The rapid evolution of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) has ushered in a transformative era for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), significantly enhancing road safety and vehicular communication. However, the intricate and dynamic nature of VANETs presents formidable challenges, particularly in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Roadside Units (RSUs), integral components of VANETs, are increasingly susceptible to cyberattacks, such as jamming and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These vulnerabilities pose grave risks to road safety, potentially leading to traffic congestion and vehicle malfunctions. Current approaches often struggle to effectively merge digital twin technology with Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to boost security and sustainability. Our study introduces an innovative cyber-twin framework tailored to enhance the security of RSUs in VANETs. This framework uniquely combines digital twin technology with cutting-edge AI to offer a real-time, dynamic representation of RSUs. This allows for detailed monitoring and efficient detection of threats, significantly strengthening RSU security in VANETs. Moreover, our framework makes a notable contribution to eco-friendly communication by improving the computational efficiency of RSUs, leading to increased energy efficiency and extended hardware durability. Our results show a considerable enhancement in resource management and attack detection, surpassing the performance of existing solutions. In particular, the cyber-twin framework showed a substantial reduction in RSU load and an optimal balance between resource consumption and high attack detection efficiency, with a defined twinning rate range of seventy-six to ninety per cent. These advancements underscore our commitment to developing sustainable, secure, and resilient vehicular communication systems for the future of smart cities.
Customization generation techniques have significantly advanced the synthesis of specific concepts across varied contexts. Multi-concept customization emerges as the challenging task within this domain. Existing approaches often rely on training a Low-Rank Adaptations (LoRA) fusion matrix of multiple LoRA to merge various concepts into a single image. However, we identify this straightforward method faces two major challenges: 1) concept confusion, which occurs when the model cannot preserve distinct individual characteristics, and 2) concept vanishing, where the model fails to generate the intended subjects. To address these issues, we introduce LoRA-Composer, a training-free framework designed for seamlessly integrating multiple LoRAs, thereby enhancing the harmony among different concepts within generated images. LoRA-Composer addresses concept vanishing through Concept Injection Constraints, enhancing concept visibility via an expanded cross-attention mechanism. To combat concept confusion, Concept Isolation Constraints are introduced, refining the self-attention computation. Furthermore, Latent Re-initialization is proposed to effectively stimulate concept-specific latent within designated regions. Our extensive testing showcases a notable enhancement in LoRA-Composer's performance compared to standard baselines, especially when eliminating the image-based conditions like canny edge or pose estimations. Code is released at //github.com/Young98CN/LoRA\_Composer.
Cost of serving large language models (LLM) is high, but the expensive and scarce GPUs are poorly efficient when generating tokens sequentially, unless the batch of sequences is enlarged. However, the batch size is limited by some constantly reused intermediate results, namely KV-Cache. They occupy too much memory to fit more sequences into a GPU simultaneously. While they could be offloaded to host memory, the CPU-GPU bandwidth is an inevitable bottleneck. We find a way to decompose the transformer models into two parts of different characteristics, one of which includes the memory-bound KV-Cache accessing. Our key insight is that the aggregated memory capacity, bandwidth, and computing power of CPUs across multiple nodes is an efficient option to process this part. Performance improvement comes from reduced data transmission overhead and boosted GPU throughput to process the other model part. Moreover, we address efficiency challenges brought by heterogeneity at both temporal and inter-device scopes using scheduling and performance modeling techniques. Evaluation results show that our system achieves 1.88x - 5.04x the throughput of vLLM when serving modern LLMs with the same GPU.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. As these models become more integral to research and applications, conducting comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities has grown increasingly important. However, most existing benchmarks fail to consider that, in certain situations, images need to be interpreted within a broader context. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark, named as CODIS, designed to assess the ability of models to use context provided in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. Our findings indicate that MLLMs consistently fall short of human performance on this benchmark. Further analysis confirms that these models struggle to effectively extract and utilize contextual information to improve their understanding of images. This underscores the pressing need to enhance the ability of MLLMs to comprehend visuals in a context-dependent manner. View our project website at //thunlp-mt.github.io/CODIS.
Autonomous parallel-style on-ramp merging in human controlled traffic continues to be an existing issue for autonomous vehicle control. Existing non-learning based solutions for vehicle control rely on rules and optimization primarily. These methods have been seen to present significant challenges. Recent advancements in Deep Reinforcement Learning have shown promise and have received significant academic interest however the available learning based approaches show inadequate attention to other highway vehicles and often rely on inaccurate road traffic assumptions. In addition, the parallel-style case is rarely considered. A novel learning based model for acceleration and lane change decision making that explicitly considers the utility to both the ego vehicle and its surrounding vehicles which may be cooperative or uncooperative to produce behaviour that is socially acceptable is proposed. The novel reward function makes use of Social Value Orientation to weight the vehicle's level of social cooperation and is divided into ego vehicle and surrounding vehicle utility which are weighted according to the model's designated Social Value Orientation. A two-lane highway with an on-ramp divided into a taper-style and parallel-style section is considered. Simulation results indicated the importance of considering surrounding vehicles in reward function design and show that the proposed model matches or surpasses those in literature in terms of collisions while also introducing socially courteous behaviour avoiding near misses and anti-social behaviour through direct consideration of the effect of merging on surrounding vehicles.
Foundation models, such as Large language Models (LLMs), have attracted significant amount of interest due to their large number of applications. Existing works show that appropriate prompt design, such as Chain-of-Thoughts, can unlock LLM's powerful capacity in diverse areas. However, when handling tasks involving repetitive sub-tasks and/or deceptive contents, such as arithmetic calculation and article-level fake news detection, existing prompting strategies either suffers from insufficient expressive power or intermediate errors triggered by hallucination. To make LLM more discerning to such intermediate errors, we propose to guide LLM with a Divide-and-Conquer program that simultaneously ensures superior expressive power and disentangles task decomposition, sub-task resolution, and resolution assembly process. Theoretic analysis reveals that our strategy can guide LLM to extend the expressive power of fixed-depth Transformer. Experiments indicate that our proposed method can achieve better performance than typical prompting strategies in tasks bothered by intermediate errors and deceptive contents, such as large integer multiplication, hallucination detection and misinformation detection.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms face the challenge of efficient exploration due to the exponential increase in the size of the joint state-action space. While demonstration-guided learning has proven beneficial in single-agent settings, its direct applicability to MARL is hindered by the practical difficulty of obtaining joint expert demonstrations. In this work, we introduce a novel concept of personalized expert demonstrations, tailored for each individual agent or, more broadly, each individual type of agent within a heterogeneous team. These demonstrations solely pertain to single-agent behaviors and how each agent can achieve personal goals without encompassing any cooperative elements, thus naively imitating them will not achieve cooperation due to potential conflicts. To this end, we propose an approach that selectively utilizes personalized expert demonstrations as guidance and allows agents to learn to cooperate, namely personalized expert-guided MARL (PegMARL). This algorithm utilizes two discriminators: the first provides incentives based on the alignment of policy behavior with demonstrations, and the second regulates incentives based on whether the behavior leads to the desired objective. We evaluate PegMARL using personalized demonstrations in both discrete and continuous environments. The results demonstrate that PegMARL learns near-optimal policies even when provided with suboptimal demonstrations, and outperforms state-of-the-art MARL algorithms in solving coordinated tasks. We also showcase PegMARL's capability to leverage joint demonstrations in the StarCraft scenario and converge effectively even with demonstrations from non-co-trained policies.
The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) often confronts challenges stemming from the heavy reliance on human annotators in the reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, or the frequent and costly external queries tied to the self-instruct paradigm. In this work, we pivot to Reinforcement Learning (RL) -- but with a twist. Diverging from the typical RLHF, which refines LLMs following instruction data training, we use RL to directly generate the foundational instruction dataset that alone suffices for fine-tuning. Our method, TeaMs-RL, uses a suite of textual operations and rules, prioritizing the diversification of training datasets. It facilitates the generation of high-quality data without excessive reliance on external advanced models, paving the way for a single fine-tuning step and negating the need for subsequent RLHF stages. Our findings highlight key advantages of our approach: reduced need for human involvement and fewer model queries (only $5.73\%$ of WizardLM's total), along with enhanced capabilities of LLMs in crafting and comprehending complex instructions compared to strong baselines, and substantially improved model privacy protection.
The Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) transport problem is a relaxation of classic optimal transport, which seeks a transport between two measures while preserving their internal geometry. Due to meeting this theoretical underpinning, it is a valuable tool for the analysis of objects that do not possess a natural embedding or should be studied independently of it. Prime applications can thus be found in e.g. shape matching, classification and interpolation tasks. To tackle the latter, one theoretically justified approach is the employment of multi-marginal GW transport and GW barycenters, which are Fr\'echet means with respect to the GW distance. However, because the computation of GW itself already poses a quadratic and non-convex optimization problem, the determination of GW barycenters is a hard task and algorithms for their computation are scarce. In this paper, we revisit a known procedure for the determination of Fr\'echet means in Riemannian manifolds via tangential approximations in the context of GW. We provide a characterization of barycenters in the GW tangent space, which ultimately gives rise to a fixpoint iteration for approximating GW barycenters using multi-marginal plans. We propose a relaxation of this fixpoint iteration and show that it monotonously decreases the barycenter loss. In certain cases our proposed method naturally provides us with barycentric embeddings. The resulting algorithm is capable of producing qualitative shape interpolations between multiple 3d shapes with support sizes of over thousands of points in reasonable time. In addition, we verify our method on shape classification and multi-graph matching tasks.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at //github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT representations can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%.