Formatting is an important property in tables for visualization, presentation, and analysis. Spreadsheet software allows users to automatically format their tables by writing data-dependent conditional formatting (CF) rules. Writing such rules is often challenging for users as it requires them to understand and implement the underlying logic. We present FormaT5, a transformer-based model that can generate a CF rule given the target table and a natural language description of the desired formatting logic. We find that user descriptions for these tasks are often under-specified or ambiguous, making it harder for code generation systems to accurately learn the desired rule in a single step. To tackle this problem of under-specification and minimise argument errors, FormaT5 learns to predict placeholders though an abstention objective. These placeholders can then be filled by a second model or, when examples of rows that should be formatted are available, by a programming-by-example system. To evaluate FormaT5 on diverse and real scenarios, we create an extensive benchmark of 1053 CF tasks, containing real-world descriptions collected from four different sources. We release our benchmarks to encourage research in this area. Abstention and filling allow FormaT5 to outperform 8 different neural approaches on our benchmarks, both with and without examples. Our results illustrate the value of building domain-specific learning systems.
A timely software update is vital to combat the increasing security vulnerabilities. However, some software vendors may secretly patch their vulnerabilities without creating CVE entries or even describing the security issue in their change log. Thus, it is critical to identify these hidden security patches and defeat potential N-day attacks. Researchers have employed various machine learning techniques to identify security patches in open-source software, leveraging the syntax and semantic features of the software changes and commit messages. However, all these solutions cannot be directly applied to the binary code, whose instructions and program flow may dramatically vary due to different compilation configurations. In this paper, we propose BinGo, a new security patch detection system for binary code. The main idea is to present the binary code as code property graphs to enable a comprehensive understanding of program flow and perform a language model over each basic block of binary code to catch the instruction semantics. BinGo consists of four phases, namely, patch data pre-processing, graph extraction, embedding generation, and graph representation learning. Due to the lack of an existing binary security patch dataset, we construct such a dataset by compiling the pre-patch and post-patch source code of the Linux kernel. Our experimental results show BinGo can achieve up to 80.77% accuracy in identifying security patches between two neighboring versions of binary code. Moreover, BinGo can effectively reduce the false positives and false negatives caused by the different compilers and optimization levels.
Wireframing is a critical step in the UI design process. Mid-fidelity wireframes offer more impactful and engaging visuals compared to low-fidelity versions. However, their creation can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, requiring the addition of actual content and semantic icons. In this paper, we introduce a novel solution WireGen, to automatically generate mid-fidelity wireframes with just a brief design intent description using the generative Large Language Models (LLMs). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of WireGen in producing 77.5% significantly better wireframes, outperforming two widely-used in-context learning baselines. A user study with 5 designers further validates its real-world usefulness, highlighting its potential value to enhance UI design process.
Recent approaches such as ControlNet offer users fine-grained spatial control over text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. However, auxiliary modules have to be trained for each type of spatial condition, model architecture, and checkpoint, putting them at odds with the diverse intents and preferences a human designer would like to convey to the AI models during the content creation process. In this work, we present FreeControl, a training-free approach for controllable T2I generation that supports multiple conditions, architectures, and checkpoints simultaneously. FreeControl designs structure guidance to facilitate the structure alignment with a guidance image, and appearance guidance to enable the appearance sharing between images generated using the same seed. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of FreeControl across a variety of pre-trained T2I models. In particular, FreeControl facilitates convenient training-free control over many different architectures and checkpoints, allows the challenging input conditions on which most of the existing training-free methods fail, and achieves competitive synthesis quality with training-based approaches.
To address the 'memory wall' problem in NN hardware acceleration, we introduce HALO-CAT, a software-hardware co-design optimized for Hidden Neural Network (HNN) processing. HALO-CAT integrates Layer-Penetrative Tiling (LPT) for algorithmic efficiency, reducing intermediate result sizes. Furthermore, the architecture employs an activation-localized computing-in-memory approach to minimize data movement. This design significantly enhances energy efficiency, achieving a 14.2x reduction in activation memory capacity and a 17.8x decrease in energy consumption, with only a 1.5% loss in accuracy, compared to traditional HNN processors.
This work presents an investigation and assessment framework, which, supported by realistic data, aims at provisioning operators with in-depth insights into the consumer-perceived Quality-of-Experience (QoE) at public Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructures. Motivated by the unprecedented EV market growth, it is suspected that the existing charging infrastructure will soon be no longer capable of sustaining the rapidly growing charging demands; let alone that the currently adopted ad hoc infrastructure expansion strategies seem to be far from contributing any quality service sustainability solutions that tangibly reduce (ultimately mitigate) the severity of this problem. Without suitable QoE metrics, operators, today, face remarkable difficulty in assessing the performance of EV Charging Stations (EVCSs) in this regard. This paper aims at filling this gap through the formulation of novel and original critical QoE performance metrics that provide operators with visibility into the per-EVCS operational dynamics and allow for the optimization of these stations' respective utilization. Such metrics shall then be used as inputs to a Machine Learning model finely tailored and trained using recent real-world data sets for the purpose of forecasting future long-term EVCS loads. This will, in turn, allow for making informed optimal EV charging infrastructure expansions that will be capable of reliably coping with the rising EV charging demands and maintaining acceptable QoE levels. The model's accuracy has been tested and extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the achieved performance in terms of the above listed metrics and show the suitability of the recommended infrastructure expansions.
This article provides an analytical framework for how to simulate human-like thought processes within a computer. It describes how attention and memory should be structured, updated, and utilized to search for associative additions to the stream of thought. The focus is on replicating the mammalian working memory system, which features two forms of persistent activity: sustained firing (preserving information on the order of seconds) and synaptic potentiation (preserving information from minutes to hours). The article uses a series of over 40 original figures to systematically demonstrate how the iterative updating of these working memory stores provides functional structure to thought and consciousness. In an AI implementation, these two stores should be updated continuously and in an iterative fashion, meaning each state should preserve a proportion of the coactive representations from the state before it. Thus, the set of concepts in working memory will evolve gradually and incrementally over time. This makes each state a revised iteration of the preceding state and causes successive states to overlap and blend with respect to the information they contain. Transitions between states happen as persistent activity spreads activation energy throughout the hierarchical network searching long-term memory for the most appropriate representation to be added to the global workspace. The result is a chain of associatively linked intermediate states capable of advancing toward a solution or goal. Iterative updating is conceptualized here as an information processing strategy, a model of working memory, a theory of consciousness, and an algorithm for designing and programming artificial general intelligence.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs into five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey helps to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.
To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.