The development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has far exceeded the investigation of their relationship with society. Sociotechnical inquiry is needed to mitigate the harms of new technologies whose potential impacts remain poorly understood. To date, subfields of AI research develop primarily individual views on their relationship with sociotechnics, while tools for external investigation, comparison, and cross-pollination are lacking. In this paper, we propose four directions for inquiry into new and evolving areas of technological development: value--what progress and direction does a field promote, optimization--how the defined system within a problem formulation relates to broader dynamics, consensus--how agreement is achieved and who is included in building it, and failure--what methods are pursued when the problem specification is found wanting. The paper provides a lexicon for sociotechnical inquiry and illustrates it through the example of consumer drone technology.
Erasure coding (EC) affords data redundancy for large-scale systems. XOR-based EC is an easy-to-implement method for optimizing EC. This paper addresses a significant performance gap between the state-of-the-art XOR-based EC approach (with 4.9 GB/s coding throughput) and Intel's high-performance EC library based on another approach (with 6.7 GB/s). We propose a novel approach based on our observation that XOR-based EC virtually generates programs of a Domain Specific Language for XORing byte arrays. We formalize such programs as straight-line programs (SLPs) of compiler construction and optimize SLPs using various optimization techniques. Our optimization flow is three-fold: 1) reducing operations using grammar compression algorithms; 2) reducing memory accesses using deforestation, a functional program optimization method; and 3) reducing cache misses using the (red-blue) pebble game of program analysis. We provide an experimental library, which outperforms Intel's library with 8.92 GB/s throughput.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
It has been a long time that computer architecture and systems are optimized to enable efficient execution of machine learning (ML) algorithms or models. Now, it is time to reconsider the relationship between ML and systems, and let ML transform the way that computer architecture and systems are designed. This embraces a twofold meaning: the improvement of designers' productivity, and the completion of the virtuous cycle. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of work that applies ML for system design, which can be grouped into two major categories, ML-based modelling that involves predictions of performance metrics or some other criteria of interest, and ML-based design methodology that directly leverages ML as the design tool. For ML-based modelling, we discuss existing studies based on their target level of system, ranging from the circuit level to the architecture/system level. For ML-based design methodology, we follow a bottom-up path to review current work, with a scope of (micro-)architecture design (memory, branch prediction, NoC), coordination between architecture/system and workload (resource allocation and management, data center management, and security), compiler, and design automation. We further provide a future vision of opportunities and potential directions, and envision that applying ML for computer architecture and systems would thrive in the community.
This paper surveys the field of transfer learning in the problem setting of Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL has been the key solution to sequential decision-making problems. Along with the fast advance of RL in various domains. including robotics and game-playing, transfer learning arises as an important technique to assist RL by leveraging and transferring external expertise to boost the learning process. In this survey, we review the central issues of transfer learning in the RL domain, providing a systematic categorization of its state-of-the-art techniques. We analyze their goals, methodologies, applications, and the RL frameworks under which these transfer learning techniques would be approachable. We discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other relevant topics from an RL perspective and also explore the potential challenges as well as future development directions for transfer learning in RL.
Edge intelligence refers to a set of connected systems and devices for data collection, caching, processing, and analysis in locations close to where data is captured based on artificial intelligence. The aim of edge intelligence is to enhance the quality and speed of data processing and protect the privacy and security of the data. Although recently emerged, spanning the period from 2011 to now, this field of research has shown explosive growth over the past five years. In this paper, we present a thorough and comprehensive survey on the literature surrounding edge intelligence. We first identify four fundamental components of edge intelligence, namely edge caching, edge training, edge inference, and edge offloading, based on theoretical and practical results pertaining to proposed and deployed systems. We then aim for a systematic classification of the state of the solutions by examining research results and observations for each of the four components and present a taxonomy that includes practical problems, adopted techniques, and application goals. For each category, we elaborate, compare and analyse the literature from the perspectives of adopted techniques, objectives, performance, advantages and drawbacks, etc. This survey article provides a comprehensive introduction to edge intelligence and its application areas. In addition, we summarise the development of the emerging research field and the current state-of-the-art and discuss the important open issues and possible theoretical and technical solutions.
This study is to review the approaches used for measuring sentences similarity. Measuring similarity between natural language sentences is a crucial task for many Natural Language Processing applications such as text classification, information retrieval, question answering, and plagiarism detection. This survey classifies approaches of calculating sentences similarity based on the adopted methodology into three categories. Word-to-word based, structure based, and vector-based are the most widely used approaches to find sentences similarity. Each approach measures relatedness between short texts based on a specific perspective. In addition, datasets that are mostly used as benchmarks for evaluating techniques in this field are introduced to provide a complete view on this issue. The approaches that combine more than one perspective give better results. Moreover, structure based similarity that measures similarity between sentences structures needs more investigation.
Automated machine learning (AutoML) aims to find optimal machine learning solutions automatically given a machine learning problem. It could release the burden of data scientists from the multifarious manual tuning process and enable the access of domain experts to the off-the-shelf machine learning solutions without extensive experience. In this paper, we review the current developments of AutoML in terms of three categories, automated feature engineering (AutoFE), automated model and hyperparameter learning (AutoMHL), and automated deep learning (AutoDL). State-of-the-art techniques adopted in the three categories are presented, including Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithm, and gradient-based approaches. We summarize popular AutoML frameworks and conclude with current open challenges of AutoML.
Deep reinforcement learning is the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning. This field of research has been able to solve a wide range of complex decision-making tasks that were previously out of reach for a machine. Thus, deep RL opens up many new applications in domains such as healthcare, robotics, smart grids, finance, and many more. This manuscript provides an introduction to deep reinforcement learning models, algorithms and techniques. Particular focus is on the aspects related to generalization and how deep RL can be used for practical applications. We assume the reader is familiar with basic machine learning concepts.
Our experience of the world is multimodal - we see objects, hear sounds, feel texture, smell odors, and taste flavors. Modality refers to the way in which something happens or is experienced and a research problem is characterized as multimodal when it includes multiple such modalities. In order for Artificial Intelligence to make progress in understanding the world around us, it needs to be able to interpret such multimodal signals together. Multimodal machine learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. It is a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary potential. Instead of focusing on specific multimodal applications, this paper surveys the recent advances in multimodal machine learning itself and presents them in a common taxonomy. We go beyond the typical early and late fusion categorization and identify broader challenges that are faced by multimodal machine learning, namely: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to better understand the state of the field and identify directions for future research.