Timing vulnerabilities in processors have emerged as a potent threat. As processors are the foundation of any computing system, identifying these flaws is imperative. Recently fuzzing techniques, traditionally used for detecting software vulnerabilities, have shown promising results for uncovering vulnerabilities in large-scale hardware designs, such as processors. Researchers have adapted black-box or grey-box fuzzing to detect timing vulnerabilities in processors. However, they cannot identify the locations or root causes of these timing vulnerabilities, nor do they provide coverage feedback to enable the designer's confidence in the processor's security. To address the deficiencies of the existing fuzzers, we present WhisperFuzz--the first white-box fuzzer with static analysis--aiming to detect and locate timing vulnerabilities in processors and evaluate the coverage of microarchitectural timing behaviors. WhisperFuzz uses the fundamental nature of processors' timing behaviors, microarchitectural state transitions, to localize timing vulnerabilities. WhisperFuzz automatically extracts microarchitectural state transitions from a processor design at the register-transfer level (RTL) and instruments the design to monitor the state transitions as coverage. Moreover, WhisperFuzz measures the time a design-under-test (DUT) takes to process tests, identifying any minor, abnormal variations that may hint at a timing vulnerability. WhisperFuzz detects 12 new timing vulnerabilities across advanced open-sourced RISC-V processors: BOOM, Rocket Core, and CVA6. Eight of these violate the zero latency requirements of the Zkt extension and are considered serious security vulnerabilities. Moreover, WhisperFuzz also pinpoints the locations of the new and the existing vulnerabilities.
Designing a humanoid locomotion controller is challenging and classically split up in sub-problems. Footstep planning is one of those, where the sequence of footsteps is defined. Even in simpler environments, finding a minimal sequence, or even a feasible sequence, yields a complex optimization problem. In the literature, this problem is usually addressed by search-based algorithms (e.g. variants of A*). However, such approaches are either computationally expensive or rely on hand-crafted tuning of several parameters. In this work, at first, we propose an efficient footstep planning method to navigate in local environments with obstacles, based on state-of-the art Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques, with very low computational requirements for on-line inference. Our approach is heuristic-free and relies on a continuous set of actions to generate feasible footsteps. In contrast, other methods necessitate the selection of a relevant discrete set of actions. Second, we propose a forecasting method, allowing to quickly estimate the number of footsteps required to reach different candidates of local targets. This approach relies on inherent computations made by the actor-critic DRL architecture. We demonstrate the validity of our approach with simulation results, and by a deployment on a kid-size humanoid robot during the RoboCup 2023 competition.
Emotion is vital to information and message processing, playing a key role in attitude formation. Consequently, creating a mood that evokes an emotional response is essential to any compelling piece of outreach communication. Many nonprofits and charities, despite having established messages, face challenges in creating advocacy campaign videos for social media. It requires significant creative and cognitive efforts to ensure that videos achieve the desired mood across multiple dimensions: script, visuals, and audio. We introduce MoodSmith, an AI-powered system that helps users explore mood possibilities for their message and create advocacy campaigns that are mood-consistent across dimensions. To achieve this, MoodSmith uses emotive language and plotlines for scripts, artistic style and color palette for visuals, and positivity and energy for audio. Our studies show that MoodSmith can effectively achieve a variety of moods, and the produced videos are consistent across media dimensions.
Surface prediction and completion have been widely studied in various applications. Recently, research in surface completion has evolved from small objects to complex large-scale scenes. As a result, researchers have begun increasing the volume of data and leveraging a greater variety of data modalities including rendered RGB images, descriptive texts, depth images, etc, to enhance algorithm performance. However, existing datasets suffer from a deficiency in the amounts of scene-level models along with the corresponding multi-modal information. Therefore, a method to scale the datasets and generate multi-modal information in them efficiently is essential. To bridge this research gap, we propose MASSTAR: a Multi-modal lArge-scale Scene dataset with a verSatile Toolchain for surfAce pRediction and completion. We develop a versatile and efficient toolchain for processing the raw 3D data from the environments. It screens out a set of fine-grained scene models and generates the corresponding multi-modal data. Utilizing the toolchain, we then generate an example dataset composed of over a thousand scene-level models with partial real-world data added. We compare MASSTAR with the existing datasets, which validates its superiority: the ability to efficiently extract high-quality models from complex scenarios to expand the dataset. Additionally, several representative surface completion algorithms are benchmarked on MASSTAR, which reveals that existing algorithms can hardly deal with scene-level completion. We will release the source code of our toolchain and the dataset. For more details, please see our project page at //sysu-star.github.io/MASSTAR.
Existing work in scientific machine learning (SciML) has shown that data-driven learning of solution operators can provide a fast approximate alternative to classical numerical partial differential equation (PDE) solvers. Of these, Neural Operators (NOs) have emerged as particularly promising. We observe that several uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for NOs fail for test inputs that are even moderately out-of-domain (OOD), even when the model approximates the solution well for in-domain tasks. To address this limitation, we show that ensembling several NOs can identify high-error regions and provide good uncertainty estimates that are well-correlated with prediction errors. Based on this, we propose a cost-effective alternative, DiverseNO, that mimics the properties of the ensemble by encouraging diverse predictions from its multiple heads in the last feed-forward layer. We then introduce Operator-ProbConserv, a method that uses these well-calibrated UQ estimates within the ProbConserv framework to update the model. Our empirical results show that Operator-ProbConserv enhances OOD model performance for a variety of challenging PDE problems and satisfies physical constraints such as conservation laws.
Fault localization is a critical process that involves identifying specific program elements responsible for program failures. Manually pinpointing these elements, such as classes, methods, or statements, which are associated with a fault is laborious and time-consuming. To overcome this challenge, various fault localization tools have been developed. These tools typically generate a ranked list of suspicious program elements. However, this information alone is insufficient. A prior study emphasized that automated fault localization should offer a rationale. In this study, we investigate the step-by-step reasoning for explainable fault localization. We explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLM) in assisting developers in reasoning about code. We proposed FuseFL that utilizes several combinations of information to enhance the LLM results which are spectrum-based fault localization results, test case execution outcomes, and code description (i.e., explanation of what the given code is intended to do). We conducted our investigation using faulty code from Refactory dataset. First, we evaluate the performance of the automated fault localization. Our results demonstrate a more than 30% increase in the number of successfully localized faults at Top-1 compared to the baseline. To evaluate the explanations generated by FuseFL, we create a dataset of human explanations that provide step-by-step reasoning as to why specific lines of code are considered faulty. This dataset consists of 324 faulty code files, along with explanations for 600 faulty lines. Furthermore, we also conducted human studies to evaluate the explanations. We found that for 22 out of the 30 randomly sampled cases, FuseFL generated correct explanations.
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.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset.
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains $188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.
Dialogue systems have attracted more and more attention. Recent advances on dialogue systems are overwhelmingly contributed by deep learning techniques, which have been employed to enhance a wide range of big data applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and recommender systems. For dialogue systems, deep learning can leverage a massive amount of data to learn meaningful feature representations and response generation strategies, while requiring a minimum amount of hand-crafting. In this article, we give an overview to these recent advances on dialogue systems from various perspectives and discuss some possible research directions. In particular, we generally divide existing dialogue systems into task-oriented and non-task-oriented models, then detail how deep learning techniques help them with representative algorithms and finally discuss some appealing research directions that can bring the dialogue system research into a new frontier.