pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Hi-Gen: Generative Retrieval For Large-Scale Personalized E-commerce Search
Authors: Yanjing Wu, Yinfu Feng, Jian Wang, WenJi Zhou, Yunan Ye, Rong Xiao, Jun Xiao
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Metric Learning, Position, Representation Learning, Retrieval

Leveraging generative retrieval (GR) techniques to enhance search systems is an emerging methodology that has shown promising results in recent years. In GR, a text-to-text model maps string queries directly to relevant document identifiers (docIDs), dramatically simplifying the retrieval process. However, when applying most GR models in large-scale E-commerce for personalized item search, we must face two key problems in encoding and decoding. (1) Existing docID generation methods ignore the encoding of efficiency information, which is critical in E-commerce. (2) The positional information is important in decoding docIDs, while prior studies have not adequately discriminated the significance of positional information or well exploited the inherent interrelation among these positions. To overcome these problems, we introduce an efficient Hierarchical encoding-decoding Generative retrieval method (Hi-Gen) for large-scale personalized E-commerce search systems. Specifically, we first design a representation learning model using metric learning to learn discriminative feature representations of items to capture semantic relevance and efficiency information. Then, we propose a category-guided hierarchical clustering scheme that makes full use of the semantic and efficiency information of items to facilitate docID generation. Finally, we design a position-aware loss to discriminate the importance of positions and mine the inherent interrelation between different tokens at the same position. This loss boosts the performance of the language model used in the decoding stage. Besides, we propose two variants of Hi-Gen (Hi-Gen-I2I and Hi-Gen-Cluster) to support online real-time large-scale recall in the online serving process. Hi-Gen gets 3.30% and 4.62% improvements over SOTA for Recall@1 on the public and industry datasets, respectively.
Towards a high-performance AI compiler with upstream MLIR
Authors: Renato Golin, Lorenzo Chelini, Adam Siemieniuk, Kavitha Madhu, Niranjan Hasabnis, Hans Pabst, Evangelos Georganas, Alexander Heinecke
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

This work proposes a compilation flow using open-source compiler passes to build a framework to achieve ninja performance from a generic linear algebra high-level abstraction. We demonstrate this flow with a proof-of-concept MLIR project that uses input IR in Linalg-on-Tensor from TensorFlow and PyTorch, performs cache-level optimizations and lowering to micro-kernels for efficient vectorization, achieving over 90% of the performance of ninja-written equivalent programs. The contributions of this work include: (1) Packing primitives on the tensor dialect and passes for cache-aware distribution of tensors (single and multi-core) and type-aware instructions (VNNI, BFDOT, BFMMLA), including propagation of shapes across the entire function; (2) A linear algebra pipeline, including tile, fuse and bufferization strategies to get model-level IR into hardware friendly tile calls; (3) A mechanism for micro-kernel lowering to an open source library that supports various CPUs.
On Hybrid Gene Regulatory Networks
Authors: Adrian Wurm, Honglu Sun
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00

In this work, we study a class of hybrid dynamical systems called hybrid gene regulatory networks (HGRNs) which was proposed to model gene regulatory networks. In HGRNs, there exist well-behaved trajectories that reach a fixed point or converge to a limit cycle, as well as chaotic trajectories that behave non-periodic or indeterministic. In our work, we investigate these irregular behaviors of HGRNs and present theoretical results about the decidability of the reachability problem, the probability of indeterministic behavior of HGRNs, and chaos especially in 2-dimensional HGRNs.
Correlations versus noise in the NFT market
Authors: Marcin Wątorek, Paweł Szydło, Jarosław Kwapień, Stanisław Drożdż
Date: 2024-04-23 00:00:00

The non-fungible token (NFT) market emerges as a recent trading innovation leveraging blockchain technology, mirroring the dynamics of the cryptocurrency market. The current study is based on the capitalization changes and transaction volumes across a large number of token collections on the Ethereum platform. In order to deepen the understanding of the market dynamics, the collection-collection dependencies are examined by using the multivariate formalism of detrended correlation coefficient and correlation matrix. It appears that correlation strength is lower here than that observed in previously studied markets. Consequently, the eigenvalue spectra of the correlation matrix more closely follow the Marchenko-Pastur distribution, still, some departures indicating the existence of correlations remain. The comparison of results obtained from the correlation matrix built from the Pearson coefficients and, independently, from the detrended cross-correlation coefficients suggests that the global correlations in the NFT market arise from higher frequency fluctuations. Corresponding minimal spanning trees (MSTs) for capitalization variability exhibit a scale-free character while, for the number of transactions, they are somewhat more decentralized.
KATO: Knowledge Alignment and Transfer for Transistor Sizing of Different Design and Technology
Authors: Wei W. Xing, Weijian Fan, Zhuohua Liu, Yuan YAO, Yuanqi Hu
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Transfer Learning

Automatic transistor sizing in circuit design continues to be a formidable challenge. Despite that Bayesian optimization (BO) has achieved significant success, it is circuit-specific, limiting the accumulation and transfer of design knowledge for broader applications. This paper proposes (1) efficient automatic kernel construction, (2) the first transfer learning across different circuits and technology nodes for BO, and (3) a selective transfer learning scheme to ensure only useful knowledge is utilized. These three novel components are integrated into BO with Multi-objective Acquisition Ensemble (MACE) to form Knowledge Alignment and Transfer Optimization (KATO) to deliver state-of-the-art performance: up to 2x simulation reduction and 1.2x design improvement over the baselines.
Simulation-Free Determination of Microstructure Representative Volume Element Size via Fisher Scores
Authors: Wei Liu, Satyajit Mojumder, Wing Kam Liu, Wei Chen, Daniel W. Apley
Date: 2024-04-07 00:00:00

A representative volume element (RVE) is a reasonably small unit of microstructure that can be simulated to obtain the same effective properties as the entire microstructure sample. Finite element (FE) simulation of RVEs, as opposed to much larger samples, saves computational expense, especially in multiscale modeling. Therefore, it is desirable to have a framework that determines RVE size prior to FE simulations. Existing methods select the RVE size based on when the FE-simulated properties of samples of increasing size converge with insignificant statistical variations, with the drawback that many samples must be simulated. We propose a simulation-free alternative that determines RVE size based only on a micrograph. The approach utilizes a machine learning model trained to implicitly characterize the stochastic nature of the input micrograph. The underlying rationale is to view RVE size as the smallest moving window size for which the stochastic nature of the microstructure within the window is stationary as the window moves across a large micrograph. For this purpose, we adapt a recently developed Fisher score-based framework for microstructure nonstationarity monitoring. Because the resulting RVE size is based solely on the micrograph and does not involve any FE simulation of specific properties, it constitutes an RVE for any property of interest that solely depends on the microstructure characteristics. Through numerical experiments of simple and complex microstructures, we validate our approach and show that our selected RVE sizes are consistent with when the chosen FE-simulated properties converge.
CWF: Consolidating Weak Features in High-quality Mesh Simplification
Authors: Rui Xu, Longdu Liu, Ningna Wang, Shuangmin Chen, Shiqing Xin, Xiaohu Guo, Zichun Zhong, Taku Komura, Wenping Wang, Changhe Tu
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00

In mesh simplification, common requirements like accuracy, triangle quality, and feature alignment are often considered as a trade-off. Existing algorithms concentrate on just one or a few specific aspects of these requirements. For example, the well-known Quadric Error Metrics (QEM) approach prioritizes accuracy and can preserve strong feature lines/points as well but falls short in ensuring high triangle quality and may degrade weak features that are not as distinctive as strong ones. In this paper, we propose a smooth functional that simultaneously considers all of these requirements. The functional comprises a normal anisotropy term and a Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) energy term, with the variables being a set of movable points lying on the surface. The former inherits the spirit of QEM but operates in a continuous setting, while the latter encourages even point distribution, allowing various surface metrics. We further introduce a decaying weight to automatically balance the two terms. We selected 100 CAD models from the ABC dataset, along with 21 organic models, to compare the existing mesh simplification algorithms with ours. Experimental results reveal an important observation: the introduction of a decaying weight effectively reduces the conflict between the two terms and enables the alignment of weak features. This distinctive feature sets our approach apart from most existing mesh simplification methods and demonstrates significant potential in shape understanding.
Enhancing Privacy in Face Analytics Using Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Authors: Bharat Yalavarthi, Arjun Ramesh Kaushik, Arun Ross, Vishnu Boddeti, Nalini Ratha
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Modern face recognition systems utilize deep neural networks to extract salient features from a face. These features denote embeddings in latent space and are often stored as templates in a face recognition system. These embeddings are susceptible to data leakage and, in some cases, can even be used to reconstruct the original face image. To prevent compromising identities, template protection schemes are commonly employed. However, these schemes may still not prevent the leakage of soft biometric information such as age, gender and race. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel technique that combines Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) with an existing template protection scheme known as PolyProtect. We show that the embeddings can be compressed and encrypted using FHE and transformed into a secure PolyProtect template using polynomial transformation, for additional protection. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach through extensive experiments on multiple datasets. Our proposed approach ensures irreversibility and unlinkability, effectively preventing the leakage of soft biometric attributes from face embeddings without compromising recognition accuracy.
Securing O-RAN Open Interfaces
Authors: Joshua Groen, Salvatore D'Oro, Utku Demir, Leonardo Bonati, Davide Villa, Michele Polese, Tommaso Melodia, Kaushik Chowdhury
Date: 2024-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Computing

The next generation of cellular networks will be characterized by openness, intelligence, virtualization, and distributed computing. The Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) framework represents a significant leap toward realizing these ideals, with prototype deployments taking place in both academic and industrial domains. While it holds the potential to disrupt the established vendor lock-ins, Open RAN's disaggregated nature raises critical security concerns. Safeguarding data and securing interfaces must be integral to Open RAN's design, demanding meticulous analysis of cost/benefit tradeoffs. In this paper, we embark on the first comprehensive investigation into the impact of encryption on two pivotal Open RAN interfaces: the E2 interface, connecting the base station with a near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controller, and the Open Fronthaul, connecting the Radio Unit to the Distributed Unit. Our study leverages a full-stack O-RAN ALLIANCE compliant implementation within the Colosseum network emulator and a production-ready Open RAN and 5G-compliant private cellular network. This research contributes quantitative insights into the latency introduced and throughput reduction stemming from using various encryption protocols. Furthermore, we present four fundamental principles for constructing security by design within Open RAN systems, offering a roadmap for navigating the intricate landscape of Open RAN security.
FEDSTR: Money-In AI-Out | A Decentralized Marketplace for Federated Learning and LLM Training on the NOSTR Protocol
Authors: Konstantinos E. Nikolakakis, George Chantzialexiou, Dionysis Kalogerias
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

The NOSTR is a communication protocol for the social web, based on the w3c websockets standard. Although it is still in its infancy, it is well known as a social media protocol, thousands of trusted users and multiple user interfaces, offering a unique experience and enormous capabilities. To name a few, the NOSTR applications include but are not limited to direct messaging, file sharing, audio/video streaming, collaborative writing, blogging and data processing through distributed AI directories. In this work, we propose an approach that builds upon the existing protocol structure with end goal a decentralized marketplace for federated learning and LLM training. In this proposed design there are two parties: on one side there are customers who provide a dataset that they want to use for training an AI model. On the other side, there are service providers, who receive (parts of) the dataset, train the AI model, and for a payment as an exchange, they return the optimized AI model. The decentralized and censorship resistant features of the NOSTR enable the possibility of designing a fair and open marketplace for training AI models and LLMs.
NeRF-XL: Scaling NeRFs with Multiple GPUs
Authors: RuiLong Li, Sanja Fidler, Angjoo Kanazawa, Francis Williams
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, NeRF

We present NeRF-XL, a principled method for distributing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) across multiple GPUs, thus enabling the training and rendering of NeRFs with an arbitrarily large capacity. We begin by revisiting existing multi-GPU approaches, which decompose large scenes into multiple independently trained NeRFs, and identify several fundamental issues with these methods that hinder improvements in reconstruction quality as additional computational resources (GPUs) are used in training. NeRF-XL remedies these issues and enables the training and rendering of NeRFs with an arbitrary number of parameters by simply using more hardware. At the core of our method lies a novel distributed training and rendering formulation, which is mathematically equivalent to the classic single-GPU case and minimizes communication between GPUs. By unlocking NeRFs with arbitrarily large parameter counts, our approach is the first to reveal multi-GPU scaling laws for NeRFs, showing improvements in reconstruction quality with larger parameter counts and speed improvements with more GPUs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NeRF-XL on a wide variety of datasets, including the largest open-source dataset to date, MatrixCity, containing 258K images covering a 25km^2 city area.
Using Large Language Models to Enrich the Documentation of Datasets for Machine Learning
Authors: Joan Giner-Miguelez, Abel Gómez, Jordi Cabot
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00

Recent regulatory initiatives like the European AI Act and relevant voices in the Machine Learning (ML) community stress the need to describe datasets along several key dimensions for trustworthy AI, such as the provenance processes and social concerns. However, this information is typically presented as unstructured text in accompanying documentation, hampering their automated analysis and processing. In this work, we explore using large language models (LLM) and a set of prompting strategies to automatically extract these dimensions from documents and enrich the dataset description with them. Our approach could aid data publishers and practitioners in creating machine-readable documentation to improve the discoverability of their datasets, assess their compliance with current AI regulations, and improve the overall quality of ML models trained on them. In this paper, we evaluate the approach on 12 scientific dataset papers published in two scientific journals (Nature's Scientific Data and Elsevier's Data in Brief) using two different LLMs (GPT3.5 and Flan-UL2). Results show good accuracy with our prompt extraction strategies. Concrete results vary depending on the dimensions, but overall, GPT3.5 shows slightly better accuracy (81,21%) than FLAN-UL2 (69,13%) although it is more prone to hallucinations. We have released an open-source tool implementing our approach and a replication package, including the experiments' code and results, in an open-source repository.
Patent Value Characterization -- An Empirical Analysis of Elevator Industry Patents
Authors: Yuhang Guan, Runzheng Wang, Lei Fu, Huanle Zhang
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00

The global patent application count has steadily increased, achieving eight consecutive years of growth.The global patent industry has shown a general trend of expansion. This is attributed to the increasing innovation activities, particularly in the fields of technology, healthcare, and biotechnology. Some emerging market countries, such as China and India, have experienced significant growth in the patent domain, becoming important participants in global patent activities.
Sketch2Human: Deep Human Generation with Disentangled Geometry and Appearance Control
Authors: Linzi Qu, Jiaxiang Shang, Hui Ye, Xiaoguang Han, Hongbo Fu
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Image Generation

Geometry- and appearance-controlled full-body human image generation is an interesting but challenging task. Existing solutions are either unconditional or dependent on coarse conditions (e.g., pose, text), thus lacking explicit geometry and appearance control of body and garment. Sketching offers such editing ability and has been adopted in various sketch-based face generation and editing solutions. However, directly adapting sketch-based face generation to full-body generation often fails to produce high-fidelity and diverse results due to the high complexity and diversity in the pose, body shape, and garment shape and texture. Recent geometrically controllable diffusion-based methods mainly rely on prompts to generate appearance and it is hard to balance the realism and the faithfulness of their results to the sketch when the input is coarse. This work presents Sketch2Human, the first system for controllable full-body human image generation guided by a semantic sketch (for geometry control) and a reference image (for appearance control). Our solution is based on the latent space of StyleGAN-Human with inverted geometry and appearance latent codes as input. Specifically, we present a sketch encoder trained with a large synthetic dataset sampled from StyleGAN-Human's latent space and directly supervised by sketches rather than real images. Considering the entangled information of partial geometry and texture in StyleGAN-Human and the absence of disentangled datasets, we design a novel training scheme that creates geometry-preserved and appearance-transferred training data to tune a generator to achieve disentangled geometry and appearance control. Although our method is trained with synthetic data, it can handle hand-drawn sketches as well. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our method to state-of-the-art methods.
Interactive Manipulation and Visualization of 3D Brain MRI for Surgical Training
Authors: Siddharth Jha, Zichen Gui, Benjamin Delbos, Richard Moreau, Arnaud Leleve, Irene Cheng
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

In modern medical diagnostics, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an important technique that provides detailed insights into anatomical structures. In this paper, we present a comprehensive methodology focusing on streamlining the segmentation, reconstruction, and visualization process of 3D MRI data. Segmentation involves the extraction of anatomical regions with the help of state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms. Then, 3D reconstruction converts segmented data from the previous step into multiple 3D representations. Finally, the visualization stage provides efficient and interactive presentations of both 2D and 3D MRI data. Integrating these three steps, the proposed system is able to augment the interpretability of the anatomical information from MRI scans according to our interviews with doctors. Even though this system was originally designed and implemented as part of human brain haptic feedback simulation for surgeon training, it can also provide experienced medical practitioners with an effective tool for clinical data analysis, surgical planning and other purposes
Divide-Conquer-and-Merge: Memory- and Time-Efficient Holographic Displays
Authors: Zhenxing Dong, Jidong Jia, Yan Li, Yuye Ling
Date: 2024-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 16k, 8k, GPU

Recently, deep learning-based computer-generated holography (CGH) has demonstrated tremendous potential in three-dimensional (3D) displays and yielded impressive display quality. However, most existing deep learning-based CGH techniques can only generate holograms of 1080p resolution, which is far from the ultra-high resolution (16K+) required for practical virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications to support a wide field of view and large eye box. One of the major obstacles in current CGH frameworks lies in the limited memory available on consumer-grade GPUs which could not facilitate the generation of higher-definition holograms. To overcome the aforementioned challenge, we proposed a divide-conquer-and-merge strategy to address the memory and computational capacity scarcity in ultra-high-definition CGH generation. This algorithm empowers existing CGH frameworks to synthesize higher-definition holograms at a faster speed while maintaining high-fidelity image display quality. Both simulations and experiments were conducted to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed framework. By integrating our strategy into HoloNet and CCNNs, we achieved significant reductions in GPU memory usage during the training period by 64.3\% and 12.9\%, respectively. Furthermore, we observed substantial speed improvements in hologram generation, with an acceleration of up to 3$\times$ and 2 $\times$, respectively. Particularly, we successfully trained and inferred 8K definition holograms on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU for the first time in simulations. Furthermore, we conducted full-color optical experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method. We believe our strategy can provide a novel approach for memory- and time-efficient holographic displays.