pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
rule4ml: An Open-Source Tool for Resource Utilization and Latency Estimation for ML Models on FPGA
Authors: Mohammad Mehdi Rahimifar, Hamza Ezzaoui Rahali, Audrey C. Therrien
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: High-Level Synthesis

Implementing Machine Learning (ML) models on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is becoming increasingly popular across various domains as a low-latency and low-power solution that helps manage large data rates generated by continuously improving detectors. However, developing ML models for FPGAs is time-consuming, as optimization requires synthesis to evaluate FPGA area and latency, making the process slow and repetitive. This paper introduces a novel method to predict the resource utilization and inference latency of Neural Networks (NNs) before their synthesis and implementation on FPGA. We leverage HLS4ML, a tool-flow that helps translate NNs into high-level synthesis (HLS) code, to synthesize a diverse dataset of NN architectures and train resource utilization and inference latency predictors. While HLS4ML requires full synthesis to obtain resource and latency insights, our method uses trained regression models for immediate pre-synthesis predictions. The prediction models estimate the usage of Block RAM (BRAM), Digital Signal Processors (DSP), Flip-Flops (FF), and Look-Up Tables (LUT), as well as the inference clock cycles. The predictors were evaluated on both synthetic and existing benchmark architectures and demonstrated high accuracy with R2 scores ranging between 0.8 and 0.98 on the validation set and sMAPE values between 10% and 30%. Overall, our approach provides valuable preliminary insights, enabling users to quickly assess the feasibility and efficiency of NNs on FPGAs, accelerating the development and deployment processes. The open-source repository can be found at https://github.com/IMPETUS-UdeS/rule4ml, while the datasets are publicly available at https://borealisdata.ca/dataverse/rule4ml.
The impact of internal variability on benchmarking deep learning climate emulators
Authors: Björn Lütjens, Raffaele Ferrari, Duncan Watson-Parris, Noelle Selin
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Learning

Full-complexity Earth system models (ESMs) are computationally very expensive, limiting their use in exploring the climate outcomes of multiple emission pathways. More efficient emulators that approximate ESMs can directly map emissions onto climate outcomes, and benchmarks are being used to evaluate their accuracy on standardized tasks and datasets. We investigate a popular benchmark in data-driven climate emulation, ClimateBench, on which deep learning-based emulators are currently achieving the best performance. We compare these deep learning emulators with a linear regression-based emulator, akin to pattern scaling, and show that it outperforms the incumbent 100M-parameter deep learning foundation model, ClimaX, on 3 out of 4 regionally-resolved climate variables, notably surface temperature and precipitation. While emulating surface temperature is expected to be predominantly linear, this result is surprising for emulating precipitation. Precipitation is a much more noisy variable, and we show that deep learning emulators can overfit to internal variability noise at low frequencies, degrading their performance in comparison to a linear emulator. We address the issue of overfitting by increasing the number of climate simulations per emission pathway (from 3 to 50) and updating the benchmark targets with the respective ensemble averages from the MPI-ESM1.2-LR model. Using the new targets, we show that linear pattern scaling continues to be more accurate on temperature, but can be outperformed by a deep learning-based technique for emulating precipitation. We publish our code and data at github.com/blutjens/climate-emulator.
Semi-Supervised One-Shot Imitation Learning
Authors: Philipp Wu, Kourosh Hakhamaneshi, Yuqing Du, Igor Mordatch, Aravind Rajeswaran, Pieter Abbeel
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Imitation Learning

One-shot Imitation Learning~(OSIL) aims to imbue AI agents with the ability to learn a new task from a single demonstration. To supervise the learning, OSIL typically requires a prohibitively large number of paired expert demonstrations -- i.e. trajectories corresponding to different variations of the same semantic task. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the semi-supervised OSIL problem setting, where the learning agent is presented with a large dataset of trajectories with no task labels (i.e. an unpaired dataset), along with a small dataset of multiple demonstrations per semantic task (i.e. a paired dataset). This presents a more realistic and practical embodiment of few-shot learning and requires the agent to effectively leverage weak supervision from a large dataset of trajectories. Subsequently, we develop an algorithm specifically applicable to this semi-supervised OSIL setting. Our approach first learns an embedding space where different tasks cluster uniquely. We utilize this embedding space and the clustering it supports to self-generate pairings between trajectories in the large unpaired dataset. Through empirical results on simulated control tasks, we demonstrate that OSIL models trained on such self-generated pairings are competitive with OSIL models trained with ground-truth labels, presenting a major advancement in the label-efficiency of OSIL.
Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent?
Authors: Yoshua Bengio, Michael K. Cohen, Nikolay Malkin, Matt MacDermott, Damiano Fornasiere, Pietro Greiner, Younesse Kaddar
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00

Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees? With the long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we consider estimating a context-dependent bound on the probability of violating a given safety specification. Such a risk evaluation would need to be performed at run-time to provide a guardrail against dangerous actions of an AI. Noting that different plausible hypotheses about the world could produce very different outcomes, and because we do not know which one is right, we derive bounds on the safety violation probability predicted under the true but unknown hypothesis. Such bounds could be used to reject potentially dangerous actions. Our main results involve searching for cautious but plausible hypotheses, obtained by a maximization that involves Bayesian posteriors over hypotheses. We consider two forms of this result, in the iid case and in the non-iid case, and conclude with open problems towards turning such theoretical results into practical AI guardrails.
scASDC: Attention Enhanced Structural Deep Clustering for Single-cell RNA-seq Data
Authors: Wenwen Min, Zhen Wang, Fangfang Zhu, Taosheng Xu, Shunfang Wang
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering, Graph Clustering, Self-Supervised Learning

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis is pivotal for understanding cellular heterogeneity. However, the high sparsity and complex noise patterns inherent in scRNA-seq data present significant challenges for traditional clustering methods. To address these issues, we propose a deep clustering method, Attention-Enhanced Structural Deep Embedding Graph Clustering (scASDC), which integrates multiple advanced modules to improve clustering accuracy and robustness.Our approach employs a multi-layer graph convolutional network (GCN) to capture high-order structural relationships between cells, termed as the graph autoencoder module. To mitigate the oversmoothing issue in GCNs, we introduce a ZINB-based autoencoder module that extracts content information from the data and learns latent representations of gene expression. These modules are further integrated through an attention fusion mechanism, ensuring effective combination of gene expression and structural information at each layer of the GCN. Additionally, a self-supervised learning module is incorporated to enhance the robustness of the learned embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that scASDC outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, providing a robust and effective solution for single-cell clustering tasks. Our method paves the way for more accurate and meaningful analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing data, contributing to better understanding of cellular heterogeneity and biological processes. All code and public datasets used in this paper are available at \url{https://github.com/wenwenmin/scASDC} and \url{https://zenodo.org/records/12814320}.
A Systematic Literature Map on Big Data
Authors: Rogerio Rossi, Kechi Hirama, Eduardo Ferreira Franco
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

The paradigm of Big Data has been established as a solid field of studies in many areas such as healthcare, science, transport, education, government services, among others. Despite widely discussed, there is no agreed definition about the paradigm although there are many concepts proposed by the academy and industry. This work aims to provide an analytical view of the studies conducted and published regarding the Big Data paradigm. The approach used is the systematic map of the literature, combining bibliometric analysis and content analysis to depict the panorama of research works, identifying patterns, trends, and gaps. The results indicate that there is still a long way to go, both in research and in concepts, such as building and defining adequate infrastructures and standards, to meet future challenges and for the paradigm to become effective and bring the expected benefits.
Advancing oncology with federated learning: transcending boundaries in breast, lung, and prostate cancer. A systematic review
Authors: Anshu Ankolekar, Sebastian Boie, Maryam Abdollahyan, Emanuela Gadaleta, Seyed Alireza Hasheminasab, Guang Yang, Charles Beauville, Nikolaos Dikaios, George Anthony Kastis, Michael Bussmann, Sara Khalid, Hagen Kruger, Philippe Lambin, Giorgos Papanastasiou
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution to address the limitations of centralised machine learning (ML) in oncology, particularly in overcoming privacy concerns and harnessing the power of diverse, multi-center data. This systematic review synthesises current knowledge on the state-of-the-art FL in oncology, focusing on breast, lung, and prostate cancer. Distinct from previous surveys, our comprehensive review critically evaluates the real-world implementation and impact of FL on cancer care, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing ML generalisability, performance and data privacy in clinical settings and data. We evaluated state-of-the-art advances in FL, demonstrating its growing adoption amid tightening data privacy regulations. FL outperformed centralised ML in 15 out of the 25 studies reviewed, spanning diverse ML models and clinical applications, and facilitating integration of multi-modal information for precision medicine. Despite the current challenges identified in reproducibility, standardisation and methodology across studies, the demonstrable benefits of FL in harnessing real-world data and addressing clinical needs highlight its significant potential for advancing cancer research. We propose that future research should focus on addressing these limitations and investigating further advanced FL methods, to fully harness data diversity and realise the transformative power of cutting-edge FL in cancer care.
The Role and Applications of Airport Digital Twin in Cyberattack Protection during the Generative AI Era
Authors: Abraham Itzhak Weinberg
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

In recent years, the threat facing airports from growing and increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks has become evident. Airports are considered a strategic national asset, so protecting them from attacks, specifically cyberattacks, is a crucial mission. One way to increase airports' security is by using Digital Twins (DTs). This paper shows and demonstrates how DTs can enhance the security mission. The integration of DTs with Generative AI (GenAI) algorithms can lead to synergy and new frontiers in fighting cyberattacks. The paper exemplifies ways to model cyberattack scenarios using simulations and generate synthetic data for testing defenses. It also discusses how DTs can be used as a crucial tool for vulnerability assessment by identifying weaknesses, prioritizing, and accelerating remediations in case of cyberattacks. Moreover, the paper demonstrates approaches for anomaly detection and threat hunting using Machine Learning (ML) and GenAI algorithms. Additionally, the paper provides impact prediction and recovery coordination methods that can be used by DT operators and stakeholders. It also introduces ways to harness the human factor by integrating training and simulation algorithms with Explainable AI (XAI) into the DT platforms. Lastly, the paper offers future applications and technologies that can be utilized in DT environments.
Early-Exit meets Model-Distributed Inference at Edge Networks
Authors: Marco Colocrese, Erdem Koyuncu, Hulya Seferoglu
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

Distributed inference techniques can be broadly classified into data-distributed and model-distributed schemes. In data-distributed inference (DDI), each worker carries the entire deep neural network (DNN) model but processes only a subset of the data. However, feeding the data to workers results in high communication costs, especially when the data is large. An emerging paradigm is model-distributed inference (MDI), where each worker carries only a subset of DNN layers. In MDI, a source device that has data processes a few layers of DNN and sends the output to a neighboring device, i.e., offloads the rest of the layers. This process ends when all layers are processed in a distributed manner. In this paper, we investigate the design and development of MDI with early-exit, which advocates that there is no need to process all the layers of a model for some data to reach the desired accuracy, i.e., we can exit the model without processing all the layers if target accuracy is reached. We design a framework MDI-Exit that adaptively determines early-exit and offloading policies as well as data admission at the source. Experimental results on a real-life testbed of NVIDIA Nano edge devices show that MDI-Exit processes more data when accuracy is fixed and results in higher accuracy for the fixed data rate.
Differentially Private Data Release on Graphs: Inefficiencies and Unfairness
Authors: Ferdinando Fioretto, Diptangshu Sen, Juba Ziani
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Networks are crucial components of many sectors, including telecommunications, healthcare, finance, energy, and transportation.The information carried in such networks often contains sensitive user data, like location data for commuters and packet data for online users. Therefore, when considering data release for networks, one must ensure that data release mechanisms do not leak information about individuals, quantified in a precise mathematical sense. Differential Privacy (DP) is the widely accepted, formal, state-of-the-art technique, which has found use in a variety of real-life settings including the 2020 U.S. Census, Apple users' device data, or Google's location data. Yet, the use of DP comes with new challenges, as the noise added for privacy introduces inaccuracies or biases and further, DP techniques can also distribute these biases disproportionately across different populations, inducing fairness issues. The goal of this paper is to characterize the impact of DP on bias and unfairness in the context of releasing information about networks, taking a departure from previous work which has studied these effects in the context of private population counts release (such as in the U.S. Census). To this end, we consider a network release problem where the network structure is known to all, but the weights on edges must be released privately. We consider the impact of this private release on a simple downstream decision-making task run by a third-party, which is to find the shortest path between any two pairs of nodes and recommend the best route to users. This setting is of highly practical relevance, mirroring scenarios in transportation networks, where preserving privacy while providing accurate routing information is crucial. Our work provides theoretical foundations and empirical evidence into the bias and unfairness arising due to privacy in these networked decision problems.
Improved Adaboost Algorithm for Web Advertisement Click Prediction Based on Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Authors: Qixuan Yu, Xirui Tang, Feiyang Li, Zinan Cao
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

This paper explores an improved Adaboost algorithm based on Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs), which aims to improve the prediction accuracy of user clicks on web page advertisements. By comparing it with several common machine learning algorithms, the paper analyses the advantages of the new model in ad click prediction. It is shown that the improved algorithm proposed in this paper performs well in user ad click prediction with an accuracy of 92%, which is an improvement of 13.6% compared to the highest of 78.4% among the other three base models. This significant improvement indicates that the algorithm is more capable of capturing user behavioural characteristics and time series patterns. In addition, this paper evaluates the model's performance on other performance metrics, including accuracy, recall, and F1 score. The results show that the improved Adaboost algorithm based on LSTM is significantly ahead of the traditional model in all these metrics, which further validates its effectiveness and superiority. Especially when facing complex and dynamically changing user behaviours, the model is able to better adapt and make accurate predictions. In order to ensure the practicality and reliability of the model, this study also focuses on the accuracy difference between the training set and the test set. After validation, the accuracy of the proposed model on these two datasets only differs by 1.7%, which is a small difference indicating that the model has good generalisation ability and can be effectively applied to real-world scenarios.
Moo-ving Beyond Tradition: Revolutionizing Cattle Behavioural Phenotyping with Pose Estimation Techniques
Authors: Navid Ghassemi, Ali Goldani, Ian Q. Whishaw, Majid H. Mohajerani
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

The cattle industry has been a major contributor to the economy of many countries, including the US and Canada. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized this sector, mirroring its transformative impact across all industries by enabling scalable and automated monitoring and intervention practices. AI has also introduced tools and methods that automate many tasks previously performed by human labor with the help of computer vision, including health inspections. Among these methods, pose estimation has a special place; pose estimation is the process of finding the position of joints in an image of animals. Analyzing the pose of animal subjects enables precise identification and tracking of the animal's movement and the movements of its body parts. By summarizing the video and imagery data into movement and joint location using pose estimation and then analyzing this information, we can address the scalability challenge in cattle management, focusing on health monitoring, behavioural phenotyping and welfare concerns. Our study reviews recent advancements in pose estimation methodologies, their applicability in improving the cattle industry, existing challenges, and gaps in this field. Furthermore, we propose an initiative to enhance open science frameworks within this field of study by launching a platform designed to connect industry and academia.
HeLiMOS: A Dataset for Moving Object Segmentation in 3D Point Clouds From Heterogeneous LiDAR Sensors
Authors: Hyungtae Lim, Seoyeon Jang, Benedikt Mersch, Jens Behley, Hyun Myung, Cyrill Stachniss
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

Moving object segmentation (MOS) using a 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor is crucial for scene understanding and identification of moving objects. Despite the availability of various types of 3D LiDAR sensors in the market, MOS research still predominantly focuses on 3D point clouds from mechanically spinning omnidirectional LiDAR sensors. Thus, we are, for example, lacking a dataset with MOS labels for point clouds from solid-state LiDAR sensors which have irregular scanning patterns. In this paper, we present a labeled dataset, called \textit{HeLiMOS}, that enables to test MOS approaches on four heterogeneous LiDAR sensors, including two solid-state LiDAR sensors. Furthermore, we introduce a novel automatic labeling method to substantially reduce the labeling effort required from human annotators. To this end, our framework exploits an instance-aware static map building approach and tracking-based false label filtering. Finally, we provide experimental results regarding the performance of commonly used state-of-the-art MOS approaches on HeLiMOS that suggest a new direction for a sensor-agnostic MOS, which generally works regardless of the type of LiDAR sensors used to capture 3D point clouds. Our dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/view/helimos.
EqNIO: Subequivariant Neural Inertial Odometry
Authors: Royina Karegoudra Jayanth, Yinshuang Xu, ZiYun Wang, Evangelos Chatzipantazis, Daniel Gehrig, Kostas Daniilidis
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Neural networks are seeing rapid adoption in purely inertial odometry, where accelerometer and gyroscope measurements from commodity inertial measurement units (IMU) are used to regress displacements and associated uncertainties. They can learn informative displacement priors, which can be directly fused with the raw data with off-the-shelf non-linear filters. Nevertheless, these networks do not consider the physical roto-reflective symmetries inherent in IMU data, leading to the need to memorize the same priors for every possible motion direction, which hinders generalization. In this work, we characterize these symmetries and show that the IMU data and the resulting displacement and covariance transform equivariantly, when rotated around the gravity vector and reflected with respect to arbitrary planes parallel to gravity. We design a neural network that respects these symmetries by design through equivariant processing in three steps: First, it estimates an equivariant gravity-aligned frame from equivariant vectors and invariant scalars derived from IMU data, leveraging expressive linear and non-linear layers tailored to commute with the underlying symmetry transformation. We then map the IMU data into this frame, thereby achieving an invariant canonicalization that can be directly used with off-the-shelf inertial odometry networks. Finally, we map these network outputs back into the original frame, thereby obtaining equivariant covariances and displacements. We demonstrate the generality of our framework by applying it to the filter-based approach based on TLIO, and the end-to-end RONIN architecture, and show better performance on the TLIO, Aria, RIDI and OxIOD datasets than existing methods.