This paper proposes a new control framework for manipulating soft objects. A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach is used to make the shape of a deformable object reach a set of desired points by controlling a robotic arm which manipulates it. Our framework is more easily generalizable than existing ones: it can work directly with different initial and desired final shapes without need for relearning. We achieve this by using learning parallelization, i.e., executing multiple agents in parallel on various environment instances. We focus our study on deformable linear objects. These objects are interesting in industrial and agricultural domains, yet their manipulation with robots, especially in 3D workspaces, remains challenging. We simulate the entire environment, i.e., the soft object and the robot, for the training and the testing using PyBullet and OpenAI Gym. We use a combination of state-of-the-art DRL techniques, the main ingredient being a training approach for the learning agent (i.e., the robot) based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Our simulation results support the usefulness and enhanced generality of the proposed approach.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as promising solutions for collaborative filtering (CF) through the modeling of user-item interaction graphs. The nucleus of existing GNN-based recommender systems involves recursive message passing along user-item interaction edges to refine encoded embeddings. Despite their demonstrated effectiveness, current GNN-based methods encounter challenges of limited receptive fields and the presence of noisy ``interest-irrelevant'' connections. In contrast, Transformer-based methods excel in aggregating information adaptively and globally. Nevertheless, their application to large-scale interaction graphs is hindered by inherent complexities and challenges in capturing intricate, entangled structural information. In this paper, we propose TransGNN, a novel model that integrates Transformer and GNN layers in an alternating fashion to mutually enhance their capabilities. Specifically, TransGNN leverages Transformer layers to broaden the receptive field and disentangle information aggregation from edges, which aggregates information from more relevant nodes, thereby enhancing the message passing of GNNs. Additionally, to capture graph structure information effectively, positional encoding is meticulously designed and integrated into GNN layers to encode such structural knowledge into node attributes, thus enhancing the Transformer's performance on graphs. Efficiency considerations are also alleviated by proposing the sampling of the most relevant nodes for the Transformer, along with two efficient sample update strategies to reduce complexity. Furthermore, theoretical analysis demonstrates that TransGNN offers increased expressiveness compared to GNNs, with only a marginal increase in linear complexity. Extensive experiments on five public datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of TransGNN.
This paper presents a framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) into translation validation, targeting LLVM compiler transformations where formal verification tools are insufficient. Our framework first utilizes existing formal verification frameworks for translation validation. In this work, we use Alive2, a well-known tool in LLVM compiler verification, as an example. When formal verification frameworks are unable to confirm a transformation's soundness, our framework employs fine-tuned LLMs for prediction. It applies fuzzing to transformations predicted as potentially unsound by the LLMs due to return value or memory inconsistencies, aiming to find counterexamples. In cases where transformations are unsound for other reasons or sound, or if no counterexamples emerge, the framework directly reports these outcomes without further fuzzing. This methodology has shown effectiveness in complex areas like deep-learning accelerator design, where traditional tools struggle.
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) CPU benchmark has been widely used as a measure of computing performance for decades. The SPEC is an industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite and the collective data provide a proxy for the history of worldwide CPU and system performance. Past efforts have not provided or enabled answers to questions such as, how has the SPEC benchmark suite evolved empirically over time and what micro-architecture artifacts have had the most influence on performance? -- have any micro-benchmarks within the suite had undue influence on the results and comparisons among the codes? -- can the answers to these questions provide insights to the future of computer system performance? To answer these questions, we detail our historical and statistical analysis of specific hardware artifacts (clock frequencies, core counts, etc.) on the performance of the SPEC benchmarks since 1995. We discuss in detail several methods to normalize across benchmark evolutions. We perform both isolated and collective sensitivity analyses for various hardware artifacts and we identify one benchmark (libquantum) that had somewhat undue influence on performance outcomes. We also present the use of SPEC data to predict future performance.
This paper unveils CG-Eval, the first-ever comprehensive and automated evaluation framework designed for assessing the generative capabilities of large Chinese language models across a spectrum of academic disciplines. CG-Eval stands out for its automated process, which critically assesses models based on their proficiency in generating precise and contextually relevant responses to a diverse array of questions within six key domains: Science and Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences, Mathematical Calculations, Medical Practitioner Qualification Examination, Judicial Examination, and Certified Public Accountant Examination. Alongside this, we introduce Gscore, an innovative composite index developed from a weighted sum of multiple metrics. Gscore uniquely automates the quality measurement of a model's text generation against reference standards, providing a detailed and nuanced assessment of model performance. This automation not only enhances the efficiency and scalability of the evaluation process but also ensures objective and consistent assessment across various models. The detailed test data and results, highlighting the robust capabilities and comparative performance of the evaluated models, are accessible at //cgeval.besteasy.com/.
This paper presents new solutions for Private Information Retrieval (PIR) with side information. This problem is motivated by PIR settings in which a client has side information about the data held by the servers and would like to leverage this information in order to improve the download rate. The problem of PIR with side information has been the subject of several recent studies that presented achievability schemes as well as converses for both multi-server and single-server settings. However, the solutions for the multi-server settings adapted from the solutions for the single-server setting in a rather straightforward manner, relying on the concept of super-messages. Such solutions require an exponential degree of sub-packetization (in terms of the number of messages). This paper makes the following contributions. First, we revisit the PIR problem with side information and present a new approach to leverage side information in the context of PIR. The key idea of our approach is a randomized algorithm to determine the linear combinations of the sub-packets that need to be recovered from each server. In addition, our approach takes advantage of the fact that the identity of the side information messages does not need to be kept private, and, as a result, the information retrieval scheme does not need to be symmetric. Second, we present schemes for PIR with side information that achieve a higher rate than previously proposed solutions and require a significantly lower degree of sub-packetization (linear in the number of servers). Our scheme not only achieves the highest known download rate for the problem at hand but also invalidates a previously claimed converse bound on the maximum achievable download rate.
The IoT's vulnerability to network attacks has motivated the design of intrusion detection schemes (IDS) using Machine Learning (ML), with a low computational cost for online detection but intensive offline learning. Such IDS can have high attack detection accuracy and are easily installed on servers that communicate with IoT devices. However, they are seldom evaluated in realistic operational conditions where IDS processing may be held up by the system overload created by attacks. Thus we first present an experimental study of UDP Flood Attacks on a Local Area Network Test-Bed, where the first line of defence is an accurate IDS using an Auto-Associative Dense Random Neural Network. The experiments reveal that during severe attacks, the packet and protocol management software overloads the multi-core server, and paralyses IDS detection. We therefore propose and experimentally evaluate an IDS design where decisions are made from a very small number of incoming packets, so that attacking traffic is dropped within milli-seconds after an attack begins and the paralysing effect of congestion is avoided.
Classification is a fundamental task in many applications on which data-driven methods have shown outstanding performances. However, it is challenging to determine whether such methods have achieved the optimal performance. This is mainly because the best achievable performance is typically unknown and hence, effectively estimating it is of prime importance. In this paper, we consider binary classification problems and we propose an estimator for the false positive rate (FPR) of the Bayes classifier, that is, the optimal classifier with respect to accuracy, from a given dataset. Our method utilizes soft labels, or real-valued labels, which are gaining significant traction thanks to their properties. We thoroughly examine various theoretical properties of our estimator, including its consistency, unbiasedness, rate of convergence, and variance. To enhance the versatility of our estimator beyond soft labels, we also consider noisy labels, which encompass binary labels. For noisy labels, we develop effective FPR estimators by leveraging a denoising technique and the Nadaraya-Watson estimator. Due to the symmetry of the problem, our results can be readily applied to estimate the false negative rate of the Bayes classifier.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various natural language processing and software engineering tasks, such as code generation. The LLMs are mainly utilized in the prompt-based zero/few-shot paradigm to guide the model in accomplishing the task. GPT-based models are one of the popular ones studied for tasks such as code comment generation or test generation. These tasks are `generative' tasks. However, there is limited research on the usage of LLMs for `non-generative' tasks such as classification using the prompt-based paradigm. In this preliminary exploratory study, we investigated the applicability of LLMs for Code Clone Detection (CCD), a non-generative task. By building a mono-lingual and cross-lingual CCD dataset derived from CodeNet, we first investigated two different prompts using ChatGPT to detect Type-4 code clones in Java-Java and Java-Ruby pairs in a zero-shot setting. We then conducted an analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT in CCD. ChatGPT surpasses the baselines in cross-language CCD attaining an F1-score of 0.877 and achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned models for mono-lingual CCD, with an F1-score of 0.878. Also, the prompt and the difficulty level of the problems has an impact on the performance of ChatGPT. Finally we provide insights and future directions based on our initial analysis
Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is used in a wide range of applications such as remote sensing, yet the transmission of the HS images by communication data links becomes challenging due to the large number of spectral bands that the HS images contain together with the limited data bandwidth available in real applications. Compressive Sensing reduces the images by randomly subsampling the spectral bands of each spatial pixel and then it performs the image reconstruction of all the bands using recovery algorithms which impose sparsity in a certain transform domain. Since the image pixels are not strictly sparse, this work studies a data sparsification pre-processing stage prior to compression to ensure the sparsity of the pixels. The sparsified images are compressed $2.5\times$ and then recovered using the Generalized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm (gOMP) characterized by high accuracy, low computational requirements and fast convergence. The experiments are performed in five conventional hyperspectral images where the effect of different sparsification levels in the quality of the uncompressed as well as the recovered images is studied. It is concluded that the gOMP algorithm reconstructs the hyperspectral images with higher accuracy as well as faster convergence when the pixels are highly sparsified and hence at the expense of reducing the quality of the recovered images with respect to the original images.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.