OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Resilience-by-Design in 6G Networks: Literature Review and Novel Enabling Concepts
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The sixth generation (6G) mobile communication networks are expected to intelligently integrate into various aspects of modern digital society, including smart cities, homes, health-care, transportation, and factories. While offering a multitude of services, it is likely that societies become increasingly reliant on 6G infrastructure. Any disruption to these digital services, whether due to human or technical failures, natural disasters, or terrorism, would significantly impact citizens' daily lives. Hence, 6G networks need not only to provide high-performance services but also to be resilient in maintaining essential services in the face of potentially unknown challenges. This paper provides a general review of the state of the art on resilient systems, definitions, concepts, and approaches. Moreover, it introduces a comprehensive concept, i.e., resilience-by-design (RBD), in three different levels for designing resilient 6G communication networks, summarizing our initial studies within the German Open6GHub project. First, we outline the general RBD enabling principles and discuss their related sub-categories. Next, adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we propose to embed these principles across all 6G layers/perspectives including electronics, physical channel, network components and functions, networks, services, and cross-layer and cross-infrastructure considerations and discuss their challenges. We further elaborate the RBD principles and their realizations along with several 6G use-cases. The paper is concluded by presenting a comprehensive list of open problems for future research on 6G resilience.
Pattern-Based Time-Series Risk Scoring for Anomaly Detection and Alert Filtering -- A Predictive Maintenance Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Fault detection is a key challenge in the management of complex systems. In the context of SparkCognition's efforts towards predictive maintenance in large scale industrial systems, this problem is often framed in terms of anomaly detection - identifying patterns of behavior in the data which deviate from normal. Patterns of normal behavior aren't captured simply in the coarse statistics of measured signals. Rather, the multivariate sequential pattern itself can be indicative of normal vs. abnormal behavior. For this reason, normal behavior modeling that relies on snapshots of the data without taking into account temporal relationships as they evolve would be lacking. However, common strategies for dealing with temporal dependence, such as Recurrent Neural Networks or attention mechanisms are oftentimes computationally expensive and difficult to train. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient approach to anomaly detection and alert filtering based on sequential pattern similarities. In our empirical analysis section, we show how this approach can be leveraged for a variety of purposes involving anomaly detection on a large scale real-world industrial system. Subsequently, we test our approach on a publicly-available dataset in order to establish its general applicability and robustness compared to a state-of-the-art baseline. We also demonstrate an efficient way of optimizing the framework based on an alert recall objective function.
Revisit, Extend, and Enhance Hessian-Free Influence Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Influence functions serve as crucial tools for assessing sample influence in model interpretation, subset training set selection, noisy label detection, and more. By employing the first-order Taylor extension, influence functions can estimate sample influence without the need for expensive model retraining. However, applying influence functions directly to deep models presents challenges, primarily due to the non-convex nature of the loss function and the large size of model parameters. This difficulty not only makes computing the inverse of the Hessian matrix costly but also renders it non-existent in some cases. Various approaches, including matrix decomposition, have been explored to expedite and approximate the inversion of the Hessian matrix, with the aim of making influence functions applicable to deep models. In this paper, we revisit a specific, albeit naive, yet effective approximation method known as TracIn. This method substitutes the inverse of the Hessian matrix with an identity matrix. We provide deeper insights into why this simple approximation method performs well. Furthermore, we extend its applications beyond measuring model utility to include considerations of fairness and robustness. Finally, we enhance TracIn through an ensemble strategy. To validate its effectiveness, we conduct experiments on synthetic data and extensive evaluations on noisy label detection, sample selection for large language model fine-tuning, and defense against adversarial attacks.
Single-Fiber Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry Shape Sensing of Continuum Manipulators with Planar Bending
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

To address the challenges associated with shape sensing of continuum manipulators (CMs) using Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) optical fibers, we feature a unique shape sensing assembly utilizing solely a single Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR) fiber attached to a flat nitinol wire (NiTi). Integrating this easy-to-manufacture unique sensor with a long and soft CM with 170 mm length, we performed different experiments to evaluate its shape reconstruction ability. Results demonstrate phenomenal shape reconstruction accuracy for both C-shape (< 2 mm tip error, < 1.2 mm shape error) and J-shape (< 3.4 mm tip error, < 2.3 mm shape error) experiments.
Data Makes Better Data Scientists
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

With the goal of identifying common practices in data science projects, this paper proposes a framework for logging and understanding incremental code executions in Jupyter notebooks. This framework aims to allow reasoning about how insights are generated in data science and extract key observations into best data science practices in the wild. In this paper, we show an early prototype of this framework and ran an experiment to log a machine learning project for 25 undergraduate students.
Physics-guided Full Waveform Inversion using Encoder-Solver Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) is an inverse problem for estimating the wave velocity distribution in a given domain, based on observed data on the boundaries. The inversion is computationally demanding because we are required to solve multiple forward problems, either in time or frequency domains, to simulate data that are then iteratively fitted to the observed data. We consider FWI in the frequency domain, where the Helmholtz equation is used as a forward model, and its repeated solution is the main computational bottleneck of the inversion process. To ease this cost, we integrate a learning process of an encoder-solver preconditioner that is based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The encoder-solver is trained to effectively precondition the discretized Helmholtz operator given velocity medium parameters. Then, by re-training the CNN between the iterations of the optimization process, the encoder-solver is adapted to the iteratively evolving velocity medium as part of the inversion. Without retraining, the performance of the solver deteriorates as the medium changes. Using our light retraining procedures, we obtain the forward simulations effectively throughout the process. We demonstrate our approach to solving FWI problems using 2D geophysical models with high-frequency data.
Video Enriched Retrieval Augmented Generation Using Aligned Video Captions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we propose the use of "aligned visual captions" as a mechanism for integrating information contained within videos into retrieval augmented generation (RAG) based chat assistant systems. These captions are able to describe the visual and audio content of videos in a large corpus while having the advantage of being in a textual format that is both easy to reason about & incorporate into large language model (LLM) prompts, but also typically require less multimedia content to be inserted into the multimodal LLM context window, where typical configurations can aggressively fill up the context window by sampling video frames from the source video. Furthermore, visual captions can be adapted to specific use cases by prompting the original foundational model / captioner for particular visual details or fine tuning. In hopes of helping advancing progress in this area, we curate a dataset and describe automatic evaluation procedures on common RAG tasks.
TableDC: Deep Clustering for Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Deep clustering (DC), a fusion of deep representation learning and clustering, has recently demonstrated positive results in data science, particularly text processing and computer vision. However, joint optimization of feature learning and data distribution in the multi-dimensional space is domain-specific, so existing DC methods struggle to generalize to other application domains (such as data integration and cleaning). In data management tasks, where high-density embeddings and overlapping clusters dominate, a data management-specific DC algorithm should be able to interact better with the data properties for supporting data cleaning and integration tasks. This paper presents a deep clustering algorithm for tabular data (TableDC) that reflects the properties of data management applications, particularly schema inference, entity resolution, and domain discovery. To address overlapping clusters, TableDC integrates Mahalanobis distance, which considers variance and correlation within the data, offering a similarity method suitable for tables, rows, or columns in high-dimensional latent spaces. TableDC provides flexibility for the final clustering assignment and shows higher tolerance to outliers through its heavy-tailed Cauchy distribution as the similarity kernel. The proposed similarity measure is particularly beneficial where the embeddings of raw data are densely packed and exhibit high degrees of overlap. Data cleaning tasks may involve a large number of clusters, which affects the scalability of existing DC methods. TableDC's self-supervised module efficiently learns data embeddings with a large number of clusters compared to existing benchmarks, which scale in quadratic time. We evaluated TableDC with several existing DC, Standard Clustering (SC), and state-of-the-art bespoke methods over benchmark datasets. TableDC consistently outperforms existing DC, SC, and bespoke methods.
Facilitating Holistic Evaluations with LLMs: Insights from Scenario-Based Experiments
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Workshop courses designed to foster creativity are gaining popularity. However, even experienced faculty teams find it challenging to realize a holistic evaluation that accommodates diverse perspectives. Adequate deliberation is essential to integrate varied assessments, but faculty often lack the time for such exchanges. Deriving an average score without discussion undermines the purpose of a holistic evaluation. Therefore, this paper explores the use of a Large Language Model (LLM) as a facilitator to integrate diverse faculty assessments. Scenario-based experiments were conducted to determine if the LLM could integrate diverse evaluations and explain the underlying pedagogical theories to faculty. The results were noteworthy, showing that the LLM can effectively facilitate faculty discussions. Additionally, the LLM demonstrated the capability to create evaluation criteria by generalizing a single scenario-based experiment, leveraging its already acquired pedagogical domain knowledge.
Hierarchical Action Recognition: A Contrastive Video-Language Approach with Hierarchical Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Video recognition remains an open challenge, requiring the identification of diverse content categories within videos. Mainstream approaches often perform flat classification, overlooking the intrinsic hierarchical structure relating categories. To address this, we formalize the novel task of hierarchical video recognition, and propose a video-language learning framework tailored for hierarchical recognition. Specifically, our framework encodes dependencies between hierarchical category levels, and applies a top-down constraint to filter recognition predictions. We further construct a new fine-grained dataset based on medical assessments for rehabilitation of stroke patients, serving as a challenging benchmark for hierarchical recognition. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for hierarchical recognition, significantly outperforming conventional methods, especially for fine-grained subcategories. The proposed framework paves the way for hierarchical modeling in video understanding tasks, moving beyond flat categorization.
Towards Efficient Disaster Response via Cost-effective Unbiased Class Rate Estimation through Neyman Allocation Stratified Sampling Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid development of earth observation technology, we have entered an era of massively available satellite remote-sensing data. However, a large amount of satellite remote sensing data lacks a label or the label cost is too high to hinder the potential of AI technology mining satellite data. Especially in such an emergency response scenario that uses satellite data to evaluate the degree of disaster damage. Disaster damage assessment encountered bottlenecks due to excessive focus on the damage of a certain building in a specific geographical space or a certain area on a larger scale. In fact, in the early days of disaster emergency response, government departments were more concerned about the overall damage rate of the disaster area instead of single-building damage, because this helps the government decide the level of emergency response. We present an innovative algorithm that constructs Neyman stratified random sampling trees for binary classification and extends this approach to multiclass problems. Through extensive experimentation on various datasets and model structures, our findings demonstrate that our method surpasses both passive and conventional active learning techniques in terms of class rate estimation and model enhancement with only 30\%-60\% of the annotation cost of simple sampling. It effectively addresses the 'sampling bias' challenge in traditional active learning strategies and mitigates the 'cold start' dilemma. The efficacy of our approach is further substantiated through application to disaster evaluation tasks using Xview2 Satellite imagery, showcasing its practical utility in real-world contexts.
Rethinking Pruning for Backdoor Mitigation: An Optimization Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, posing concerning threats to their reliable deployment. Recent research reveals that backdoors can be erased from infected DNNs by pruning a specific group of neurons, while how to effectively identify and remove these backdoor-associated neurons remains an open challenge. Most of the existing defense methods rely on defined rules and focus on neuron's local properties, ignoring the exploration and optimization of pruning policies. To address this gap, we propose an Optimized Neuron Pruning (ONP) method combined with Graph Neural Network (GNN) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to repair backdoor models. Specifically, ONP first models the target DNN as graphs based on neuron connectivity, and then uses GNN-based RL agents to learn graph embeddings and find a suitable pruning policy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to employ GNN and RL for optimizing pruning policies in the field of backdoor defense. Experiments show, with a small amount of clean data, ONP can effectively prune the backdoor neurons implanted by a set of backdoor attacks at the cost of negligible performance degradation, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance for backdoor mitigation.
XL3M: A Training-free Framework for LLM Length Extension Based on Segment-wise Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Length generalization failure problem, namely the large language model (LLM) fails to generalize to texts longer than its maximum training length, greatly restricts the application of LLM in the scenarios with streaming long inputs. To address this problem, the existing methods either require substantial costs or introduce precision loss. In this paper, we empirically find that the accuracy of the LLM's prediction is highly correlated to its certainty. Based on this, we propose an efficient training free framework, named XL3M (it means extra-long large language model), which enables the LLMs trained on short sequences to reason extremely long sequence without any further training or fine-tuning. Under the XL3M framework, the input context will be firstly decomposed into multiple short sub-contexts, where each sub-context contains an independent segment and a common ``question'' which is a few tokens from the end of the original context. Then XL3M gives a method to measure the relevance between each segment and the ``question'', and constructs a concise key context by splicing all the relevant segments in chronological order. The key context is further used instead of the original context to complete the inference task. Evaluations on comprehensive benchmarks show the superiority of XL3M. Using our framework, a Llama2-7B model is able to reason 20M long sequences on an 8-card Huawei Ascend 910B NPU machine with 64GB memory per card.
Wireless Federated Learning over Resource-Constrained Networks: Digital versus Analog Transmissions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

To enable wireless federated learning (FL) in communication resource-constrained networks, two communication schemes, i.e., digital and analog ones, are effective solutions. In this paper, we quantitatively compare these two techniques, highlighting their essential differences as well as respectively suitable scenarios. We first examine both digital and analog transmission schemes, together with a unified and fair comparison framework under imbalanced device sampling, strict latency targets, and transmit power constraints. A universal convergence analysis under various imperfections is established for evaluating the performance of FL over wireless networks. These analytical results reveal that the fundamental difference between the digital and analog communications lies in whether communication and computation are jointly designed or not. The digital scheme decouples the communication design from FL computing tasks, making it difficult to support uplink transmission from massive devices with limited bandwidth and hence the performance is mainly communication-limited. In contrast, the analog communication allows over-the-air computation (AirComp) and achieves better spectrum utilization. However, the computation-oriented analog transmission reduces power efficiency, and its performance is sensitive to computation errors from imperfect channel state information (CSI). Furthermore, device sampling for both schemes are optimized and differences in sampling optimization are analyzed. Numerical results verify the theoretical analysis and affirm the superior performance of the sampling optimization.
XTrack: Multimodal Training Boosts RGB-X Video Object Trackers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal sensing has proven valuable for visual tracking, as different sensor types offer unique strengths in handling one specific challenging scene where object appearance varies. While a generalist model capable of leveraging all modalities would be ideal, development is hindered by data sparsity, typically in practice, only one modality is available at a time. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure and achieve that knowledge gained from multimodal sensing -- such as identifying relevant features and regions -- is effectively shared, even when certain modalities are unavailable at inference. We venture with a simple assumption: similar samples across different modalities have more knowledge to share than otherwise. To implement this, we employ a ``weak" classifier tasked with distinguishing between modalities. More specifically, if the classifier ``fails" to accurately identify the modality of the given sample, this signals an opportunity for cross-modal knowledge sharing. Intuitively, knowledge transfer is facilitated whenever a sample from one modality is sufficiently close and aligned with another. Technically, we achieve this by routing samples from one modality to the expert of the others, within a mixture-of-experts framework designed for multimodal video object tracking. During the inference, the expert of the respective modality is chosen, which we show to benefit from the multimodal knowledge available during training, thanks to the proposed method. Through the exhaustive experiments that use only paired RGB-E, RGB-D, and RGB-T during training, we showcase the benefit of the proposed method for RGB-X tracker during inference, with an average +3\% precision improvement over the current SOTA. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/supertyd/XTrack/tree/main.
Exploring Activation Patterns of Parameters in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Most work treats large language models as black boxes without in-depth understanding of their internal working mechanism. In order to explain the internal representations of LLMs, we propose a gradient-based metric to assess the activation level of model parameters. Based on this metric, we obtain three preliminary findings. (1) When the inputs are in the same domain, parameters in the shallow layers will be activated densely, which means a larger portion of parameters will have great impacts on the outputs. In contrast, parameters in the deep layers are activated sparsely. (2) When the inputs are across different domains, parameters in shallow layers exhibit higher similarity in the activation behavior than deep layers. (3) In deep layers, the similarity of the distributions of activated parameters is positively correlated to the empirical data relevance. Further, we develop three validation experiments to solidify these findings. (1) Firstly, starting from the first finding, we attempt to configure different prune ratios for different layers, and find this method can benefit model pruning. (2) Secondly, we find that a pruned model based on one calibration set can better handle tasks related to the calibration task than those not related, which validate the second finding. (3) Thirdly, Based on the STS-B and SICK benchmark, we find that two sentences with consistent semantics tend to share similar parameter activation patterns in deep layers, which aligns with our third finding. Our work sheds light on the behavior of parameter activation in LLMs, and we hope these findings will have the potential to inspire more practical applications.