The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to the use of interconnected smart devices, sensors, and other technologies to create a network of intelligent systems that can monitor and manage industrial processes. 6TiSCH (IPv6 over the Time Slotted Channel Hopping mode of IEEE 802.15.4e) as an enabling technology facilitates low-power and low-latency communication between IoT devices in industrial environments. The Routing Protocol for Low power and lossy networks (RPL), which is used as the de-facto routing protocol for 6TiSCH networks is observed to suffer from several limitations, especially during congestion in the network. Therefore, there is an immediate need for some modifications to the RPL to deal with this problem. Under traffic load which keeps on changing continuously at different instants of time, the proposed mechanism aims at finding the appropriate parent for a node that can forward the packet to the destination through the least congested path with minimal packet loss. This facilitates congestion management under dynamic traffic loads. For this, a new metric for routing using the concept of exponential weighting has been proposed, which takes the number of packets present in the queue of the node into account when choosing the parent at a particular instance of time. Additionally, the paper proposes a parent selection and swapping mechanism for congested networks. Performance evaluations are carried out in order to validate the proposed work. The results show an improvement in the performance of RPL under heavy and dynamic traffic loads.
We conducted a survey of 135 software engineering (SE) practitioners to understand how they use Generative AI-based chatbots like ChatGPT for SE tasks. We find that they want to use ChatGPT for SE tasks like software library selection but often worry about the truthfulness of ChatGPT responses. We developed a suite of techniques and a tool called CID (ChatGPT Incorrectness Detector) to automatically test and detect the incorrectness in ChatGPT responses. CID is based on the iterative prompting to ChatGPT by asking it contextually similar but textually divergent questions (using an approach that utilizes metamorphic relationships in texts). The underlying principle in CID is that for a given question, a response that is different from other responses (across multiple incarnations of the question) is likely an incorrect response. In a benchmark study of library selection, we show that CID can detect incorrect responses from ChatGPT with an F1-score of 0.74 - 0.75.
AI-Generated Content (AIGC), as a novel manner of providing Metaverse services in the forthcoming Internet paradigm, can resolve the obstacles of immersion requirements. Concurrently, edge computing, as an evolutionary paradigm of computing in communication systems, effectively augments real-time interactive services. In pursuit of enhancing the accessibility of AIGC services, the deployment of AIGC models (e.g., diffusion models) to edge servers and local devices has become a prevailing trend. Nevertheless, this approach faces constraints imposed by battery life and computational resources when tasks are offloaded to local devices, limiting the capacity to deliver high-quality content to users while adhering to stringent latency requirements. So there will be a tradeoff between the utility of AIGC models and offloading decisions in the edge computing paradigm. This paper proposes a joint optimization algorithm for offloading decisions, computation time, and diffusion steps of the diffusion models in the reverse diffusion stage. Moreover, we take the average error into consideration as the metric for evaluating the quality of the generated results. Experimental results conclusively demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves superior joint optimization performance compared to the baselines.
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a significant breakthrough into foundation models for computer vision, providing a large-scale image segmentation model. However, despite SAM's zero-shot performance, its segmentation masks lack fine-grained details, particularly in accurately delineating object boundaries. We have high expectations regarding whether SAM, as a foundation model, can be improved towards highly accurate object segmentation, which is known as dichotomous image segmentation (DIS). To address this issue, we propose DIS-SAM, which advances SAM towards DIS with extremely accurate details. DIS-SAM is a framework specifically tailored for highly accurate segmentation, maintaining SAM's promptable design. DIS-SAM employs a two-stage approach, integrating SAM with a modified IS-Net dedicated to DIS. Despite its simplicity, DIS-SAM demonstrates significantly enhanced segmentation accuracy compared to SAM and HQ-SAM.
Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPM) have shown remarkable efficacy in the synthesis of high-quality images. However, their inference process characteristically requires numerous, potentially hundreds, of iterative steps, which could exaggerate the problem of exposure bias due to the training and inference discrepancy. Previous work has attempted to mitigate this issue by perturbing inputs during training, which consequently mandates the retraining of the DPM. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of exposure bias in DPM and, intriguingly, we find that the exposure bias could be alleviated with a novel sampling method that we propose, without retraining the model. We empirically and theoretically show that, during inference, for each backward time step $t$ and corresponding state $\hat{x}_t$, there might exist another time step $t_s$ which exhibits superior coupling with $\hat{x}_t$. Based on this finding, we introduce a sampling method named Time-Shift Sampler. Our framework can be seamlessly integrated to existing sampling algorithms, such as DDPM, DDIM and other high-order solvers, inducing merely minimal additional computations. Experimental results show our method brings significant and consistent improvements in FID scores on different datasets and sampling methods. For example, integrating Time-Shift Sampler to F-PNDM yields a FID=3.88, achieving 44.49\% improvements as compared to F-PNDM, on CIFAR-10 with 10 sampling steps, which is more performant than the vanilla DDIM with 100 sampling steps. Our code is available at //github.com/Mingxiao-Li/TS-DPM.
NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content, in the context of a dialogue, can have severe side effects on users in open-domain dialogue systems. However, research on detecting NSFW language, especially sexually explicit content, within a dialogue context has significantly lagged behind. To address this issue, we introduce CensorChat, a dialogue monitoring dataset aimed at NSFW dialogue detection. Leveraging knowledge distillation techniques involving GPT-4 and ChatGPT, this dataset offers a cost-effective means of constructing NSFW content detectors. The process entails collecting real-life human-machine interaction data and breaking it down into single utterances and single-turn dialogues, with the chatbot delivering the final utterance. ChatGPT is employed to annotate unlabeled data, serving as a training set. Rationale validation and test sets are constructed using ChatGPT and GPT-4 as annotators, with a self-criticism strategy for resolving discrepancies in labeling. A BERT model is fine-tuned as a text classifier on pseudo-labeled data, and its performance is assessed. The study emphasizes the importance of AI systems prioritizing user safety and well-being in digital conversations while respecting freedom of expression. The proposed approach not only advances NSFW content detection but also aligns with evolving user protection needs in AI-driven dialogues.
The growing popularity of machine learning (ML) and the integration of ML components with other software artifacts has led to the use of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools, such as Travis CI, GitHub Actions, etc. that enable faster integration and testing for ML projects. Such CI/CD configurations and services require synchronization during the life cycle of the projects. Several works discussed how CI/CD configuration and services change during their usage in traditional software systems. However, there is very limited knowledge of how CI/CD configuration and services change in ML projects. To fill this knowledge gap, this work presents the first empirical analysis of how CI/CD configuration evolves for ML software systems. We manually analyzed 343 commits collected from 508 open-source ML projects to identify common CI/CD configuration change categories in ML projects and devised a taxonomy of 14 co-changes in CI/CD and ML components. Moreover, we developed a CI/CD configuration change clustering tool that identified frequent CI/CD configuration change patterns in 15,634 commits. Furthermore, we measured the expertise of ML developers who modify CI/CD configurations. Based on this analysis, we found that 61.8% of commits include a change to the build policy and minimal changes related to performance and maintainability compared to general open-source projects. Additionally, the co-evolution analysis identified that CI/CD configurations, in many cases, changed unnecessarily due to bad practices such as the direct inclusion of dependencies and a lack of usage of standardized testing frameworks. More practices were found through the change patterns analysis consisting of using deprecated settings and reliance on a generic build language. Finally, our developer's expertise analysis suggests that experienced developers are more inclined to modify CI/CD configurations.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
Data transmission between two or more digital devices in industry and government demands secure and agile technology. Digital information distribution often requires deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques which have also gained popularity in both, civilian and military environments, such as, emergence of Smart Cities and Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT). This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. Because datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex Big Data problem. Due to potentially sensitive nature of IoT datasets, Blockchain technology is used to facilitate secure sharing of IoT datasets, which allows digital information to be distributed, but not copied. However, blockchain has several limitations related to complexity, scalability, and excessive energy consumption. We propose an approach to hide information (sensor signal) by transforming it to an image or an audio signal. In one of the latest attempts to the military modernization, we investigate sensor fusion approach by investigating the challenges of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application for specific hand gesture alert system from wearable devices.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been used for node and graph classification tasks with great success, but GNNs model dependencies among the attributes of nearby neighboring nodes rather than dependencies among observed node labels. In this work, we consider the task of inductive node classification using GNNs in supervised and semi-supervised settings, with the goal of incorporating label dependencies. Because current GNNs are not universal (i.e., most-expressive) graph representations, we propose a general collective learning approach to increase the representation power of any existing GNN. Our framework combines ideas from collective classification with self-supervised learning, and uses a Monte Carlo approach to sampling embeddings for inductive learning across graphs. We evaluate performance on five real-world network datasets and demonstrate consistent, significant improvement in node classification accuracy, for a variety of state-of-the-art GNNs.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.