OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A New Security and Identification Concept for SWIPT Systems in IoT Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

This article addresses an innovative concept to enhance the security for IoT applications in the case of Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer. This is achieved by integrating a complementary security and identification mechanism through Wireless Power Transfer link within the network of autonomous wireless nodes. This mechanism is implemented at the level of the RF rectifier used to receive energy from a dedicated RF source. A prototype of such RF rectifier has been developed, it generates in real time a backscattered waveform (uplink from the wireless node to the RF source) as function of the parameters of the incoming energy waveform (downlink from RF source) and a digital private key code, generated/available at the level of the wireless node. This uplink waveform can be monitored at the level of the RF source for security/identification purposes implementing an autonomous hardware/physical security layer that operates independently from the communication protocols.
Privacy-preserving server-supported decryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we consider encryption systems with two-out-of-two threshold decryption, where one of the parties (the client) initiates the decryption and the other one (the server) assists. Existing threshold decryption schemes disclose to the server the ciphertext that is being decrypted. We give a construction, where the identity of the ciphertext is not leaked to the server, and the client's privacy is thus preserved. While showing the security of this construction, we run into the issue of defining the security of a scheme with blindly assisted decryption. We discuss previously proposed security definitions for similar cryptographic functionalities and argue why they do not capture the expected meaning of security. We propose an ideal functionality for the encryption with server-supported blind threshold decryption in the universal composability model, carefully balancing between the meaning of privacy, and the ability to implement it. We construct a protocol and show that it is a secure implementation of the proposed functionality in the random oracle model.
Task queue implementation for edge computing platform
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

With the rising number of distributed computer systems, from microservice web applications to IoT platforms, the question of reliable communication between different parts of the aforementioned systems is becoming increasingly important. As part of this paper, a task queue, which facilitates reliable asynchronous communication between different services, will be implemented. In order to control the flow of tasks through the queue and limit the load on downstream components, we are going to explore ways of efficiently restricting throughput, and defining priority queues within the task queue service. The research will also take a look at how different aspects of the task queue, such as the underlying persistence layer, affect their performance, reliability, and resource usage. This task queue will be implemented as a component in the already existing platform for managing clusters, constellations
AgentSense: Benchmarking Social Intelligence of Language Agents through Interactive Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly leveraged to empower autonomous agents to simulate human beings in various fields of behavioral research. However, evaluating their capacity to navigate complex social interactions remains a challenge. Previous studies face limitations due to insufficient scenario diversity, complexity, and a single-perspective focus. To this end, we introduce AgentSense: Benchmarking Social Intelligence of Language Agents through Interactive Scenarios. Drawing on Dramaturgical Theory, AgentSense employs a bottom-up approach to create 1,225 diverse social scenarios constructed from extensive scripts. We evaluate LLM-driven agents through multi-turn interactions, emphasizing both goal completion and implicit reasoning. We analyze goals using ERG theory and conduct comprehensive experiments. Our findings highlight that LLMs struggle with goals in complex social scenarios, especially high-level growth needs, and even GPT-4o requires improvement in private information reasoning. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/ljcleo/agent_sense}.
Interpreting Neural Networks through Mahalanobis Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a theoretical framework that connects neural network linear layers with the Mahalanobis distance, offering a new perspective on neural network interpretability. While previous studies have explored activation functions primarily for performance optimization, our work interprets these functions through statistical distance measures, a less explored area in neural network research. By establishing this connection, we provide a foundation for developing more interpretable neural network models, which is crucial for applications requiring transparency. Although this work is theoretical and does not include empirical data, the proposed distance-based interpretation has the potential to enhance model robustness, improve generalization, and provide more intuitive explanations of neural network decisions.
FeBiM: Efficient and Compact Bayesian Inference Engine Empowered with Ferroelectric In-Memory Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In scenarios with limited training data or where explainability is crucial, conventional neural network-based machine learning models often face challenges. In contrast, Bayesian inference-based algorithms excel in providing interpretable predictions and reliable uncertainty estimation in these scenarios. While many state-of-the-art in-memory computing (IMC) architectures leverage emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies to offer unparalleled computing capacity and energy efficiency for neural network workloads, their application in Bayesian inference is limited. This is because the core operations in Bayesian inference differ significantly from the multiplication-accumulation (MAC) operations common in neural networks, rendering them generally unsuitable for direct implementation in most existing IMC designs. In this paper, we propose FeBiM, an efficient and compact Bayesian inference engine powered by multi-bit ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET)-based IMC. FeBiM effectively encodes the trained probabilities of a Bayesian inference model within a compact FeFET-based crossbar. It maps quantized logarithmic probabilities to discrete FeFET states. As a result, the accumulated outputs of the crossbar naturally represent the posterior probabilities, i.e., the Bayesian inference model's output given a set of observations. This approach enables efficient in-memory Bayesian inference without the need for additional calculation circuitry. As the first FeFET-based in-memory Bayesian inference engine, FeBiM achieves an impressive storage density of 26.32 Mb/mm$^{2}$ and a computing efficiency of 581.40 TOPS/W in a representative Bayesian classification task. These results demonstrate 10.7$\times$/43.4$\times$ improvement in compactness/efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art hardware implementation of Bayesian inference.
Capsule Endoscopy Multi-classification via Gated Attention and Wavelet Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Abnormalities in the gastrointestinal tract significantly influence the patient's health and require a timely diagnosis for effective treatment. With such consideration, an effective automatic classification of these abnormalities from a video capsule endoscopy (VCE) frame is crucial for improvement in diagnostic workflows. The work presents the process of developing and evaluating a novel model designed to classify gastrointestinal anomalies from a VCE video frame. Integration of Omni Dimensional Gated Attention (OGA) mechanism and Wavelet transformation techniques into the model's architecture allowed the model to focus on the most critical areas in the endoscopy images, reducing noise and irrelevant features. This is particularly advantageous in capsule endoscopy, where images often contain a high degree of variability in texture and color. Wavelet transformations contributed by efficiently capturing spatial and frequency-domain information, improving feature extraction, especially for detecting subtle features from the VCE frames. Furthermore, the features extracted from the Stationary Wavelet Transform and Discrete Wavelet Transform are concatenated channel-wise to capture multiscale features, which are essential for detecting polyps, ulcerations, and bleeding. This approach improves classification accuracy on imbalanced capsule endoscopy datasets. The proposed model achieved 92.76% and 91.19% as training and validation accuracies respectively. At the same time, Training and Validation losses are 0.2057 and 0.2700. The proposed model achieved a Balanced Accuracy of 94.81%, AUC of 87.49%, F1-score of 91.11%, precision of 91.17%, recall of 91.19% and specificity of 98.44%. Additionally, the model's performance is benchmarked against two base models, VGG16 and ResNet50, demonstrating its enhanced ability to identify and classify a range of gastrointestinal abnormalities accurately.
Motion Planning for Robotics: A Review for Sampling-based Planners
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in robotics have transformed industries such as manufacturing, logistics, surgery, and planetary exploration. A key challenge is developing efficient motion planning algorithms that allow robots to navigate complex environments while avoiding collisions and optimizing metrics like path length, sweep area, execution time, and energy consumption. Among the available algorithms, sampling-based methods have gained the most traction in both research and industry due to their ability to handle complex environments, explore free space, and offer probabilistic completeness along with other formal guarantees. Despite their widespread application, significant challenges still remain. To advance future planning algorithms, it is essential to review the current state-of-the-art solutions and their limitations. In this context, this work aims to shed light on these challenges and assess the development and applicability of sampling-based methods. Furthermore, we aim to provide an in-depth analysis of the design and evaluation of ten of the most popular planners across various scenarios. Our findings highlight the strides made in sampling-based methods while underscoring persistent challenges. This work offers an overview of the important ongoing research in robotic motion planning.
Progressive Glimmer: Expanding Dimensionality in Multidimensional Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Progressive dimensionality reduction algorithms allow for visually investigating intermediate results, especially for large data sets. While different algorithms exist that progressively increase the number of data points, we propose an algorithm that allows for increasing the number of dimensions. Especially in spatio-temporal data, where each spatial location can be seen as one data point and each time step as one dimension, the data is often stored in a format that supports quick access to the individual dimensions of all points. Therefore, we propose Progressive Glimmer, a progressive multidimensional scaling (MDS) algorithm. We adapt the Glimmer algorithm to support progressive updates for changes in the data's dimensionality. We evaluate Progressive Glimmer's embedding quality and runtime. We observe that the algorithm provides more stable results, leading to visually consistent results for progressive rendering and making the approach applicable to streaming data. We show the applicability of our approach to spatio-temporal simulation ensemble data where we add the individual ensemble members progressively.
Non-Dominated Sorting Bidirectional Differential Coevolution
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Constrained multiobjective optimization problems (CMOPs) are commonly found in real-world applications. CMOP is a complex problem that needs to satisfy a set of equality or inequality constraints. This paper proposes a variant of the bidirectional coevolution algorithm (BiCo) with differential evolution (DE). The novelties in the model include the DE differential mutation and crossover operators as the main search engine and a non-dominated sorting selection scheme. Experimental results on two benchmark test suites and eight real-world CMOPs suggested that the proposed model reached better overall performance than the original model.
Computational Bottlenecks of Training Small-scale Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

While large language models (LLMs) dominate the AI landscape, Small-scale large Language Models (SLMs) are gaining attention due to cost and efficiency demands from consumers. However, there is limited research on the training behavior and computational requirements of SLMs. In this study, we explore the computational bottlenecks of training SLMs (up to 2B parameters) by examining the effects of various hyperparameters and configurations, including GPU type, batch size, model size, communication protocol, attention type, and the number of GPUs. We assess these factors on popular cloud services using metrics such as loss per dollar and tokens per second. Our findings aim to support the broader adoption and optimization of language model training for low-resource AI research institutes.
CloserMusicDB: A Modern Multipurpose Dataset of High Quality Music
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce CloserMusicDB, a collection of full length studio quality tracks annotated by a team of human experts. We describe the selected qualities of our dataset, along with three example tasks possible to perform using this dataset: hook detection, contextual tagging and artist identification. We conduct baseline experiments and provide initial benchmarks for these tasks.
Energy-Efficiency Architectural Enhancements for Sensing-Enabled Mobile Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Sensing will be a key technology in 6G networks, enabling a plethora of new sensing-enabled use cases. Some of the use cases relate to deployments over a wide physical area that needs to be sensed by multiple sensing sources at different locations. The efficient management of the sensing resources is pivotal for sustainable sensing-enabled mobile network designs. In this paper, we provide an example of such use case, and show the energy consumption due to sensing has potential to scale to prohibitive levels. We then propose architectural enhancements to solve this problem, and discuss energy saving and energy efficient strategies in sensing, that can only be properly quantified and applied with the proposed architectural enhancements.
Analyzing Neural Network Robustness Using Graph Curvature
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a new look at the neural network (NN) robustness problem, from the point of view of graph theory analysis, specifically graph curvature. Graph curvature (e.g., Ricci curvature) has been used to analyze system dynamics and identify bottlenecks in many domains, including road traffic analysis and internet routing. We define the notion of neural Ricci curvature and use it to identify bottleneck NN edges that are heavily used to ``transport data" to the NN outputs. We provide an evaluation on MNIST that illustrates that such edges indeed occur more frequently for inputs where NNs are less robust. These results will serve as the basis for an alternative method of robust training, by minimizing the number of bottleneck edges.
Community detection on directed networks with missing edges
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Identifying significant community structures in networks with incomplete data is a challenging task, as the reliability of solutions diminishes with increasing levels of missing information. However, in many empirical contexts, some information about the uncertainty in the network measurements can be estimated. In this work, we extend the recently developed Flow Stability framework, originally designed for detecting communities in time-varying networks, to address the problem of community detection in weighted, directed networks with missing links. Our approach leverages known uncertainty levels in nodes' out-degrees to enhance the robustness of community detection. Through comparisons on synthetic networks and a real-world network of messaging channels on the Telegram platform, we demonstrate that our method delivers more reliable community structures, even when a significant portion of data is missing.
Optimizing Hearthstone Agents using an Evolutionary Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Digital collectible card games are not only a growing part of the video game industry, but also an interesting research area for the field of computational intelligence. This game genre allows researchers to deal with hidden information, uncertainty and planning, among other aspects. This paper proposes the use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to develop agents who play a card game, Hearthstone, by optimizing a data-driven decision-making mechanism that takes into account all the elements currently in play. Agents feature self-learning by means of a competitive coevolutionary training approach, whereby no external sparring element defined by the user is required for the optimization process. One of the agents developed through the proposed approach was runner-up (best 6%) in an international Hearthstone Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition. Our proposal performed remarkably well, even when it faced state-of-the-art techniques that attempted to take into account future game states, such as Monte-Carlo Tree search. This outcome shows how evolutionary computation could represent a considerable advantage in developing AIs for collectible card games such as Hearthstone.
Soft Finger Grasp Force and Contact State Estimation from Tactile Sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Soft robotic fingers can improve adaptability in grasping and manipulation, compensating for geometric variation in object or environmental contact, but today lack force capacity and fine dexterity. Integrated tactile sensors can provide grasp and task information which can improve dexterity,but should ideally not require object-specific training. The total force vector exerted by a finger provides general information to the internal grasp forces (e.g. for grasp stability) and, when summed over fingers, an estimate of the external force acting on the grasped object (e.g. for task-level control). In this study, we investigate the efficacy of estimating finger force from integrated soft sensors and use it to estimate contact states. We use a neural network for force regression, collecting labelled data with a force/torque sensor and a range of test objects. Subsequently, we apply this model in a plug-in task scenario and demonstrate its validity in estimating contact states.
Super Gradient Descent: Global Optimization requires Global Gradient
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Global minimization is a fundamental challenge in optimization, especially in machine learning, where finding the global minimum of a function directly impacts model performance and convergence. This article introduces a novel optimization method that we called Super Gradient Descent, designed specifically for one-dimensional functions, guaranteeing convergence to the global minimum for any k-Lipschitz function defined on a closed interval [a, b]. Our approach addresses the limitations of traditional optimization algorithms, which often get trapped in local minima. In particular, we introduce the concept of global gradient which offers a robust solution for precise and well-guided global optimization. By focusing on the global minimization problem, this work bridges a critical gap in optimization theory, offering new insights and practical advancements in different optimization problems in particular Machine Learning problems like line search.
DA-VIL: Adaptive Dual-Arm Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning and Variable Impedance Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Dual-arm manipulation is an area of growing interest in the robotics community. Enabling robots to perform tasks that require the coordinated use of two arms, is essential for complex manipulation tasks such as handling large objects, assembling components, and performing human-like interactions. However, achieving effective dual-arm manipulation is challenging due to the need for precise coordination, dynamic adaptability, and the ability to manage interaction forces between the arms and the objects being manipulated. We propose a novel pipeline that combines the advantages of policy learning based on environment feedback and gradient-based optimization to learn controller gains required for the control outputs. This allows the robotic system to dynamically modulate its impedance in response to task demands, ensuring stability and dexterity in dual-arm operations. We evaluate our pipeline on a trajectory-tracking task involving a variety of large, complex objects with different masses and geometries. The performance is then compared to three other established methods for controlling dual-arm robots, demonstrating superior results.
Temporal Convolution-based Hybrid Model Approach with Representation Learning for Real-Time Acoustic Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

The early detection of potential failures in industrial machinery components is paramount for ensuring the reliability and safety of operations, thereby preserving Machine Condition Monitoring (MCM). This research addresses this imperative by introducing an innovative approach to Real-Time Acoustic Anomaly Detection. Our method combines semi-supervised temporal convolution with representation learning and a hybrid model strategy with Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) to handle various intricate anomaly patterns found in acoustic data effectively. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance compared to established research in the field, underscoring the effectiveness of this approach. Not only do we present quantitative evidence of its superiority, but we also employ visual representations, such as t-SNE plots, to further substantiate the model's efficacy.
Model merging with SVD to tie the Knots
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent model merging methods demonstrate that the parameters of fully-finetuned models specializing in distinct tasks can be combined into one model capable of solving all tasks without retraining. Yet, this success does not transfer well when merging LoRA finetuned models. We study this phenomenon and observe that the weights of LoRA finetuned models showcase a lower degree of alignment compared to their fully-finetuned counterparts. We hypothesize that improving this alignment is key to obtaining better LoRA model merges, and propose KnOTS to address this problem. KnOTS uses the SVD to jointly transform the weights of different LoRA models into an aligned space, where existing merging methods can be applied. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark that explicitly evaluates whether merged models are general models. Notably, KnOTS consistently improves LoRA merging by up to 4.3% across several vision and language benchmarks, including our new setting. We release our code at: https://github.com/gstoica27/KnOTS.