Randomized experiments are a powerful methodology for data-driven evaluation of decisions or interventions. Yet, their validity may be undermined by network interference. This occurs when the treatment of one unit impacts not only its outcome but also that of connected units, biasing traditional treatment effect estimations. Our study introduces a new framework to accommodate complex and unknown network interference, moving beyond specialized models in the existing literature. Our framework, termed causal message-passing, is grounded in high-dimensional approximate message passing methodology. It is tailored for multi-period experiments and is particularly effective in settings with many units and prevalent network interference. The framework models causal effects as a dynamic process where a treated unit's impact propagates through the network via neighboring units until equilibrium is reached. This approach allows us to approximate the dynamics of potential outcomes over time, enabling the extraction of valuable information before treatment effects reach equilibrium. Utilizing causal message-passing, we introduce a practical algorithm to estimate the total treatment effect, defined as the impact observed when all units are treated compared to the scenario where no unit receives treatment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across five numerical scenarios, each characterized by a distinct interference structure.
Printed Electronics (PE) feature distinct and remarkable characteristics that make them a prominent technology for achieving true ubiquitous computing. This is particularly relevant in application domains that require conformal and ultra-low cost solutions, which have experienced limited penetration of computing until now. Unlike silicon-based technologies, PE offer unparalleled features such as non-recurring engineering costs, ultra-low manufacturing cost, and on-demand fabrication of conformal, flexible, non-toxic, and stretchable hardware. However, PE face certain limitations due to their large feature sizes, that impede the realization of complex circuits, such as machine learning classifiers. In this work, we address these limitations by leveraging the principles of Approximate Computing and Bespoke (fully-customized) design. We propose an automated framework for designing ultra-low power Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers which employs, for the first time, a holistic approach to approximate all functions of the MLP's neurons: multiplication, accumulation, and activation. Through comprehensive evaluation across various MLPs of varying size, our framework demonstrates the ability to enable battery-powered operation of even the most intricate MLP architecture examined, significantly surpassing the current state of the art.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant reasoning capabilities in robotic systems. However, their deployment in multi-robot systems remains fragmented and struggles to handle complex task dependencies and parallel execution. This study introduces the DART-LLM (Dependency-Aware Multi-Robot Task Decomposition and Execution using Large Language Models) system, designed to address these challenges. DART-LLM utilizes LLMs to parse natural language instructions, decomposing them into multiple subtasks with dependencies to establish complex task sequences, thereby enhancing efficient coordination and parallel execution in multi-robot systems. The system includes the QA LLM module, Breakdown Function modules, Actuation module, and a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based object detection module, enabling task decomposition and execution from natural language instructions to robotic actions. Experimental results demonstrate that DART-LLM excels in handling long-horizon tasks and collaborative tasks with complex dependencies. Even when using smaller models like Llama 3.1 8B, the system achieves good performance, highlighting DART-LLM's robustness in terms of model size. Please refer to the project website \url{//wyd0817.github.io/project-dart-llm/} for videos and code.
Relative pose estimation using point correspondences (PC) is a widely used technique. A minimal configuration of six PCs is required for two views of generalized cameras. In this paper, we present several minimal solvers that use six PCs to compute the 6DOF relative pose of multi-camera systems, including a minimal solver for the generalized camera and two minimal solvers for the practical configuration of two-camera rigs. The equation construction is based on the decoupling of rotation and translation. Rotation is represented by Cayley or quaternion parametrization, and translation can be eliminated by using the hidden variable technique. Ray bundle constraints are found and proven when a subset of PCs relate the same cameras across two views. This is the key to reducing the number of solutions and generating numerically stable solvers. Moreover, all configurations of six-point problems for multi-camera systems are enumerated. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior accuracy and efficiency of our solvers compared to state-of-the-art six-point methods. The code is available at //github.com/jizhaox/relpose-6pt
We propose a robust and efficient framework to generate global trajectories for ground robots in complex 3D environments. The proposed method takes point cloud as input and efficiently constructs a multi-level map using triangular patches as the basic elements. A kinematic path search is adopted on the patches, where motion primitives on different patches combine to form the global min-time cost initial trajectory. We use a same-level expansion method to locate the nearest obstacle for each trajectory waypoint and construct an objective function with curvature, smoothness and obstacle terms for optimization. We evaluate the method on several complex 3D point cloud maps. Compared to existing methods, our method demonstrates higher robustness to point cloud noise, enabling the generation of high quality trajectory while maintaining high computational efficiency. Our code will be publicly available at //github.com/ck-tian/MLMC-planner.
As NLP models become more complex, understanding their decisions becomes more crucial. Counterfactuals (CFs), where minimal changes to inputs flip a model's prediction, offer a way to explain these models. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in NLP tasks, their efficacy in generating high-quality CFs remains uncertain. This work fills this gap by investigating how well LLMs generate CFs for two NLU tasks. We conduct a comprehensive comparison of several common LLMs, and evaluate their CFs, assessing both intrinsic metrics, and the impact of these CFs on data augmentation. Moreover, we analyze differences between human and LLM-generated CFs, providing insights for future research directions. Our results show that LLMs generate fluent CFs, but struggle to keep the induced changes minimal. Generating CFs for Sentiment Analysis (SA) is less challenging than NLI where LLMs show weaknesses in generating CFs that flip the original label. This also reflects on the data augmentation performance, where we observe a large gap between augmenting with human and LLMs CFs. Furthermore, we evaluate LLMs' ability to assess CFs in a mislabelled data setting, and show that they have a strong bias towards agreeing with the provided labels. GPT4 is more robust against this bias and its scores correlate well with automatic metrics. Our findings reveal several limitations and point to potential future work directions.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques have gained popularity in public and government domains. This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. As datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex data problem. Because military is investigating how heterogeneous IoT devices can aid processes and tasks, we investigate a multi-sensor approach. Moreover, we propose a signal to image encoding approach to transform information (signal) to integrate (fuse) data from IoT wearable devices to an image which is invertible and easier to visualize supporting decision making. Furthermore, we investigate the challenge of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application that utilizes hand gesture data from wearable devices.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.