OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Software Engineering for Robotics: Future Research Directions; Report from the 2023 Workshop on Software Engineering for Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Robots are experiencing a revolution as they permeate many aspects of our daily lives, from performing house maintenance to infrastructure inspection, from efficiently warehousing goods to autonomous vehicles, and more. This technical progress and its impact are astounding. This revolution, however, is outstripping the capabilities of existing software development processes, techniques, and tools, which largely have remained unchanged for decades. These capabilities are ill-suited to handling the challenges unique to robotics software such as dealing with a wide diversity of domains, heterogeneous hardware, programmed and learned components, complex physical environments captured and modeled with uncertainty, emergent behaviors that include human interactions, and scalability demands that span across multiple dimensions. Looking ahead to the need to develop software for robots that are ever more ubiquitous, autonomous, and reliant on complex adaptive components, hardware, and data, motivated an NSF-sponsored community workshop on the subject of Software Engineering for Robotics, held in Detroit, Michigan in October 2023. The goal of the workshop was to bring together thought leaders across robotics and software engineering to coalesce a community, and identify key problems in the area of SE for robotics that that community should aim to solve over the next 5 years. This report serves to summarize the motivation, activities, and findings of that workshop, in particular by articulating the challenges unique to robot software, and identifying a vision for fruitful near-term research directions to tackle them.
Contrastive Learning and Cycle Consistency-based Transductive Transfer Learning for Target Annotation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Annotating automatic target recognition (ATR) is a highly challenging task, primarily due to the unavailability of labeled data in the target domain. Hence, it is essential to construct an optimal target domain classifier by utilizing the labeled information of the source domain images. The transductive transfer learning (TTL) method that incorporates a CycleGAN-based unpaired domain translation network has been previously proposed in the literature for effective ATR annotation. Although this method demonstrates great potential for ATR, it severely suffers from lower annotation performance, higher Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) score, and the presence of visual artifacts in the synthetic images. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid contrastive learning base unpaired domain translation (H-CUT) network that achieves a significantly lower FID score. It incorporates both attention and entropy to emphasize the domain-specific region, a noisy feature mixup module to generate high variational synthetic negative patches, and a modulated noise contrastive estimation (MoNCE) loss to reweight all negative patches using optimal transport for better performance. Our proposed contrastive learning and cycle-consistency-based TTL (C3TTL) framework consists of two H-CUT networks and two classifiers. It simultaneously optimizes cycle-consistency, MoNCE, and identity losses. In C3TTL, two H-CUT networks have been employed through a bijection mapping to feed the reconstructed source domain images into a pretrained classifier to guide the optimal target domain classifier. Extensive experimental analysis conducted on three ATR datasets demonstrates that the proposed C3TTL method is effective in annotating civilian and military vehicles, as well as ship targets.
ACS: Concurrent Kernel Execution on Irregular, Input-Dependent Computational Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

GPUs are widely used to accelerate many important classes of workloads today. However, we observe that several important emerging classes of workloads, including simulation engines for deep reinforcement learning and dynamic neural networks, are unable to fully utilize the massive parallelism that GPUs offer. These applications tend to have kernels that are small in size, i.e., have few thread blocks that do not saturate compute resources. Executing independent kernels concurrently is a promising approach to improve parallelism and utilization. However, this inter-kernel concurrency is difficult to leverage in such workloads with existing approaches: First, the inter-kernel dependencies and computational graph are input-dependent and vary each time the application is executed. Second, the computational graphs tend to be irregular, requiring fine-grain scheduling and synchronization; thus incurring significant synchronization overheads if kernel execution is parallelized. In this work, we propose ACS, a framework that enables lightweight detection of inter-kernel dependencies and low overhead kernel scheduling at runtime. The key idea behind ACS is to perform inter-kernel dependency checks for a small window of kernels at runtime, similar to out-of order instruction scheduling. This enables concurrent execution of kernels in applications whose computational graphs are input dependent and require fine-grained scheduling. We propose ACS-SW, a software-only open-source implementation of ACS and ACS-HW, a hardware-software cooperative implementation. ACS-HW further reduces synchronization overheads by reducing communication between the CPU and GPU. We evaluate ACS for deep RL simulation and dynamic DNNs on both real hardware and a GPU simulator. We demonstrate speedups of up to 2.19x (1.56x on average) by improving GPU utilization with concurrent kernel execution.
A New Class of Algorithms for Finding Short Vectors in Lattices Lifted from Co-dimension $k$ Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a new class of algorithms for finding a short vector in lattices defined by codes of co-dimension $k$ over $\mathbb{Z}_P^d$, where $P$ is prime. The co-dimension $1$ case is solved by exploiting the packing properties of the projections mod $P$ of an initial set of non-lattice vectors onto a single dual codeword. The technical tools we introduce are sorting of the projections followed by single-step pairwise Euclidean reduction of the projections, resulting in monotonic convergence of the positive-valued projections to zero. The length of vectors grows by a geometric factor each iteration. For fixed $P$ and $d$, and large enough user-defined input sets, we show that it is possible to minimize the number of iterations, and thus the overall length expansion factor, to obtain a short lattice vector. Thus we obtain a novel approach for controlling the output length, which resolves an open problem posed by Noah Stephens-Davidowitz (the possibility of an approximation scheme for the shortest-vector problem (SVP) which does not reduce to near-exact SVP). In our approach, one may obtain short vectors even when the lattice dimension is quite large, e.g., 8000. For fixed $P$, the algorithm yields shorter vectors for larger $d$. We additionally present a number of extensions and generalizations of our fundamental co-dimension $1$ method. These include a method for obtaining many different lattice vectors by multiplying the dual codeword by an integer and then modding by $P$; a co-dimension $k$ generalization; a large input set generalization; and finally, a "block" generalization, which involves the replacement of pairwise (Euclidean) reduction by a $k$-party (non-Euclidean) reduction. The $k$-block generalization of our algorithm constitutes a class of polynomial-time algorithms indexed by $k\geq 2$, which yield successively improved approximations for the short vector problem.
Program Decomposition and Translation with Static Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The rising popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has motivated exploring their use in code-related tasks. Code LLMs with more than millions of parameters are trained on a massive amount of code in different Programming Languages (PLs). Such models are used for automating various Software Engineering (SE) tasks using prompt engineering. However, given the very large size of industry-scale project files, a major issue of these LLMs is their limited context window size, motivating the question of "Can these LLMs process very large files and can we effectively perform prompt engineering?". Code translation aims to convert source code from one PL to another. In this work, we assess the effect of method-level program decomposition on context window of LLMs and investigate how this approach can enable translation of very large files which originally could not be done due to out-of-context issue. Our observations from 20 well-known java projects and approximately 60K methods suggest that method-level program decomposition significantly improves the limited context window problem of LLMs by 99.5%. Furthermore, our empirical analysis indicate that with method-level decomposition, each input fragment on average only consumes 5% of the context window, leaving more context space for prompt engineering and the output. Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of a Call Graph (CG) approach for translating very large files when doing method-level program decomposition.
Enhancing Reliability of Neural Networks at the Edge: Inverted Normalization with Stochastic Affine Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Bayesian Neural Networks (BayNNs) naturally provide uncertainty in their predictions, making them a suitable choice in safety-critical applications. Additionally, their realization using memristor-based in-memory computing (IMC) architectures enables them for resource-constrained edge applications. In addition to predictive uncertainty, however, the ability to be inherently robust to noise in computation is also essential to ensure functional safety. In particular, memristor-based IMCs are susceptible to various sources of non-idealities such as manufacturing and runtime variations, drift, and failure, which can significantly reduce inference accuracy. In this paper, we propose a method to inherently enhance the robustness and inference accuracy of BayNNs deployed in IMC architectures. To achieve this, we introduce a novel normalization layer combined with stochastic affine transformations. Empirical results in various benchmark datasets show a graceful degradation in inference accuracy, with an improvement of up to $58.11\%$.
Patch2QL: Discover Cognate Defects in Open Source Software Supply Chain With Auto-generated Static Analysis Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In the open source software (OSS) ecosystem, there exists a complex software supply chain, where developers upstream and downstream widely borrow and reuse code. This results in the widespread occurrence of recurring defects, missing fixes, and propagation issues. These are collectively referred to as cognate defects, and their scale and threats have not received extensive attention and systematic research. Software composition analysis and code clone detection methods are unable to cover the various variant issues in the supply chain scenario, while code static analysis, or static application security testing (SAST) techniques struggle to target specific defects. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for detecting cognate defects in OSS through the automatic generation of SAST rules. Specifically, it extracts key syntax and semantic information from pre- and post-patch versions of code through structural comparison and control flow to data flow analysis, and generates rules that matches these key elements. We have implemented a prototype tool called Patch2QL and applied it to fundamental OSS in C/C++. In experiments, we discovered 7 new vulnerabilities with medium to critical severity in the most popular upstream software, as well as numerous potential security issues. When analyzing downstream projects in the supply chain, we found a significant number of representative cognate defects, clarifying the threat posed by this issue. Additionally, compared to general-purpose SAST and signature-based mechanisms, the generated rules perform better at discover all variants of cognate defects.
Mini-batch Submodular Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present the first mini-batch algorithm for maximizing a non-negative monotone decomposable submodular function, $F=\sum_{i=1}^N f^i$, under a set of constraints. We consider two sampling approaches: uniform and weighted. We first show that mini-batch with weighted sampling improves over the state of the art sparsifier based approach both in theory and in practice. Surprisingly, our experimental results show that uniform sampling is superior to weighted sampling. However, it is impossible to explain this using worst-case analysis. Our main contribution is using smoothed analysis to provide a theoretical foundation for our experimental results. We show that, under very mild assumptions, uniform sampling is superior for both the mini-batch and the sparsifier approaches. We empirically verify that these assumptions hold for our datasets. Uniform sampling is simple to implement and has complexity independent of $N$, making it the perfect candidate to tackle massive real-world datasets.
Persona-centric Metamorphic Relation guided Robustness Evaluation for Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Recently there has been significant progress in the field of dialogue system thanks to the introduction of training paradigms such as fine-tune and prompt learning. Persona can function as the prior knowledge for maintaining the personality consistency of dialogue systems, which makes it perform well on accuracy. Nonetheless, the conventional reference-based evaluation method falls short in capturing the genuine text comprehension prowess of the model, significantly relying on the quality of data annotation. In contrast, the application of metamorphic testing offers a more profound insight into the model's distinct capabilities without necessitating supplementary annotation labels. This approach furnishes a more comprehensive portrayal of the model's intricacies and exposes intricacies concealed within reference-based validation techniques. Consequently, we introduce a persona-centric metamorphic relation construction for metamorphic testing, aimed at evaluating both the persona consistency and robustness of personalized dialogue models. For that reason, this work evaluates several widely used training paradigms including learning from scratch, pretrain + fine-tune and prompt learning in personalized dialogue retrieval to know if they are more robust or if they have the same flaws as their predecessor. Under three kinds of designed metamorphic relations with consistent outputs, our experimental results reveal that prompt learning shows stronger robustness compared to training from scratch and fine-tune. Although tested retrieval models gain competitively high retrieval accuracy according to the traditional reference-based validation, they are still fragile and demonstrate various unexpected behaviors, thus there is still room for future improvement in personalized dialogue retrieval.
On the Fundamental Tradeoff of Joint Communication and Quickest Change Detection with State-Independent Data Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we take the initiative in studying the information-theoretic tradeoff between communication and quickest change detection (QCD) under an integrated sensing and communication setting. We formally establish a joint communication and sensing problem for the quickest change detection. We assume a broadcast channel with a transmitter, a communication receiver, and a QCD detector in which only the detection channel is state dependent. For the problem setting, by utilizing constant subblock-composition codes and a modified CuSum detection rule, which we call subblock CuSum (SCS), we provide an inner bound on the information-theoretic tradeoff between communication rate and change point detection delay in the asymptotic regime of vanishing false alarm rate. We further provide a partial converse that matches our inner bound for a certain class of codes. This implies that the SCS detection strategy is asymptotically optimal for our codes as the false alarm rate constraint vanishes. We also present some canonical examples of the tradeoff region for a binary channel, a scalar Gaussian channel, and a MIMO Gaussian channel.
Small Language Model Meets with Reinforced Vision Vocabulary
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Playing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in 2023 is trendy among the AI community. However, the relatively large number of parameters (more than 7B) of popular LVLMs makes it difficult to train and deploy on consumer GPUs, discouraging many researchers with limited resources. Imagine how cool it would be to experience all the features of current LVLMs on an old GTX1080ti (our only game card). Accordingly, we present Vary-toy in this report, a small-size Vary along with Qwen-1.8B as the base ``large'' language model. In Vary-toy, we introduce an improved vision vocabulary, allowing the model to not only possess all features of Vary but also gather more generality. Specifically, we replace negative samples of natural images with positive sample data driven by object detection in the procedure of generating vision vocabulary, more sufficiently utilizing the capacity of the vocabulary network and enabling it to efficiently encode visual information corresponding to natural objects. For experiments, Vary-toy can achieve 65.6% ANLS on DocVQA, 59.1% accuracy on ChartQA, 88.1% accuracy on RefCOCO, and 29% on MMVet. The code will be publicly available on the homepage.
Self-Supervised Vision Transformers Are Efficient Segmentation Learners for Imperfect Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This study demonstrates a cost-effective approach to semantic segmentation using self-supervised vision transformers (SSVT). By freezing the SSVT backbone and training a lightweight segmentation head, our approach effectively utilizes imperfect labels, thereby improving robustness to label imperfections. Empirical experiments show significant performance improvements over existing methods for various annotation types, including scribble, point-level, and image-level labels. The research highlights the effectiveness of self-supervised vision transformers in dealing with imperfect labels, providing a practical and efficient solution for semantic segmentation while reducing annotation costs. Through extensive experiments, we confirm that our method outperforms baseline models for all types of imperfect labels. Especially under the zero-shot vision-language-model-based label, our model exhibits 11.5\%p performance gain compared to the baseline.
Investigation of FlexAlgo for User-driven Path Control
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper examines the Flexible Algorithm (FlexAlgo) for its potential to enable user-driven path control in intra-domain Segment Routing (SR) enabled networks. FlexAlgo is a relatively new approach to intra-domain routing that allows multiple custom algorithms to coexist within a single domain. This capability has the potential to provide users with greater control over the paths their data takes through a network. The research includes a thorough investigation of the FlexAlgo approach, including an examination of its underlying techniques, as well as a practical implementation of a FlexAlgo-based solution. We depict performed experiments where we implemented FlexAlgo in three different scenarios. We also present how we developed an automated tool for users to control traffic steering using preferred metrics and constraints. The results of this investigation demonstrate the capabilities of FlexAlgo as a means of enabling user-driven path control and therefore increase security and trust of users towards the network.
Knowledge Distillation from Language-Oriented to Emergent Communication for Multi-Agent Remote Control
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we compare emergent communication (EC) built upon multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) and language-oriented semantic communication (LSC) empowered by a pre-trained large language model (LLM) using human language. In a multi-agent remote navigation task, with multimodal input data comprising location and channel maps, it is shown that EC incurs high training cost and struggles when using multimodal data, whereas LSC yields high inference computing cost due to the LLM's large size. To address their respective bottlenecks, we propose a novel framework of language-guided EC (LEC) by guiding the EC training using LSC via knowledge distillation (KD). Simulations corroborate that LEC achieves faster travel time while avoiding areas with poor channel conditions, as well as speeding up the MADRL training convergence by up to 61.8% compared to EC.
EL-VIT: Probing Vision Transformer with Interactive Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Nowadays, Vision Transformer (ViT) is widely utilized in various computer vision tasks, owing to its unique self-attention mechanism. However, the model architecture of ViT is complex and often challenging to comprehend, leading to a steep learning curve. ViT developers and users frequently encounter difficulties in interpreting its inner workings. Therefore, a visualization system is needed to assist ViT users in understanding its functionality. This paper introduces EL-VIT, an interactive visual analytics system designed to probe the Vision Transformer and facilitate a better understanding of its operations. The system consists of four layers of visualization views. The first three layers include model overview, knowledge background graph, and model detail view. These three layers elucidate the operation process of ViT from three perspectives: the overall model architecture, detailed explanation, and mathematical operations, enabling users to understand the underlying principles and the transition process between layers. The fourth interpretation view helps ViT users and experts gain a deeper understanding by calculating the cosine similarity between patches. Our two usage scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of EL-VIT in helping ViT users understand the working mechanism of ViT.