OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PartIR: Composing SPMD Partitioning Strategies for Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Training of modern large neural networks (NN) requires a combination of parallelization strategies encompassing data, model, or optimizer sharding. When strategies increase in complexity, it becomes necessary for partitioning tools to be 1) expressive, allowing the composition of simpler strategies, and 2) predictable to estimate performance analytically. We present PartIR, our design for a NN partitioning system. PartIR is focused on an incremental approach to rewriting and is hardware-and-runtime agnostic. We present a simple but powerful API for composing sharding strategies and a simulator to validate them. The process is driven by high-level programmer-issued partitioning tactics, which can be both manual and automatic. Importantly, the tactics are specified separately from the model code, making them easy to change. We evaluate PartIR on several different models to demonstrate its predictability, expressibility, and ability to reach peak performance..
3D Receiver for Molecular Communications in Internet of Organoids
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Organoids have garnered attention due to their effectiveness in modeling the 3D structure of organ interactions. However, the communication engineering perspective has received relatively little attention. One way to achieve organoids communication is molecular communication (MC). Molecular communication is a bio-inspired communication paradigm that uses molecules as information carriers. It is considered one of the most promising methods for enabling the Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT) and nanonetworks. BioFETs are commonly used to implement practical MC receivers. However, most previous analyses have focused on a planar device, neglecting considerations like the threshold voltage and its potential 3D structure. This paper introduces the first FinFET-based MC receiver that covers both the top and side gates with receptors. Both binding noise and flicker noise are considered in the analysis. The performance, in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and symbol error probability (SEP), is compared with that of the 2D receiver.
Selecting Walk Schemes for Database Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machinery for data analysis often requires a numeric representation of the input. Towards that, a common practice is to embed components of structured data into a high-dimensional vector space. We study the embedding of the tuples of a relational database, where existing techniques are often based on optimization tasks over a collection of random walks from the database. The focus of this paper is on the recent FoRWaRD algorithm that is designed for dynamic databases, where walks are sampled by following foreign keys between tuples. Importantly, different walks have different schemas, or "walk schemes", that are derived by listing the relations and attributes along the walk. Also importantly, different walk schemes describe relationships of different natures in the database. We show that by focusing on a few informative walk schemes, we can obtain tuple embedding significantly faster, while retaining the quality. We define the problem of scheme selection for tuple embedding, devise several approaches and strategies for scheme selection, and conduct a thorough empirical study of the performance over a collection of downstream tasks. Our results confirm that with effective strategies for scheme selection, we can obtain high-quality embeddings considerably (e.g., three times) faster, preserve the extensibility to newly inserted tuples, and even achieve an increase in the precision of some tasks.
A Hybrid Approach of Transfer Learning and Physics-Informed Modeling: Improving Dissolved Oxygen Concentration Prediction in an Industrial Wastewater Treatment Plant
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Constructing first principles models is a challenging task for nonlinear and complex systems such as a wastewater treatment unit. In recent years, data-driven models are widely used to overcome the complexity. However, they often suffer from issues such as missing, low quality or noisy data. Transfer learning is a solution for this issue where knowledge from another task is transferred to target one to increase the prediction performance. In this work, the objective is increasing the prediction performance of an industrial wastewater treatment plant by transferring the knowledge of (i) an open-source simulation model that captures the underlying physics of the process, albeit with dissimilarities to the target plant, (ii) another industrial plant characterized by noisy and limited data but located in the same refinery, and (iii) the model in (ii) and making the objective function of the training problem physics informed where the physics information derived from the open-source model in (ii). The results have shown that test and validation performance are improved up to 27% and 59%, respectively.
End-to-End Argument Mining over Varying Rhetorical Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Rhetorical Structure Theory implies no single discourse interpretation of a text, and the limitations of RST parsers further exacerbate inconsistent parsing of similar structures. Therefore, it is important to take into account that the same argumentative structure can be found in semantically similar texts with varying rhetorical structures. In this work, the differences between paraphrases within the same argument scheme are evaluated from a rhetorical perspective. The study proposes a deep dependency parsing model to assess the connection between rhetorical and argument structures. The model utilizes rhetorical relations; RST structures of paraphrases serve as training data augmentations. The method allows for end-to-end argumentation analysis using a rhetorical tree instead of a word sequence. It is evaluated on the bilingual Microtexts corpus, and the first results on fully-fledged argument parsing for the Russian version of the corpus are reported. The results suggest that argument mining can benefit from multiple variants of discourse structure.
Hierarchical Cell-Free Massive MIMO for High Capacity with Simple Implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Cell-free massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) has recently gained much attention for its potential in shaping the landscape of sixth-generation (6G) wireless systems. This paper proposes a hierarchical network architecture tailored for cell-free massive MIMO, seamlessly integrating co-located and distributed antennas. A central base station (CBS), equipped with an antenna array, positions itself near the center of the coverage area, complemented by distributed access points spanning the periphery. The proposed architecture remarkably outperforms conventional cell-free networks, demonstrating superior sum throughput while maintaining a comparable worst-case per-user spectral efficiency. Meanwhile, the implementation cost associated with the fronthaul network is substantially diminished.
AFS-BM: Enhancing Model Performance through Adaptive Feature Selection with Binary Masking
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We study the problem of feature selection in general machine learning (ML) context, which is one of the most critical subjects in the field. Although, there exist many feature selection methods, however, these methods face challenges such as scalability, managing high-dimensional data, dealing with correlated features, adapting to variable feature importance, and integrating domain knowledge. To this end, we introduce the "Adaptive Feature Selection with Binary Masking" (AFS-BM) which remedies these problems. AFS-BM achieves this by joint optimization for simultaneous feature selection and model training. In particular, we do the joint optimization and binary masking to continuously adapt the set of features and model parameters during the training process. This approach leads to significant improvements in model accuracy and a reduction in computational requirements. We provide an extensive set of experiments where we compare AFS-BM with the established feature selection methods using well-known datasets from real-life competitions. Our results show that AFS-BM makes significant improvement in terms of accuracy and requires significantly less computational complexity. This is due to AFS-BM's ability to dynamically adjust to the changing importance of features during the training process, which an important contribution to the field. We openly share our code for the replicability of our results and to facilitate further research.
Diffusion Model Conditioning on Gaussian Mixture Model and Negative Gaussian Mixture Gradient
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models (DMs) are a type of generative model that has a huge impact on image synthesis and beyond. They achieve state-of-the-art generation results in various generative tasks. A great diversity of conditioning inputs, such as text or bounding boxes, are accessible to control the generation. In this work, we propose a conditioning mechanism utilizing Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) as feature conditioning to guide the denoising process. Based on set theory, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis that shows that conditional latent distribution based on features and classes is significantly different, so that conditional latent distribution on features produces fewer defect generations than conditioning on classes. Two diffusion models conditioned on the Gaussian mixture model are trained separately for comparison. Experiments support our findings. A novel gradient function called the negative Gaussian mixture gradient (NGMG) is proposed and applied in diffusion model training with an additional classifier. Training stability has improved. We also theoretically prove that NGMG shares the same benefit as the Earth Mover distance (Wasserstein) as a more sensible cost function when learning distributions supported by low-dimensional manifolds.
What Juris Hartmanis taught me about Reductions
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

I was a student of Juris Hartmanis at Cornell in the late 1970's. He believed that there was great potential in studying restricted reductions. I describe here some of his influences on me and, in particular, how his insights concerning reductions helped me to prove that nondeterministic space is closed under complementation.
On Dependent Variables in Reactive Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Given a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula over input and output variables, reactive synthesis requires us to design a deterministic Mealy machine that gives the values of outputs at every time step for every sequence of inputs, such that the LTL formula is satisfied. In this paper, we investigate the notion of dependent variables in the context of reactive synthesis. Inspired by successful pre-processing steps in Boolean functional synthesis, we define dependent variables as output variables that are uniquely assigned, given an assignment, to all other variables and the history so far. We describe an automata-based approach for finding a set of dependent variables. Using this, we show that dependent variables are surprisingly common in reactive synthesis benchmarks. Next, we develop a novel synthesis framework that exploits dependent variables to construct an overall synthesis solution. By implementing this framework using the widely used library Spot, we show that reactive synthesis using dependent variables can solve some problems beyond the reach of several existing techniques. Further, among benchmarks with dependent variables, if the number of non-dependent variables is low (at most 3 in our experiments), our method is able outperform all state-of-the-art tools for synthesis.
Deception and Manipulation in Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models now possess human-level linguistic abilities in many contexts. This raises the concern that they can be used to deceive and manipulate on unprecedented scales, for instance spreading political misinformation on social media. In future, agentic AI systems might also deceive and manipulate humans for their own ends. In this paper, first, I argue that AI-generated content should be subject to stricter standards against deception and manipulation than we ordinarily apply to humans. Second, I offer new characterizations of AI deception and manipulation meant to support such standards, according to which a statement is deceptive (manipulative) if it leads human addressees away from the beliefs (choices) they would endorse under ``semi-ideal'' conditions. Third, I propose two measures to guard against AI deception and manipulation, inspired by this characterization: "extreme transparency" requirements for AI-generated content and defensive systems that, among other things, annotate AI-generated statements with contextualizing information. Finally, I consider to what extent these measures can protect against deceptive behavior in future, agentic AIs, and argue that non-agentic defensive systems can provide an important layer of defense even against more powerful agentic systems.
Distributionally Robust Policy Evaluation under General Covariate Shift in Contextual Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a distributionally robust approach that enhances the reliability of offline policy evaluation in contextual bandits under general covariate shifts. Our method aims to deliver robust policy evaluation results in the presence of discrepancies in both context and policy distribution between logging and target data. Central to our methodology is the application of robust regression, a distributionally robust technique tailored here to improve the estimation of conditional reward distribution from logging data. Utilizing the reward model obtained from robust regression, we develop a comprehensive suite of policy value estimators, by integrating our reward model into established evaluation frameworks, namely direct methods and doubly robust methods. Through theoretical analysis, we further establish that the proposed policy value estimators offer a finite sample upper bound for the bias, providing a clear advantage over traditional methods, especially when the shift is large. Finally, we designed an extensive range of policy evaluation scenarios, covering diverse magnitudes of shifts and a spectrum of logging and target policies. Our empirical results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods, most notably in 90% of the cases under the policy shift-only settings and 72% of the scenarios under the general covariate shift settings.
Modeling Considerations for Developing Deep Space Autonomous Spacecraft and Simulators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

To extend the limited scope of autonomy used in prior missions for operation in distant and complex environments, there is a need to further develop and mature autonomy that jointly reasons over multiple subsystems, which we term system-level autonomy. System-level autonomy establishes situational awareness that resolves conflicting information across subsystems, which may necessitate the refinement and interconnection of the underlying spacecraft and environment onboard models. However, with a limited understanding of the assumptions and tradeoffs of modeling to arbitrary extents, designing onboard models to support system-level capabilities presents a significant challenge. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of the increasing levels of model fidelity for several key spacecraft subsystems, with the goal of informing future spacecraft functional- and system-level autonomy algorithms and the physics-based simulators on which they are validated. We do not argue for the adoption of a particular fidelity class of models but, instead, highlight the potential tradeoffs and opportunities associated with the use of models for onboard autonomy and in physics-based simulators at various fidelity levels. We ground our analysis in the context of deep space exploration of small bodies, an emerging frontier for autonomous spacecraft operation in space, where the choice of models employed onboard the spacecraft may determine mission success. We conduct our experiments in the Multi-Spacecraft Concept and Autonomy Tool (MuSCAT), a software suite for developing spacecraft autonomy algorithms.
LLMRA: Multi-modal Large Language Model based Restoration Assistant
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have a significant impact on various tasks, due to their extensive knowledge and powerful perception and generation capabilities. However, it still remains an open research problem on applying MLLMs to low-level vision tasks. In this paper, we present a simple MLLM-based Image Restoration framework to address this gap, namely Multi-modal Large Language Model based Restoration Assistant (LLMRA). We exploit the impressive capabilities of MLLMs to obtain the degradation information for universal image restoration. By employing a pretrained multi-modal large language model and a vision language model, we generate text descriptions and encode them as context embedding with degradation information for the degraded image. Through the proposed Context Enhance Module (CEM) and Degradation Context based Transformer Network (DC-former), we integrate these context embedding into the restoration network, contributing to more accurate and adjustable image restoration. Based on the dialogue with the users, our method leverages image degradation priors from MLLMs, providing low-level attributes descriptions of the input low-quality images and the restored high-quality images simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our LLMRA in universal image restoration tasks.
S$^3$M-Net: Joint Learning of Semantic Segmentation and Stereo Matching for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic segmentation and stereo matching are two essential components of 3D environmental perception systems for autonomous driving. Nevertheless, conventional approaches often address these two problems independently, employing separate models for each task. This approach poses practical limitations in real-world scenarios, particularly when computational resources are scarce or real-time performance is imperative. Hence, in this article, we introduce S$^3$M-Net, a novel joint learning framework developed to perform semantic segmentation and stereo matching simultaneously. Specifically, S$^3$M-Net shares the features extracted from RGB images between both tasks, resulting in an improved overall scene understanding capability. This feature sharing process is realized using a feature fusion adaption (FFA) module, which effectively transforms the shared features into semantic space and subsequently fuses them with the encoded disparity features. The entire joint learning framework is trained by minimizing a novel semantic consistency-guided (SCG) loss, which places emphasis on the structural consistency in both tasks. Extensive experimental results conducted on the vKITTI2 and KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed joint learning framework and its superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art single-task networks. Our project webpage is accessible at mias.group/S3M-Net.
Enhancing the vision-language foundation model with key semantic knowledge-emphasized report refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, vision-language representation learning has made remarkable advancements in building up medical foundation models, holding immense potential for transforming the landscape of clinical research and medical care. The underlying hypothesis is that the rich knowledge embedded in radiology reports can effectively assist and guide the learning process, reducing the need for additional labels. However, these reports tend to be complex and sometimes even consist of redundant descriptions that make the representation learning too challenging to capture the key semantic information. This paper develops a novel iterative vision-language representation learning framework by proposing a key semantic knowledge-emphasized report refinement method. Particularly, raw radiology reports are refined to highlight the key information according to a constructed clinical dictionary and two model-optimized knowledge-enhancement metrics. The iterative framework is designed to progressively learn, starting from gaining a general understanding of the patient's condition based on raw reports and gradually refines and extracts critical information essential to the fine-grained analysis tasks. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated on various downstream medical image analysis tasks, including disease classification, region-of-interest segmentation, and phrase grounding. Our framework surpasses seven state-of-the-art methods in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, demonstrating its encouraging potential for different clinical applications.
General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We address the challenge of acquiring real-world manipulation skills with a scalable framework. We hold the belief that identifying an appropriate prediction target capable of leveraging large-scale datasets is crucial for achieving efficient and universal learning. Therefore, we propose to utilize 3D flow, which represents the future trajectories of 3D points on objects of interest, as an ideal prediction target. To exploit scalable data resources, we turn our attention to human videos. We develop, for the first time, a language-conditioned 3D flow prediction model directly from large-scale RGBD human video datasets. Our predicted flow offers actionable guidance, thus facilitating zero-shot skill transfer in real-world scenarios. We deploy our method with a policy based on closed-loop flow prediction. Remarkably, without any in-domain finetuning, our method achieves an impressive 81\% success rate in zero-shot human-to-robot skill transfer, covering 18 tasks in 6 scenes. Our framework features the following benefits: (1) scalability: leveraging cross-embodiment data resources; (2) wide application: multiple object categories, including rigid, articulated, and soft bodies; (3) stable skill transfer: providing actionable guidance with a small inference domain-gap. Code, data, and supplementary materials are available https://general-flow.github.io
Sequential Model for Predicting Patient Adherence in Subcutaneous Immunotherapy for Allergic Rhinitis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: Subcutaneous Immunotherapy (SCIT) is the long-lasting causal treatment of allergic rhinitis (AR). How to enhance the adherence of patients to maximize the benefit of allergen immunotherapy (AIT) plays a crucial role in the management of AIT. This study aims to leverage novel machine learning models to precisely predict the risk of non-adherence of AR patients and related local symptom scores in three years SCIT. Methods: The research develops and analyzes two models, sequential latent-variable model (SLVM) of Stochastic Latent Actor-Critic (SLAC) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) evaluating them based on scoring and adherence prediction capabilities. Results: Excluding the biased samples at the first time step, the predictive adherence accuracy of the SLAC models is from 60\% to 72\%, and for LSTM models, it is 66\% to 84\%, varying according to the time steps. The range of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for SLAC models is between 0.93 and 2.22, while for LSTM models it is between 1.09 and 1.77. Notably, these RMSEs are significantly lower than the random prediction error of 4.55. Conclusion: We creatively apply sequential models in the long-term management of SCIT with promising accuracy in the prediction of SCIT nonadherence in AR patients. While LSTM outperforms SLAC in adherence prediction, SLAC excels in score prediction for patients undergoing SCIT for AR. The state-action-based SLAC adds flexibility, presenting a novel and effective approach for managing long-term AIT.