playwright are not scalable for extensive web interaction tasks, such as studying recommendation algorithms on platforms like YouTube and Twitter. These frameworks require manual coding of interactions, limiting their utility in large-scale or dynamic contexts. Steward addresses these limitations by integrating LLM capabilities with browser automation, allowing for natural language-driven interaction with websites. Steward operates by receiving natural language instructions and reactively planning and executing a sequence of actions on websites, looping until completion, making it a practical tool for developers and researchers to use. It achieves high efficiency, completing actions in 8.52 to 10.14 seconds at a cost of $0.028 per action or an average of $0.18 per task, which is further reduced to 4.8 seconds and $0.022 through a caching mechanism. It runs tasks on real websites with a 40% completion success rate. We discuss various design and implementation challenges, including state representation, action sequence selection, system responsiveness, detecting task completion, and caching implementation.
A Near-Optimal Low-Energy Deterministic Distributed SSSP with Ramifications on Congestion and APSP
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We present a low-energy deterministic distributed algorithm that computes exact Single-Source Shortest Paths (SSSP) in near-optimal time: it runs in $\tilde{O}(n)$ rounds and each node is awake during only $poly(\log n)$ rounds. When a node is not awake, it performs no computations or communications and spends no energy. The general approach we take along the way to this result can be viewed as a novel adaptation of Dijkstra's classic approach to SSSP, which makes it suitable for the distributed setting. Notice that Dijkstra's algorithm itself is not efficient in the distributed setting due to its need for repeatedly computing the minimum-distance unvisited node in the entire network. Our adapted approach has other implications, as we outline next. As a step toward the above end-result, we obtain a simple deterministic algorithm for exact SSSP with near-optimal time and message complexities of $\tilde{O}(n)$ and $\tilde{O}(m)$, in which each edge communicates only $poly(\log n)$ messages. Therefore, one can simultaneously run $n$ instances of it for $n$ sources, using a simple random delay scheduling. That computes All Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP) in the near-optimal time complexity of $\tilde{O}(n)$. This algorithm matches the complexity of the recent APSP algorithm of Bernstein and Nanongkai [STOC 2019] using a completely different method (and one that is more modular, in the sense that the SSSPs are solved independently). It also takes a step toward resolving the open problem on a deterministic $\tilde{O}(n)$-time APSP, as the only randomness used now is in the scheduling.
From Our Lab to Their Homes: Learnings from Longitudinal Field Research with Older Adults
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Conducting research with older adults in their home environments presents unique opportunities and challenges that differ significantly from traditional lab-based studies. In this paper, we share our experiences from year-long research activities aiming to design and evaluate conversational voice assistants for older adults through longitudinal deployment, interviews, co-design workshops, and evaluation studies. We discuss the benefits of bringing the lab to their home, including producing realistic and contextual interactions, creating stronger researcher-participant bonds, and enabling participant growth with the research over time. We also detail the difficulties encountered in various aspects of the research process, including recruitment, scheduling, logistics, following study protocols, and study closure. These learnings highlight the complex, yet rewarding, nature of longitudinal home-based research with older adults, offering lessons for future studies aiming to achieve real-world applicability.
From Text to Treatment Effects: A Meta-Learning Approach to Handling Text-Based Confounding
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

One of the central goals of causal machine learning is the accurate estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data. In recent years, meta-learning has emerged as a flexible, model-agnostic paradigm for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) using any supervised model. This paper examines the performance of meta-learners when the confounding variables are expressed in text. Through synthetic data experiments, we show that learners using pre-trained text representations of confounders, in addition to tabular background variables, achieve improved CATE estimates compared to those relying solely on the tabular variables, particularly when sufficient data is available. However, due to the entangled nature of the text embeddings, these models do not fully match the performance of meta-learners with perfect confounder knowledge. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of pre-trained text representations for causal inference and open up interesting avenues for future research.
CANDERE-COACH: Reinforcement Learning from Noisy Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In recent times, Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied to many challenging tasks. However, in order to perform well, it requires access to a good reward function which is often sparse or manually engineered with scope for error. Introducing human prior knowledge is often seen as a possible solution to the above-mentioned problem, such as imitation learning, learning from preference, and inverse reinforcement learning. Learning from feedback is another framework that enables an RL agent to learn from binary evaluative signals describing the teacher's (positive or negative) evaluation of the agent's action. However, these methods often make the assumption that evaluative teacher feedback is perfect, which is a restrictive assumption. In practice, such feedback can be noisy due to limited teacher expertise or other exacerbating factors like cognitive load, availability, distraction, etc. In this work, we propose the CANDERE-COACH algorithm, which is capable of learning from noisy feedback by a nonoptimal teacher. We propose a noise-filtering mechanism to de-noise online feedback data, thereby enabling the RL agent to successfully learn with up to 40% of the teacher feedback being incorrect. Experiments on three common domains demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
SOFI: Multi-Scale Deformable Transformer for Camera Calibration with Enhanced Line Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Camera calibration consists of estimating camera parameters such as the zenith vanishing point and horizon line. Estimating the camera parameters allows other tasks like 3D rendering, artificial reality effects, and object insertion in an image. Transformer-based models have provided promising results; however, they lack cross-scale interaction. In this work, we introduce \textit{multi-Scale defOrmable transFormer for camera calibratIon with enhanced line queries}, SOFI. SOFI improves the line queries used in CTRL-C and MSCC by using both line content and line geometric features. Moreover, SOFI's line queries allow transformer models to adopt the multi-scale deformable attention mechanism to promote cross-scale interaction between the feature maps produced by the backbone. SOFI outperforms existing methods on the \textit {Google Street View}, \textit {Horizon Line in the Wild}, and \textit {Holicity} datasets while keeping a competitive inference speed.
QUB-PHEO: A Visual-Based Dyadic Multi-View Dataset for Intention Inference in Collaborative Assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

QUB-PHEO introduces a visual-based, dyadic dataset with the potential of advancing human-robot interaction (HRI) research in assembly operations and intention inference. This dataset captures rich multimodal interactions between two participants, one acting as a 'robot surrogate,' across a variety of assembly tasks that are further broken down into 36 distinct subtasks. With rich visual annotations, such as facial landmarks, gaze, hand movements, object localization, and more for 70 participants, QUB-PHEO offers two versions: full video data for 50 participants and visual cues for all 70. Designed to improve machine learning models for HRI, QUB-PHEO enables deeper analysis of subtle interaction cues and intentions, promising contributions to the field. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/exponentialR/QUB-PHEO subject to an End-User License Agreement (EULA).
GEM-RAG: Graphical Eigen Memories For Retrieval Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The ability to form, retrieve, and reason about memories in response to stimuli serves as the cornerstone for general intelligence - shaping entities capable of learning, adaptation, and intuitive insight. Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven their ability, given the proper memories or context, to reason and respond meaningfully to stimuli. However, they are still unable to optimally encode, store, and retrieve memories - the ability to do this would unlock their full ability to operate as AI agents, and to specialize to niche domains. To remedy this, one promising area of research is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which aims to augment LLMs by providing them with rich in-context examples and information. In question-answering (QA) applications, RAG methods embed the text of interest in chunks, and retrieve the most relevant chunks for a prompt using text embeddings. Motivated by human memory encoding and retrieval, we aim to improve over standard RAG methods by generating and encoding higher-level information and tagging the chunks by their utility to answer questions. We introduce Graphical Eigen Memories For Retrieval Augmented Generation (GEM-RAG). GEM-RAG works by tagging each chunk of text in a given text corpus with LLM generated ``utility'' questions, connecting chunks in a graph based on the similarity of both their text and utility questions, and then using the eigendecomposition of the memory graph to build higher level summary nodes that capture the main themes of the text. We evaluate GEM-RAG, using both UnifiedQA and GPT-3.5 Turbo as the LLMs, with SBERT, and OpenAI's text encoders on two standard QA tasks, showing that GEM-RAG outperforms other state-of-the-art RAG methods on these tasks. We also discuss the implications of having a robust RAG system and future directions.
Optimizing News Text Classification with Bi-LSTM and Attention Mechanism for Efficient Data Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The development of Internet technology has led to a rapid increase in news information. Filtering out valuable content from complex information has become an urgentproblem that needs to be solved. In view of the shortcomings of traditional manual classification methods that are time-consuming and inefficient, this paper proposes an automaticclassification scheme for news texts based on deep learning. This solution achieves efficient classification and management of news texts by introducing advanced machine learning algorithms, especially an optimization model that combines Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Network (Bi-LSTM) and Attention Mechanism. Experimental results show that this solution can not only significantly improve the accuracy and timeliness of classification, but also significantly reduce the need for manual intervention. It has important practical significance for improving the information processing capabilities of the news industry and accelerating the speed of information flow. Through comparative analysis of multiple common models, the effectiveness and advancement of the proposed method are proved, laying a solid foundation for future news text classification research.
Revolutionizing Biomarker Discovery: Leveraging Generative AI for Bio-Knowledge-Embedded Continuous Space Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Biomarker discovery is vital in advancing personalized medicine, offering insights into disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic efficacy. Traditionally, the identification and validation of biomarkers heavily depend on extensive experiments and statistical analyses. These approaches are time-consuming, demand extensive domain expertise, and are constrained by the complexity of biological systems. These limitations motivate us to ask: Can we automatically identify the effective biomarker subset without substantial human efforts? Inspired by the success of generative AI, we think that the intricate knowledge of biomarker identification can be compressed into a continuous embedding space, thus enhancing the search for better biomarkers. Thus, we propose a new biomarker identification framework with two important modules:1) training data preparation and 2) embedding-optimization-generation. The first module uses a multi-agent system to automatically collect pairs of biomarker subsets and their corresponding prediction accuracy as training data. These data establish a strong knowledge base for biomarker identification. The second module employs an encoder-evaluator-decoder learning paradigm to compress the knowledge of the collected data into a continuous space. Then, it utilizes gradient-based search techniques and autoregressive-based reconstruction to efficiently identify the optimal subset of biomarkers. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets to show the efficiency, robustness, and effectiveness of our method.
SurgIRL: Towards Life-Long Learning for Surgical Automation by Incremental Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Surgical automation holds immense potential to improve the outcome and accessibility of surgery. Recent studies use reinforcement learning to learn policies that automate different surgical tasks. However, these policies are developed independently and are limited in their reusability when the task changes, making it more time-consuming when robots learn to solve multiple tasks. Inspired by how human surgeons build their expertise, we train surgical automation policies through Surgical Incremental Reinforcement Learning (SurgIRL). SurgIRL aims to (1) acquire new skills by referring to external policies (knowledge) and (2) accumulate and reuse these skills to solve multiple unseen tasks incrementally (incremental learning). Our SurgIRL framework includes three major components. We first define an expandable knowledge set containing heterogeneous policies that can be helpful for surgical tasks. Then, we propose Knowledge Inclusive Attention Network with mAximum Coverage Exploration (KIAN-ACE), which improves learning efficiency by maximizing the coverage of the knowledge set during the exploration process. Finally, we develop incremental learning pipelines based on KIAN-ACE to accumulate and reuse learned knowledge and solve multiple surgical tasks sequentially. Our simulation experiments show that KIAN-ACE efficiently learns to automate ten surgical tasks separately or incrementally. We also evaluate our learned policies on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) and demonstrate successful sim-to-real transfers.