Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
DLAS: An Exploration and Assessment of the Deep Learning Acceleration Stack

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extremely computationally demanding, which presents a large barrier to their deployment on resource-constrained devices. Since such devices are where many emerging deep learning applications lie (e.g., drones, vision-based medical technology), significant bodies of work from both the machine learning and systems communities have attempted to provide optimizations to accelerate DNNs. To help unify these two perspectives, in this paper we combine machine learning and systems techniques within the Deep Learning Acceleration Stack (DLAS), and demonstrate how these layers can be tightly dependent on each other with an across-stack perturbation study. We evaluate the impact on accuracy and inference time when varying different parameters of DLAS across two datasets, seven popular DNN architectures, four DNN compression techniques, three algorithmic primitives with sparse and dense variants, untuned and auto-scheduled code generation, and four hardware platforms. Our evaluation highlights how perturbations across DLAS parameters can cause significant variation and across-stack interactions. The highest level observation from our evaluation is that the model size, accuracy, and inference time are not guaranteed to be correlated. Overall we make 13 key observations, including that speedups provided by compression techniques are very hardware dependent, and that compiler auto-tuning can significantly alter what the best algorithm to use for a given configuration is. With DLAS, we aim to provide a reference framework to aid machine learning and systems practitioners in reasoning about the context in which their respective DNN acceleration solutions exist in. With our evaluation strongly motivating the need for co-design, we believe that DLAS can be a valuable concept for exploring the next generation of co-designed accelerated deep learning solutions.
Automated Volume Corrected Mitotic Index Calculation Through Annotation-Free Deep Learning using Immunohistochemistry as Reference Standard

The volume-corrected mitotic index (M/V-Index) was shown to provide prognostic value in invasive breast carcinomas. However, despite its prognostic significance, it is not established as the standard method for assessing aggressive biological behaviour, due to the high additional workload associated with determining the epithelial proportion. In this work, we show that using a deep learning pipeline solely trained with an annotation-free, immunohistochemistry-based approach, provides accurate estimations of epithelial segmentation in canine breast carcinomas. We compare our automatic framework with the manually annotated M/V-Index in a study with three board-certified pathologists. Our results indicate that the deep learning-based pipeline shows expert-level performance, while providing time efficiency and reproducibility.
Homomorphic Polynomial Public Key Cryptography for Quantum-secure Digital Signature

In their 2022 study, Kuang et al. introduced Multivariable Polynomial Public Key (MPPK) cryptography, leveraging the inversion relationship between multiplication and division for quantum-safe public key systems. They extended MPPK into Homomorphic Polynomial Public Key (HPPK), employing homomorphic encryption for large hidden ring operations. Originally designed for key encapsulation (KEM), HPPK's security relies on homomorphic encryption of public polynomials. This paper expands HPPK KEM to a digital signature scheme, facing challenges due to the distinct nature of verification compared to decryption. To adapt HPPK KEM to digital signatures, the authors introduce an extension of the Barrett reduction algorithm, transforming modular multiplications into divisions in the verification equation over a prime field. The extended algorithm non-linearly embeds the signature into public polynomial coefficients, addressing vulnerabilities in earlier MPPK DS schemes. Security analysis demonstrates exponential complexity for private key recovery and forged signature attacks, considering ring bit length twice that of the prime field size.
Fast Certification of Vision-Language Models Using Incremental Randomized Smoothing

A key benefit of deep vision-language models such as CLIP is that they enable zero-shot open vocabulary classification; the user has the ability to define novel class labels via natural language prompts at inference time. However, while CLIP-based zero-shot classifiers have demonstrated competitive performance across a range of domain shifts, they remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Therefore, ensuring the robustness of such models is crucial for their reliable deployment in the wild. In this work, we introduce Open Vocabulary Certification (OVC), a fast certification method designed for open-vocabulary models like CLIP via randomized smoothing techniques. Given a base "training" set of prompts and their corresponding certified CLIP classifiers, OVC relies on the observation that a classifier with a novel prompt can be viewed as a perturbed version of nearby classifiers in the base training set. Therefore, OVC can rapidly certify the novel classifier using a variation of incremental randomized smoothing. By using a caching trick, we achieve approximately two orders of magnitude acceleration in the certification process for novel prompts. To achieve further (heuristic) speedups, OVC approximates the embedding space at a given input using a multivariate normal distribution bypassing the need for sampling via forward passes through the vision backbone. We demonstrate the effectiveness of OVC on through experimental evaluation using multiple vision-language backbones on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet test datasets.
Lifting iso-dual algebraic geometry codes

In this work we investigate the problem of producing iso-dual algebraic geometry (AG) codes over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ with $q$ elements. Given a finite separable extension $\mathcal{M}/\mathcal{F}$ of function fields and an iso-dual AG-code $\mathcal{C}$ defined over $\mathcal{F}$, we provide a general method to lift the code $\mathcal{C}$ to another iso-dual AG-code $\tilde{\mathcal{C}}$ defined over $\mathcal{M}$ under some assumptions on the parity of the involved different exponents. We apply this method to lift iso-dual AG-codes over the rational function field to elementary abelian $p$-extensions, like the maximal function fields defined by the Hermitian, Suzuki, and one covered by the $GGS$ function field. We also obtain long binary and ternary iso-dual AG-codes defined over cyclotomic extensions.
When does In-context Learning Fall Short and Why? A Study on Specification-Heavy Tasks

In-context learning (ICL) has become the default method for using large language models (LLMs), making the exploration of its limitations and understanding the underlying causes crucial. In this paper, we find that ICL falls short of handling specification-heavy tasks, which are tasks with complicated and extensive task specifications, requiring several hours for ordinary humans to master, such as traditional information extraction tasks. The performance of ICL on these tasks mostly cannot reach half of the state-of-the-art results. To explore the reasons behind this failure, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 18 specification-heavy tasks with various LLMs and identify three primary reasons: inability to specifically understand context, misalignment in task schema comprehension with humans, and inadequate long-text understanding ability. Furthermore, we demonstrate that through fine-tuning, LLMs can achieve decent performance on these tasks, indicating that the failure of ICL is not an inherent flaw of LLMs, but rather a drawback of existing alignment methods that renders LLMs incapable of handling complicated specification-heavy tasks via ICL. To substantiate this, we perform dedicated instruction tuning on LLMs for these tasks and observe a notable improvement. We hope the analyses in this paper could facilitate advancements in alignment methods enabling LLMs to meet more sophisticated human demands.
Edge Accelerated Robot Navigation with Hierarchical Motion Planning

Low-cost autonomous robots suffer from limited onboard computing power, resulting in excessive computation time when navigating in cluttered environments. This paper presents Edge Accelerated Robot Navigation, or EARN for short, to achieve real-time collision avoidance by adopting hierarchical motion planning (HMP). In contrast to existing local or edge motion planning solutions that ignore the interdependency between low-level motion planning and high-level resource allocation, EARN adopts model predictive switching (MPS) that maximizes the expected switching gain w.r.t. robot states and actions under computation and communication resource constraints. As such, each robot can dynamically switch between a point-mass motion planner executed locally to guarantee safety (e.g., path-following) and a full-shape motion planner executed non-locally to guarantee efficiency (e.g., overtaking). The crux to EARN is a two-time scale integrated decision-planning algorithm based on bilevel mixed-integer optimization, and a fast conditional collision avoidance algorithm based on penalty dual decomposition. We validate the performance of EARN in indoor simulation, outdoor simulation, and real-world environments. Experiments show that EARN achieves significantly smaller navigation time and collision ratios than state-of-the-art navigation approaches.
Strengthening our grip on food security by encoding physics into AI

Climate change will jeopardize food security. Food security involves the robustness of the global agri-food system. This agri-food system is intricately connected to systems centering around health, economy, social-cultural diversity, and global political stability. A systematic way to determine acceptable interventions in the global agri-food systems involves analyses at different spatial and temporal scales. Such multi-scale analyses are common within physics. Unfortunately, physics alone is not sufficient. Machine learning techniques may aid. We focus on neural networks (NN) into which physics-based information is encoded (PeNN) and apply it to a sub-problem within the agri-food system. We show that the mean squared error of the PeNN is always smaller than that of the NNs, in the order of a factor of thousand. Furthermore, the PeNNs capture extra and interpolation very well, contrary to the NNs. It is shown that PeNNs need a much smaller data set size than the NNs to achieve a similar mse. Our results suggest that the incorporation of physics into neural networks architectures yields promise for addressing food security.
Model Agnostic Explainable Selective Regression via Uncertainty Estimation

With the wide adoption of machine learning techniques, requirements have evolved beyond sheer high performance, often requiring models to be trustworthy. A common approach to increase the trustworthiness of such systems is to allow them to refrain from predicting. Such a framework is known as selective prediction. While selective prediction for classification tasks has been widely analyzed, the problem of selective regression is understudied. This paper presents a novel approach to selective regression that utilizes model-agnostic non-parametric uncertainty estimation. Our proposed framework showcases superior performance compared to state-of-the-art selective regressors, as demonstrated through comprehensive benchmarking on 69 datasets. Finally, we use explainable AI techniques to gain an understanding of the drivers behind selective regression. We implement our selective regression method in the open-source Python package doubt and release the code used to reproduce our experiments.
Grounding or Guesswork? Large Language Models are Presumptive Grounders

Effective conversation requires common ground: a shared understanding between the participants. Common ground, however, does not emerge spontaneously in conversation. Speakers and listeners work together to both identify and construct a shared basis while avoiding misunderstanding. To accomplish grounding, humans rely on a range of dialogue acts, like clarification (What do you mean?) and acknowledgment (I understand.). However, it is unclear whether large language models (LLMs) generate text that reflects human grounding. To this end, we curate a set of grounding acts and propose corresponding metrics that quantify attempted grounding. We study whether LLM generations contain grounding acts, simulating turn-taking from several dialogue datasets and comparing results to humans. We find that -- compared to humans -- LLMs generate language with less conversational grounding, instead generating text that appears to simply presume common ground. To understand the roots of the identified grounding gap, we examine the role of instruction tuning and preference optimization, finding that training on contemporary preference data leads to a reduction in generated grounding acts. Altogether, we highlight the need for more research investigating conversational grounding in human-AI interaction.
Generate, Filter, and Fuse: Query Expansion via Multi-Step Keyword Generation for Zero-Shot Neural Rankers

Query expansion has been proved to be effective in improving recall and precision of first-stage retrievers, and yet its influence on a complicated, state-of-the-art cross-encoder ranker remains under-explored. We first show that directly applying the expansion techniques in the current literature to state-of-the-art neural rankers can result in deteriorated zero-shot performance. To this end, we propose GFF, a pipeline that includes a large language model and a neural ranker, to Generate, Filter, and Fuse query expansions more effectively in order to improve the zero-shot ranking metrics such as nDCG@10. Specifically, GFF first calls an instruction-following language model to generate query-related keywords through a reasoning chain. Leveraging self-consistency and reciprocal rank weighting, GFF further filters and combines the ranking results of each expanded query dynamically. By utilizing this pipeline, we show that GFF can improve the zero-shot nDCG@10 on BEIR and TREC DL 2019/2020. We also analyze different modelling choices in the GFF pipeline and shed light on the future directions in query expansion for zero-shot neural rankers.
RBPGAN: Recurrent Back-Projection GAN for Video Super Resolution

Recently, video super resolution (VSR) has become a very impactful task in the area of Computer Vision due to its various applications. In this paper, we propose Recurrent Back-Projection Generative Adversarial Network (RBPGAN) for VSR in an attempt to generate temporally coherent solutions while preserving spatial details. RBPGAN integrates two state-of-the-art models to get the best in both worlds without compromising the accuracy of produced video. The generator of the model is inspired by RBPN system, while the discriminator is inspired by TecoGAN. We also utilize Ping-Pong loss to increase temporal consistency over time. Our contribution together results in a model that outperforms earlier work in terms of temporally consistent details, as we will demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively using different datasets.
Approaching adverse event detection utilizing transformers on clinical time-series

Patients being admitted to a hospital will most often be associated with a certain clinical development during their stay. However, there is always a risk of patients being subject to the wrong diagnosis or to a certain treatment not pertaining to the desired effect, potentially leading to adverse events. Our research aims to develop an anomaly detection system for identifying deviations from expected clinical trajectories. To address this goal we analyzed 16 months of vital sign recordings obtained from the Nordland Hospital Trust (NHT). We employed an self-supervised framework based on the STraTS transformer architecture to represent the time series data in a latent space. These representations were then subjected to various clustering techniques to explore potential patient phenotypes based on their clinical progress. While our preliminary results from this ongoing research are promising, they underscore the importance of enhancing the dataset with additional demographic information from patients. This additional data will be crucial for a more comprehensive evaluation of the method's performance.
Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) represent a substantial advancement in the capabilities of large language models, notably in reducing factual hallucination by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, the reliability of the retrieved information is not always guaranteed. The retrieval of irrelevant data can lead to misguided responses, and potentially causing the model to overlook its inherent knowledge, even when it possesses adequate information to address the query. Moreover, standard RALMs often struggle to assess whether they possess adequate knowledge, both intrinsic and retrieved, to provide an accurate answer. In situations where knowledge is lacking, these systems should ideally respond with "unknown" when the answer is unattainable. In response to these challenges, we introduces Chain-of-Noting (CoN), a novel approach aimed at improving the robustness of RALMs in facing noisy, irrelevant documents and in handling unknown scenarios. The core idea of CoN is to generate sequential reading notes for retrieved documents, enabling a thorough evaluation of their relevance to the given question and integrating this information to formulate the final answer. We employed ChatGPT to create training data for CoN, which was subsequently trained on an LLaMa-2 7B model. Our experiments across four open-domain QA benchmarks show that RALMs equipped with CoN significantly outperform standard RALMs. Notably, CoN achieves an average improvement of +7.9 in EM score given entirely noisy retrieved documents and +10.5 in rejection rates for real-time questions that fall outside the pre-training knowledge scope.
Software Requirement Engineering: Traceability Techniques and Tools

Requirement Traceability is one of the activities in managing requirements. It is important for software projects and is affecting the quality of software products. Requirement Traceability is a method to analyze the effect of changes among various software development lifecycle parts. Agile methodologies have been presented as an alternative to traditional software engineering methodologies. The transformation between traditional and agile methodologies is a hard task so the need for traceability grows. This paper introduces traceability research at the requirement engineering on the traceability literature published during the last years. It also investigates and discusses the requirements for traceability issues. It finally presents several requirement traceability techniques and tools to support traceability.
The Use of Gamification Elements for the Development of Creativity in Engineering

The article is devoted to topical issues of using gamification elements for the development of creativity in the project activities of future specialists in engineering areas. The article discusses the didactic potential of using gamification elements to develop creativity in the project activities of future engineers. The following research tasks have been solved: the stages of the implementation of project activities using elements of gamification are described; the changes in the level of creative activity after the implementation of project activities with the use of gamification elements in the framework of the educational process are analyzed. The article attempts to clarify the terms “gamification”, “gamification elements”, “creativity”, “creative activity”, “project activity”. The focus of the study is the evaluation of the effectiveness of the use of gamification elements for the development of creativity in the project activities of future engineering specialists. The object of the study were first-year students of all areas of engineering training. The factors contributing to the maintenance of sustainable cognitive interest of students, the ability to offer original solutions, and exercise self-control have been studied. The opinions of students regarding the usefulness of using gamification elements for the development of creativity in project activities were studied. The analysis of the influence of the use of gamification elements on the development of creativity in the project activities of future specialists in engineering areas was carried out. The results of the study showed that the use of gamification elements for the development of creativity in project activities increases the interest in achieving success and involves future engineering specialists in the educational context. The use of gamification elements allows students to respond to given actions in a timely manner, showing their individuality; achieve focus on the activities performed and improve their effectiveness.
Gamification in Teaching Foreign Languages to Economics Students: A Case Study

This case study takes a deep dive into the implementation of gamification in foreign language instruction for economics students, underlining its significant potential in escalating student engagement, motivation, and consequent learning outcomes. The research serves as tangible evidence of enhanced language skills following the introduction of gamification, thereby underscoring the effectiveness of game-based learning activities in a higher education context. The investigation reveals that gamification techniques not only amplify student participation but also create meaningful and relevant contexts for language application, an aspect particularly advantageous for economics students who are often more attuned to numeric and analytic thinking. Despite the promising implications of gamification, the research does not shy away from the challenges that accompany its application. It carefully scrutinizes issues such as the considerable time and effort required for preparation, the need to strike a balance between the educational and playful aspects of gamification, maintaining fairness in competition, and the diverse impacts on students with varying learning styles and proficiencies. This study contributes to the evolving discourse on gamification in education. It opens up new avenues for future studies to further examine the long-term impacts of gamification, to understand the equilibrium between competition and cooperation in a gamified learning environment, and to explore the differential effects of gamification on learners with different characteristics. Overall, this study propels the conversation on gamification in education forward, paving the way for more effective and inclusive teaching strategies.