OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
New Class of Ciphers Using Hardware Entropy Source
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

We present a novel, computationally simple method of hiding any message in the stream of random bits by using a secret key. The method is called Bury Among Random Numbers (BARN). A stream of random bits is produced by extracting the entropy of a physical process in a hardware-based true random number generator (TRNG). The process of placing bits of a message into the stream of random bits is governed by the number of random bits skipped between subsequent insertions. The set of numbers that correspond to the steps of BARN is derived from a random number also provided by TRNG. Hence BARN cipher does not depend on any arithmetic function. We propose an effective method of computing random keys from a given number of random bits. We estimate the number of permutations that need to be tested during a brute-force attack on the new cipher for various key lengths. Some practical applications for the new class of symmetrical ciphers are discussed.
High Significant Fault Detection in Azure Core Workload Insights
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Azure Core workload insights have time-series data with different metric units. Faults or Anomalies are observed in these time-series data owing to faults observed with respect to metric name, resources region, dimensions, and its dimension value associated with the data. For Azure Core, an important task is to highlight faults or anomalies to the user on a dashboard that they can perceive easily. The number of anomalies reported should be highly significant and in a limited number, e.g., 5-20 anomalies reported per hour. The reported anomalies will have significant user perception and high reconstruction error in any time-series forecasting model. Hence, our task is to automatically identify 'high significant anomalies' and their associated information for user perception.
In My Perspective, In My Hands: Accurate Egocentric 2D Hand Pose and Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Action recognition is essential for egocentric video understanding, allowing automatic and continuous monitoring of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) without user effort. Existing literature focuses on 3D hand pose input, which requires computationally intensive depth estimation networks or wearing an uncomfortable depth sensor. In contrast, there has been insufficient research in understanding 2D hand pose for egocentric action recognition, despite the availability of user-friendly smart glasses in the market capable of capturing a single RGB image. Our study aims to fill this research gap by exploring the field of 2D hand pose estimation for egocentric action recognition, making two contributions. Firstly, we introduce two novel approaches for 2D hand pose estimation, namely EffHandNet for single-hand estimation and EffHandEgoNet, tailored for an egocentric perspective, capturing interactions between hands and objects. Both methods outperform state-of-the-art models on H2O and FPHA public benchmarks. Secondly, we present a robust action recognition architecture from 2D hand and object poses. This method incorporates EffHandEgoNet, and a transformer-based action recognition method. Evaluated on H2O and FPHA datasets, our architecture has a faster inference time and achieves an accuracy of 91.32% and 94.43%, respectively, surpassing state of the art, including 3D-based methods. Our work demonstrates that using 2D skeletal data is a robust approach for egocentric action understanding. Extensive evaluation and ablation studies show the impact of the hand pose estimation approach, and how each input affects the overall performance.
Characterizing Soft-Error Resiliency in Arm's Ethos-U55 Embedded Machine Learning Accelerator
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

As Neural Processing Units (NPU) or accelerators are increasingly deployed in a variety of applications including safety critical applications such as autonomous vehicle, and medical imaging, it is critical to understand the fault-tolerance nature of the NPUs. We present a reliability study of Arm's Ethos-U55, an important industrial-scale NPU being utilised in embedded and IoT applications. We perform large scale RTL-level fault injections to characterize Ethos-U55 against the Automotive Safety Integrity Level D (ASIL-D) resiliency standard commonly used for safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles. We show that, under soft errors, all four configurations of the NPU fall short of the required level of resiliency for a variety of neural networks running on the NPU. We show that it is possible to meet the ASIL-D level resiliency without resorting to conventional strategies like Dual Core Lock Step (DCLS) that has an area overhead of 100%. We achieve so through selective protection, where hardware structures are selectively protected (e.g., duplicated, hardened) based on their sensitivity to soft errors and their silicon areas. To identify the optimal configuration that minimizes the area overhead while meeting the ASIL-D standard, the main challenge is the large search space associated with the time-consuming RTL simulation. To address this challenge, we present a statistical analysis tool that is validated against Arm silicon and that allows us to quickly navigate hundreds of billions of fault sites without exhaustive RTL fault injections. We show that by carefully duplicating a small fraction of the functional blocks and hardening the Flops in other blocks meets the ASIL-D safety standard while introducing an area overhead of only 38%.
Large Language Models are as persuasive as humans, but how? About the cognitive effort and moral-emotional language of LLM arguments
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) are already as persuasive as humans. However, we know very little about how they do it. This paper investigates the persuasion strategies of LLMs, comparing them with human-generated arguments. Using a dataset of 1,251 participants in an experiment, we analyze the persuasion strategies of LLM-generated and human-generated arguments using measures of cognitive effort (lexical and grammatical complexity) and moral-emotional language (sentiment and moral analysis). The study reveals that LLMs produce arguments that require higher cognitive effort, exhibiting more complex grammatical and lexical structures than human counterparts. Additionally, LLMs demonstrate a significant propensity to engage more deeply with moral language, utilizing both positive and negative moral foundations more frequently than humans. In contrast with previous research, no significant difference was found in the emotional content produced by LLMs and humans. These findings contribute to the discourse on AI and persuasion, highlighting the dual potential of LLMs to both enhance and undermine informational integrity through communication strategies for digital persuasion.
SNN4Agents: A Framework for Developing Energy-Efficient Embodied Spiking Neural Networks for Autonomous Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent trends have shown that autonomous agents, such as Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and mobile robots, effectively improve human productivity in solving diverse tasks. However, since these agents are typically powered by portable batteries, they require extremely low power/energy consumption to operate in a long lifespan. To solve this challenge, neuromorphic computing has emerged as a promising solution, where bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) use spikes from event-based cameras or data conversion pre-processing to perform sparse computations efficiently. However, the studies of SNN deployments for autonomous agents are still at an early stage. Hence, the optimization stages for enabling efficient embodied SNN deployments for autonomous agents have not been defined systematically. Toward this, we propose a novel framework called SNN4Agents that consists of a set of optimization techniques for designing energy-efficient embodied SNNs targeting autonomous agent applications. Our SNN4Agents employs weight quantization, timestep reduction, and attention window reduction to jointly improve the energy efficiency, reduce the memory footprint, optimize the processing latency, while maintaining high accuracy. In the evaluation, we investigate use cases of event-based car recognition, and explore the trade-offs among accuracy, latency, memory, and energy consumption. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can maintain high accuracy (i.e., 84.12% accuracy) with 68.75% memory saving, 3.58x speed-up, and 4.03x energy efficiency improvement as compared to the state-of-the-art work for NCARS dataset. In this manner, our SNN4Agents framework paves the way toward enabling energy-efficient embodied SNN deployments for autonomous agents.
Towards Practical Tool Usage for Continually Learning LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) show an innate skill for solving language based tasks. But insights have suggested an inability to adjust for information or task-solving skills becoming outdated, as their knowledge, stored directly within their parameters, remains static in time. Tool use helps by offloading work to systems that the LLM can access through an interface, but LLMs that use them still must adapt to nonstationary environments for prolonged use, as new tools can emerge and existing tools can change. Nevertheless, tools require less specialized knowledge, therefore we hypothesize they are better suited for continual learning (CL) as they rely less on parametric memory for solving tasks and instead focus on learning when to apply pre-defined tools. To verify this, we develop a synthetic benchmark and follow this by aggregating existing NLP tasks to form a more realistic testing scenario. While we demonstrate scaling model size is not a solution, regardless of tool usage, continual learning techniques can enable tool LLMs to both adapt faster while forgetting less, highlighting their potential as continual learners.
A Paradigm For Collaborative Pervasive Fog Computing Ecosystems at the Network Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

While the success of edge and fog computing increased with the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, such novel computing paradigm, that moves compute resources closer to the source of data and services, must address many challenges such as reducing communication overhead to/from datacenters, the latency to compute and receive results, as well as energy consumption at the mobile and IoT devices. fog-to-fog (f2f) cooperation has recently been proposed to increase the computation capacity at the network edge through cooperation across multiple stakeholders. In this paper we adopt an analytical approach to studying f2f cooperation paradigm. We highlight the benefits of using such new paradigm in comparison with traditional three-tier fog computing paradigms. We use a Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) model for the N f2f cooperating nodes and cast cooperation as an optimization problem, which we solve using the proposed model.
Understanding the Role of Temperature in Diverse Question Generation by GPT-4
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We conduct a preliminary study of the effect of GPT's temperature parameter on the diversity of GPT4-generated questions. We find that using higher temperature values leads to significantly higher diversity, with different temperatures exposing different types of similarity between generated sets of questions. We also demonstrate that diverse question generation is especially difficult for questions targeting lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.
Neural McKean-Vlasov Processes: Distributional Dependence in Diffusion Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (MV-SDEs) provide a mathematical description of the behavior of an infinite number of interacting particles by imposing a dependence on the particle density. As such, we study the influence of explicitly including distributional information in the parameterization of the SDE. We propose a series of semi-parametric methods for representing MV-SDEs, and corresponding estimators for inferring parameters from data based on the properties of the MV-SDE. We analyze the characteristics of the different architectures and estimators, and consider their applicability in relevant machine learning problems. We empirically compare the performance of the different architectures and estimators on real and synthetic datasets for time series and probabilistic modeling. The results suggest that explicitly including distributional dependence in the parameterization of the SDE is effective in modeling temporal data with interaction under an exchangeability assumption while maintaining strong performance for standard Itô-SDEs due to the richer class of probability flows associated with MV-SDEs.
Predicting Accurate Hot Spots in a More Than Ten-Thousand-Core GPU with a Million-Time Speedup over FEM Enabled by a Physics-based Learning Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

The classical proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) with the Galerkin projection (GP) has been revised for chip-level thermal simulation of microprocessors with a large number of cores. An ensemble POD-GP methodology (EnPOD-GP) is introduced to significantly improve the training effectiveness and prediction accuracy by dividing a large number of heat sources into heat source blocks (HSBs) each of which may contains one or a very small number of heat sources. Although very accurate, efficient and robust to any power map, EnPOD-GP suffers from intensive training for microprocessors with an enormous number of cores. A local-domain EnPOD-GP model (LEnPOD-GP) is thus proposed to further minimize the training burden. LEnPOD-GP utilizes the concepts of local domain truncation and generic building blocks to reduce the massive training data. LEnPOD-GP has been demonstrated on thermal simulation of NVIDIA Tesla Volta GV100, a GPU with more than 13,000 cores including FP32, FP64, INT32, and Tensor Cores. Due to the domain truncation for LEnPOD-GP, the least square error (LSE) is degraded but is still as small as 1.6% over the entire space and below 1.4% in the device layer when using 4 modes per HSB. When only the maximum temperature of the entire GPU is of interest, LEnPOD-GP offers a computing speed 1.1 million times faster than the FEM with a maximum error near 1.2 degrees over the entire simulation time.
Correcting Subverted Random Oracles
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The random oracle methodology has proven to be a powerful tool for designing and reasoning about cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we focus on the basic problem of correcting faulty or adversarially corrupted random oracles, so that they can be confidently applied for such cryptographic purposes. We prove that a simple construction can transform a "subverted" random oracle which disagrees with the original one at a small fraction of inputs into an object that is indifferentiable from a random function, even if the adversary is made aware of all randomness used in the transformation. Our results permit future designers of cryptographic primitives in typical kleptographic settings (i.e., those permitting adversaries that subvert or replace basic cryptographic algorithms) to use random oracles as a trusted black box.
kNN-CLIP: Retrieval Enables Training-Free Segmentation on Continually Expanding Large Vocabularies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Continual segmentation has not yet tackled the challenge of improving open-vocabulary segmentation models with training data for accurate segmentation across large, continually expanding vocabularies. We discover that traditional continual training results in severe catastrophic forgetting, failing to outperform a zero-shot segmentation baseline. We introduce a novel training-free strategy, kNN-CLIP, which augments the model with a database of instance embeddings for semantic and panoptic segmentation that achieves zero forgetting. We demonstrate that kNN-CLIP can adapt to continually growing vocabularies without the need for retraining or large memory costs. kNN-CLIP enables open-vocabulary segmentation methods to expand their vocabularies on any domain with a single pass through the data, while only storing compact embeddings. This approach minimizes both compute and memory costs. kNN-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance across large-vocabulary semantic and panoptic segmentation datasets. We hope kNN-CLIP represents a significant step forward in enabling more efficient and adaptable continual segmentation, paving the way for advances in real-world large-vocabulary continual segmentation methods.
Exploring the Nexus Between Retrievability and Query Generation Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Quantifying bias in retrieval functions through document retrievability scores is vital for assessing recall-oriented retrieval systems. However, many studies investigating retrieval model bias lack validation of their query generation methods as accurate representations of retrievability for real users and their queries. This limitation results from the absence of established criteria for query generation in retrievability assessments. Typically, researchers resort to using frequent collocations from document corpora when no query log is available. In this study, we address the issue of reproducibility and seek to validate query generation methods by comparing retrievability scores generated from artificially generated queries to those derived from query logs. Our findings demonstrate a minimal or negligible correlation between retrievability scores from artificial queries and those from query logs. This suggests that artificially generated queries may not accurately reflect retrievability scores as derived from query logs. We further explore alternative query generation techniques, uncovering a variation that exhibits the highest correlation. This alternative approach holds promise for improving reproducibility when query logs are unavailable.
Towards Efficient SRAM-PIM Architecture Design by Exploiting Unstructured Bit-Level Sparsity
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Bit-level sparsity in neural network models harbors immense untapped potential. Eliminating redundant calculations of randomly distributed zero-bits significantly boosts computational efficiency. Yet, traditional digital SRAM-PIM architecture, limited by rigid crossbar architecture, struggles to effectively exploit this unstructured sparsity. To address this challenge, we propose Dyadic Block PIM (DB-PIM), a groundbreaking algorithm-architecture co-design framework. First, we propose an algorithm coupled with a distinctive sparsity pattern, termed a dyadic block (DB), that preserves the random distribution of non-zero bits to maintain accuracy while restricting the number of these bits in each weight to improve regularity. Architecturally, we develop a custom PIM macro that includes dyadic block multiplication units (DBMUs) and Canonical Signed Digit (CSD)-based adder trees, specifically tailored for Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations. An input pre-processing unit (IPU) further refines performance and efficiency by capitalizing on block-wise input sparsity. Results show that our proposed co-design framework achieves a remarkable speedup of up to 7.69x and energy savings of 83.43%.
Learning Human Motion from Monocular Videos via Cross-Modal Manifold Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Learning 3D human motion from 2D inputs is a fundamental task in the realms of computer vision and computer graphics. Many previous methods grapple with this inherently ambiguous task by introducing motion priors into the learning process. However, these approaches face difficulties in defining the complete configurations of such priors or training a robust model. In this paper, we present the Video-to-Motion Generator (VTM), which leverages motion priors through cross-modal latent feature space alignment between 3D human motion and 2D inputs, namely videos and 2D keypoints. To reduce the complexity of modeling motion priors, we model the motion data separately for the upper and lower body parts. Additionally, we align the motion data with a scale-invariant virtual skeleton to mitigate the interference of human skeleton variations to the motion priors. Evaluated on AIST++, the VTM showcases state-of-the-art performance in reconstructing 3D human motion from monocular videos. Notably, our VTM exhibits the capabilities for generalization to unseen view angles and in-the-wild videos.
Machine learning-based optimization workflow of the homogeneity of spunbond nonwovens with human validation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the last ten years, the average annual growth rate of nonwoven production was 4%. In 2020 and 2021, nonwoven production has increased even further due to the huge demand for nonwoven products needed for protective clothing such as FFP2 masks to combat the COVID19 pandemic. Optimizing the production process is still a challenge due to its high nonlinearity. In this paper, we present a machine learning-based optimization workflow aimed at improving the homogeneity of spunbond nonwovens. The optimization workflow is based on a mathematical model that simulates the microstructures of nonwovens. Based on trainingy data coming from this simulator, different machine learning algorithms are trained in order to find a surrogate model for the time-consuming simulator. Human validation is employed to verify the outputs of machine learning algorithms by assessing the aesthetics of the nonwovens. We include scientific and expert knowledge into the training data to reduce the computational costs involved in the optimization process. We demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of our workflow in optimizing the homogeneity of nonwovens.
Leveraging the Doppler Effect for Channel Charting
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Channel Charting is a dimensionality reduction technique that reconstructs a map of the radio environment from similarity relationships found in channel state information. Distances in the channel chart are often computed based on some dissimilarity metric, which can be derived from angular-domain information, channel impulse responses, measured phase differences or simply timestamps. Using such information implicitly makes strong assumptions about the level of phase and time synchronization between base station antennas or assumes approximately constant transmitter velocity. Many practical systems, however, may not provide phase and time synchronization and single-antenna base stations may not even have angular-domain information. We propose a Doppler effect-based loss function for Channel Charting that only requires frequency synchronization between spatially distributed base station antennas, which is a much weaker assumption. We use a dataset measured in an indoor environment to demonstrate that the proposed method is practically feasible with just four base station antennas, that it produces a channel chart that is suitable for localization in the global coordinate frame and that it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods under the given limitations.