Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have been broadly deployed in safety-critical domains, such as automotive systems, avionics, medical devices, etc. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been increasingly adopted to control CPS. Despite the popularity of AI-enabled CPS, few benchmarks are publicly available. There is also a lack of deep understanding on the performance and reliability of AI-enabled CPS across different industrial domains. To bridge this gap, we initiate to create a public benchmark of industry-level CPS in seven domains and build AI controllers for them via state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods. Based on that, we further perform a systematic evaluation of these AI-enabled systems with their traditional counterparts to identify the current challenges and explore future opportunities. Our key findings include (1) AI controllers do not always outperform traditional controllers, (2) existing CPS testing techniques (falsification, specifically) fall short of analyzing AI-enabled CPS, and (3) building a hybrid system that strategically combines and switches between AI controllers and traditional controllers can achieve better performance across different domains. Our results highlight the need for new testing techniques for AI-enabled CPS and the need for more investigations into hybrid CPS systems to achieve optimal performance and reliability.
Deep neural networks perform exceptionally well on various learning tasks with state-of-the-art results. While these models are highly expressive and achieve impressively accurate solutions with excellent generalization abilities, they are susceptible to minor perturbations. Samples that suffer such perturbations are known as "adversarial examples". Even though deep learning is an extensively researched field, many questions about the nature of deep learning models remain unanswered. In this paper, we introduce a new conceptual framework attached with a formal description that aims to shed light on the network's behavior and interpret the behind-the-scenes of the learning process. Our framework provides an explanation for inherent questions concerning deep learning. Particularly, we clarify: (1) Why do neural networks acquire generalization abilities? (2) Why do adversarial examples transfer between different models?. We provide a comprehensive set of experiments that support this new framework, as well as its underlying theory.
Domain generalization (DG) aims at learning generalizable models under distribution shifts to avoid redundantly overfitting massive training data. Previous works with complex loss design and gradient constraint have not yet led to empirical success on large-scale benchmarks. In this work, we reveal the mixture-of-experts (MoE) model's generalizability on DG by leveraging to distributively handle multiple aspects of the predictive features across domains. To this end, we propose Sparse Fusion Mixture-of-Experts (SF-MoE), which incorporates sparsity and fusion mechanisms into the MoE framework to keep the model both sparse and predictive. SF-MoE has two dedicated modules: 1) sparse block and 2) fusion block, which disentangle and aggregate the diverse learned signals of an object, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SF-MoE is a domain-generalizable learner on large-scale benchmarks. It outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts by more than 2% across 5 large-scale DG datasets (e.g., DomainNet), with the same or even lower computational costs. We further reveal the internal mechanism of SF-MoE from distributed representation perspective (e.g., visual attributes). We hope this framework could facilitate future research to push generalizable object recognition to the real world. Code and models are released at //github.com/Luodian/SF-MoE-DG.
The analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is challenging due to the large state space and the continuous changes occurring in its parts. Design practices favor modularity to help reducing the complexity. In a previous work, we proposed a discrete semantic model for CPS that captures both cyber and physical aspects as streams of discrete observations, which ultimately form the behavior of a component. This semantic model is denotational and compositional, where each composition operator algebraically models the interaction between a pair of components. In this paper, we propose a specification of some components as rewrite systems. The specification is operational and executable, and we study conditions for its semantics as components to be compositional. We demonstrate our framework on modeling a coordination of robots moving on a shared field. We show that the system of robots can be coordinated by a protocol in order to exhibit emerging behavior. We use an implementation of our framework in Maude to give some practical results.
Objective: Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) is a popular post-hoc technique for explaining black box models. While the impact of data imbalance on predictive models has been extensively studied, it remains largely unknown with respect to SHAP-based model explanations. This study sought to investigate the effects of data imbalance on SHAP explanations for deep learning models, and to propose a strategy to mitigate these effects. Materials and Methods: We propose to adjust class distributions in the background and explanation data in SHAP when explaining black box models. Our data balancing strategy is to compose background data and explanation data with an equal distribution of classes. To evaluate the effects of data adjustment on model explanation, we propose to use the beeswarm plot as a qualitative tool to identify "abnormal" explanation artifacts, and quantitatively test the consistency between variable importance and prediction power. We demonstrated our proposed approach in an empirical study that predicted inpatient mortality using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) data and a multilayer perceptron. Results: Using the data balancing strategy would allow us to reduce the number of the artifacts in the beeswarm plot, thus mitigating the negative effects of data imbalance. Additionally, with the balancing strategy, the top-ranked variables from the corresponding importance ranking demonstrated improved discrimination power. Discussion and Conclusion: Our findings suggest that balanced background and explanation data could help reduce the noise in explanation results induced by skewed data distribution and improve the reliability of variable importance ranking. Furthermore, these balancing procedures improve the potential of SHAP in identifying patients with abnormal characteristics in clinical applications.
Modern web services routinely provide REST APIs for clients to access their functionality. These APIs present unique challenges and opportunities for automated testing, driving the recent development of many techniques and tools that generate test cases for API endpoints using various strategies. Understanding how these techniques compare to one another is difficult, as they have been evaluated on different benchmarks and using different metrics. To fill this gap, we performed an empirical study aimed to understand the landscape in automated testing of REST APIs and guide future research in this area. We first identified, through a systematic selection process, a set of 10 state-of-the-art REST API testing tools that included tools developed by both researchers and practitioners. We then applied these tools to a benchmark of 20 real-world open-source RESTful services and analyzed their performance in terms of code coverage achieved and unique failures triggered. This analysis allowed us to identify strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the tools considered and of their underlying strategies, as well as implications of our findings for future research in this area.
This paper empirically investigates the influence of different data splits and splitting strategies on the performance of dysfluency detection systems. For this, we perform experiments using wav2vec 2.0 models with a classification head as well as support vector machines (SVM) in conjunction with the features extracted from the wav2vec 2.0 model to detect dysfluencies. We train and evaluate the systems with different non-speaker-exclusive and speaker-exclusive splits of the Stuttering Events in Podcasts (SEP-28k) dataset to shed some light on the variability of results w.r.t. to the partition method used. Furthermore, we show that the SEP-28k dataset is dominated by only a few speakers, making it difficult to evaluate. To remedy this problem, we created SEP-28k-Extended (SEP-28k-E), containing semi-automatically generated speaker and gender information for the SEP-28k corpus, and suggest different data splits, each useful for evaluating other aspects of methods for dysfluency detection.
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total time of the conversation. In this paper, we investigate the possibility and efficacy of estimating utterance-level engagement and define a novel metric, {\em predictive engagement}, for automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) human annotators have high agreement on assessing utterance-level engagement scores; (2) conversation-level engagement scores can be predicted from properly aggregated utterance-level engagement scores. Furthermore, we show that the utterance-level engagement scores can be learned from data. These scores can improve automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems, as shown by correlation with human judgements. This suggests that predictive engagement can be used as a real-time feedback for training better dialogue models.
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 6 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.
Multivariate time series forecasting is extensively studied throughout the years with ubiquitous applications in areas such as finance, traffic, environment, etc. Still, concerns have been raised on traditional methods for incapable of modeling complex patterns or dependencies lying in real word data. To address such concerns, various deep learning models, mainly Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods, are proposed. Nevertheless, capturing extremely long-term patterns while effectively incorporating information from other variables remains a challenge for time-series forecasting. Furthermore, lack-of-explainability remains one serious drawback for deep neural network models. Inspired by Memory Network proposed for solving the question-answering task, we propose a deep learning based model named Memory Time-series network (MTNet) for time series forecasting. MTNet consists of a large memory component, three separate encoders, and an autoregressive component to train jointly. Additionally, the attention mechanism designed enable MTNet to be highly interpretable. We can easily tell which part of the historic data is referenced the most.