Training large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models demands significant computational power and energy, leading to increased carbon footprint with potential environmental repercussions. This paper delves into the challenges of training AI models across geographically distributed (geo-distributed) data centers, emphasizing the balance between learning performance and carbon footprint. We consider Federated Learning (FL) as a solution, which prioritizes model parameter exchange over raw data, ensuring data privacy and compliance with local regulations. Given the variability in carbon intensity across regions, we propose a new framework called CAFE (short for Carbon-Aware Federated Learning) to optimize training within a fixed carbon footprint budget. Our approach incorporates coreset selection to assess learning performance, employs the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty framework to address the unpredictability of future carbon intensity, and devises an efficient algorithm to address the combinatorial complexity of the data center selection. Through extensive simulations using real-world carbon intensity data, we demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm, highlighting its superiority over existing methods in optimizing learning performance while minimizing environmental impact.
Trajectory length stands as a crucial hyperparameter within reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, significantly contributing to the sample inefficiency in robotics applications. Motivated by the pivotal role trajectory length plays in the training process, we introduce Ada-NAV, a novel adaptive trajectory length scheme designed to enhance the training sample efficiency of RL algorithms in robotic navigation tasks. Unlike traditional approaches that treat trajectory length as a fixed hyperparameter, we propose to dynamically adjust it based on the entropy of the underlying navigation policy. Interestingly, Ada-NAV can be applied to both existing on-policy and off-policy RL methods, which we demonstrate by empirically validating its efficacy on three popular RL methods: REINFORCE, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). We demonstrate through simulated and real-world robotic experiments that Ada-NAV outperforms conventional methods that employ constant or randomly sampled trajectory lengths. Specifically, for a fixed sample budget, Ada-NAV achieves an 18\% increase in navigation success rate, a 20-38\% reduction in navigation path length, and a 9.32\% decrease in elevation costs. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of Ada-NAV by integrating it with the Clearpath Husky robot, illustrating its applicability in complex outdoor environments.
Metaverse technologies demand accurate, real-time, and immersive modeling on consumer-grade hardware for both non-human perception (e.g., drone/robot/autonomous car navigation) and immersive technologies like AR/VR, requiring both structural accuracy and photorealism. However, there exists a knowledge gap in how to apply geometric reconstruction and photorealism modeling (novel view synthesis) in a unified framework. To address this gap and promote the development of robust and immersive modeling and rendering with consumer-grade devices, we propose a real-world Multi-Sensor Hybrid Room Dataset (MuSHRoom). Our dataset presents exciting challenges and requires state-of-the-art methods to be cost-effective, robust to noisy data and devices, and can jointly learn 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis instead of treating them as separate tasks, making them ideal for real-world applications. We benchmark several famous pipelines on our dataset for joint 3D mesh reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Our dataset and benchmark show great potential in promoting the improvements for fusing 3D reconstruction and high-quality rendering in a robust and computationally efficient end-to-end fashion. The dataset and code are available at the project website: //xuqianren.github.io/publications/MuSHRoom/.
Text-driven in-game 3D character auto-customization systems eliminate the complicated process of manipulating intricate character control parameters. However, current methods are limited by their single-round generation, incapable of further editing and fine-grained modification. In this paper, we propose an Interactive Character Editing framework (ICE) to achieve a multi-round dialogue-based refinement process. In a nutshell, our ICE offers a more user-friendly way to enable players to convey creative ideas iteratively while ensuring that created characters align with the expectations of players. Specifically, we propose an Instruction Parsing Module (IPM) that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to parse multi-round dialogues into clear editing instruction prompts in each round. To reliably and swiftly modify character control parameters at a fine-grained level, we propose a Semantic-guided Low-dimension Parameter Solver (SLPS) that edits character control parameters according to prompts in a zero-shot manner. Our SLPS first localizes the character control parameters related to the fine-grained modification, and then optimizes the corresponding parameters in a low-dimension space to avoid unrealistic results. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ICE for in-game character creation and the superior editing performance of ICE. Project page: //iceedit.github.io/.
Training or finetuning large-scale language models (LLMs) requires substantial computation resources, motivating recent efforts to explore parameter-efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. One approach is to treat these models as black boxes and use forward passes (Inference APIs) to interact with them. Current research focuses on adapting these black-box models to downstream tasks using gradient-free prompt optimization, but this often involves an expensive process of searching task-specific prompts. Therefore, we are motivated to study black-box language model adaptation without prompt search. Specifically, we introduce a label-enhanced cross-attention network called CrossTune, which models the semantic relatedness between the input text sequence and task-specific label descriptions. Its effectiveness is examined in the context of few-shot text classification. To improve the generalization of CrossTune, we utilize ChatGPT to generate additional training data through in-context learning. A switch mechanism is implemented to exclude low-quality ChatGPT-generated data. Through extensive experiments on seven benchmark text classification datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art gradient-free black-box tuning method by 5.7% on average. Even without using ChatGPT-augmented data, CrossTune performs better or comparably than previous black-box tuning methods, suggesting the effectiveness of our approach.
To solve complex tasks under resource constraints, reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be simple, efficient, and scalable, addressing (1) large state spaces and (2) the continuous accumulation of interaction data. We propose HyperAgent, an RL framework featuring the hypermodel and index sampling schemes that enable computation-efficient incremental approximation for the posteriors associated with general value functions without the need for conjugacy, and data-efficient action selection. Implementing HyperAgent is straightforward, requiring only one additional module beyond what is necessary for Double-DQN. HyperAgent stands out as the first method to offer robust performance in large-scale deep RL benchmarks while achieving provably scalable per-step computational complexity and attaining sublinear regret under tabular assumptions. HyperAgent can solve Deep Sea hard exploration problems with episodes that optimally scale with problem size and exhibits significant efficiency gains in both data and computation under the Atari benchmark. The core of our theoretical analysis is the sequential posterior approximation argument, enabled by the first analytical tool for sequential random projection -- a non-trivial martingale extension of the Johnson-Lindenstrauss. This work bridges the theoretical and practical realms of RL, establishing a new benchmark for RL algorithm design.
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) techniques can be used to provide data privacy when users query deep neural network (DNN) models hosted on a public cloud. State-of-the-art MPC techniques can be directly leveraged for DNN models that use simple activation functions such as ReLU. However, these techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient for the complex and highly non-linear activation functions used in cutting-edge DNN models. We present Compact, which produces piece-wise polynomial approximations of complex AFs to enable their efficient use with state-of-the-art MPC techniques. Compact neither requires nor imposes any restriction on model training and results in near-identical model accuracy. To achieve this, we design Compact with input density awareness and use an application-specific simulated annealing type optimization to generate computationally more efficient approximations of complex AFs. We extensively evaluate Compact on four different machine-learning tasks with DNN architectures that use popular complex AFs silu, gelu, and mish. Our experimental results show that Compact incurs negligible accuracy loss while being 2x-5x computationally more efficient than state-of-the-art approaches for DNN models with large number of hidden layers. Our work accelerates easy adoption of MPC techniques to provide user data privacy even when the queried DNN models consist of a number of hidden layers and trained over complex AFs.
Robotic collectives for military and disaster response applications require coalition formation algorithms to partition robots into appropriate task teams. Collectives' missions will often incorporate tasks that require multiple high-level robot behaviors or services, which coalition formation must accommodate. The highly dynamic and unstructured application domains also necessitate that coalition formation algorithms produce near optimal solutions (i.e., >95% utility) in near real-time (i.e., <5 minutes) with very large collectives (i.e., hundreds of robots). No previous coalition formation algorithm satisfies these requirements. An initial evaluation found that traditional auction-based algorithms' runtimes are too long, even though the centralized simulator incorporated ideal conditions unlikely to occur in real-world deployments (i.e., synchronization across robots and perfect, instantaneous communication). The hedonic game-based GRAPE algorithm can produce solutions in near real-time, but cannot be applied to multiple service collectives. This manuscript integrates GRAPE and a services model, producing GRAPE-S and Pair-GRAPE-S. These algorithms and two auction baselines were evaluated using a centralized simulator with up to 1000 robots, and via the largest distributed coalition formation simulated evaluation to date, with up to 500 robots. The evaluations demonstrate that auctions transfer poorly to distributed collectives, resulting in excessive runtimes and low utility solutions. GRAPE-S satisfies the target domains' coalition formation requirements, producing near optimal solutions in near real-time, and Pair-GRAPE-S more than satisfies the domain requirements, producing optimal solutions in near real-time. GRAPE-S and Pair-GRAPE-S are the first algorithms demonstrated to support near real-time coalition formation for very large, distributed collectives with multiple services.
With the extremely rapid advances in remote sensing (RS) technology, a great quantity of Earth observation (EO) data featuring considerable and complicated heterogeneity is readily available nowadays, which renders researchers an opportunity to tackle current geoscience applications in a fresh way. With the joint utilization of EO data, much research on multimodal RS data fusion has made tremendous progress in recent years, yet these developed traditional algorithms inevitably meet the performance bottleneck due to the lack of the ability to comprehensively analyse and interpret these strongly heterogeneous data. Hence, this non-negligible limitation further arouses an intense demand for an alternative tool with powerful processing competence. Deep learning (DL), as a cutting-edge technology, has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs in numerous computer vision tasks owing to its impressive ability in data representation and reconstruction. Naturally, it has been successfully applied to the field of multimodal RS data fusion, yielding great improvement compared with traditional methods. This survey aims to present a systematic overview in DL-based multimodal RS data fusion. More specifically, some essential knowledge about this topic is first given. Subsequently, a literature survey is conducted to analyse the trends of this field. Some prevalent sub-fields in the multimodal RS data fusion are then reviewed in terms of the to-be-fused data modalities, i.e., spatiospectral, spatiotemporal, light detection and ranging-optical, synthetic aperture radar-optical, and RS-Geospatial Big Data fusion. Furthermore, We collect and summarize some valuable resources for the sake of the development in multimodal RS data fusion. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential future directions are highlighted.
Knowledge graph embedding models learn the representations of entities and relations in the knowledge graphs for predicting missing links (relations) between entities. Their effectiveness are deeply affected by the ability of modeling and inferring different relation patterns such as symmetry, asymmetry, inversion, composition and transitivity. Although existing models are already able to model many of these relations patterns, transitivity, a very common relation pattern, is still not been fully supported. In this paper, we first theoretically show that the transitive relations can be modeled with projections. We then propose the Rot-Pro model which combines the projection and relational rotation together. We prove that Rot-Pro can infer all the above relation patterns. Experimental results show that the proposed Rot-Pro model effectively learns the transitivity pattern and achieves the state-of-the-art results on the link prediction task in the datasets containing transitive relations.
Retrieving object instances among cluttered scenes efficiently requires compact yet comprehensive regional image representations. Intuitively, object semantics can help build the index that focuses on the most relevant regions. However, due to the lack of bounding-box datasets for objects of interest among retrieval benchmarks, most recent work on regional representations has focused on either uniform or class-agnostic region selection. In this paper, we first fill the void by providing a new dataset of landmark bounding boxes, based on the Google Landmarks dataset, that includes $94k$ images with manually curated boxes from $15k$ unique landmarks. Then, we demonstrate how a trained landmark detector, using our new dataset, can be leveraged to index image regions and improve retrieval accuracy while being much more efficient than existing regional methods. In addition, we further introduce a novel regional aggregated selective match kernel (R-ASMK) to effectively combine information from detected regions into an improved holistic image representation. R-ASMK boosts image retrieval accuracy substantially at no additional memory cost, while even outperforming systems that index image regions independently. Our complete image retrieval system improves upon the previous state-of-the-art by significant margins on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets. Code and data will be released.