Capabilities of long-range flight and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) are essential for Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Tiltrotor VTOLs have the advantage of balancing control simplicity and system complexity due to their redundant control authority. Prior work on controlling these aircraft either requires separate controllers and switching modes for different vehicle configurations or performs the control allocation on separate actuator sets, which cannot fully use the potential of the redundancy of tiltrotor. This paper introduces a unified MPC-based control strategy for a customized tiltrotor VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which does not require mode-switching and can perform the control allocation in a consistent way. The incorporation of four independently controllable rotors in VTOL design offers an extra level of redundancy, allowing the VTOL to accommodate actuator failures. The result shows that our approach outperforms PID controllers while maintaining unified control. It allows the VTOL to perform smooth acceleration/deceleration, and precise coordinated turns. In addition, the independently controlled tilts enable the vehicle to handle actuator failures, ensuring that the aircraft remains operational even in the event of a servo or motor malfunction.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable success across various tasks. However, efficiently serving LLMs has been a challenge due to the large memory bottleneck, specifically in small batch inference settings (e.g. mobile devices). Weight-only quantization can be a promising approach, but sub-4 bit quantization remains a challenge due to large-magnitude activation outliers. To mitigate the undesirable outlier effect, we first propose per-IC quantization, a simple yet effective method that creates quantization groups within each input channel (IC) rather than the conventional per-output-channel (per-OC). Our method is motivated by the observation that activation outliers affect the input dimension of the weight matrix, so similarly grouping the weights in the IC direction can isolate outliers within a group. We also find that activation outliers do not dictate quantization difficulty, and inherent weight sensitivities also exist. With per-IC quantization as a new outlier-friendly scheme, we propose Adaptive Dimensions (AdaDim), a versatile quantization framework that can adapt to various weight sensitivity patterns. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaDim by augmenting prior methods such as Round-To-Nearest and GPTQ, showing significant improvements across various language modeling benchmarks for both base (up to +4.7% on MMLU) and instruction-tuned (up to +10% on HumanEval) LLMs. Code is available at //github.com/johnheo/adadim-llm
Emerging Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), showing potential in traditional tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Our study explores a three-phase training strategy that harnesses GPT-4's capabilities to enhance the BERT model's performance on NER. Initially, GPT-4 annotates a subset of the CONLL2003 and additional BBC dataset without fine-tuning. We then train BERT using a mix of original and LLM-annotated data, analyzing the efficacy of LLM annotations against traditional methods. The second phase involves comparative experiments with different training regimens, assessing the synergy between distilled and original data. We observe that sequential strategies, particularly a simple mix of training first with distilled data followed by original data, significantly boost performance. In the third phase, we investigate various data blending techniques, including sigmoid and power decay functions, to optimize the training process further. Our results indicate that a strategic mix of distilled and original data markedly elevates the NER capabilities of BERT. Our approach presents a scalable methodology that reduces manual annotation costs and increases efficiency, making it especially pertinent in resource-limited and closed-network environments. The study concludes that while the 'Simple Mix' strategy yields the best results, understanding its underlying mechanisms requires further research. Future work will also focus on refining prompt designs and enhancing annotation selection processes, aiming to extend our methodology to diverse NLP tasks.
Observations of groundwater pollutants, such as arsenic or Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), are riddled with left censoring. These measurements have impact on the health and lifestyle of the populace. Left censoring of these spatially correlated observations are usually addressed by applying Gaussian processes (GPs), which have theoretical advantages. However, this comes with a challenging computational complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$, which is impractical for large datasets. Additionally, a sizable proportion of the data being left-censored creates further bottlenecks, since the likelihood computation now involves an intractable high-dimensional integral of the multivariate Gaussian density. In this article, we tackle these two problems simultaneously by approximating the GP with a Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) approach that exploits an explicit link between a GP with Mat\'ern correlation function and a GMRF using stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). We introduce a GMRF-based measurement error into the model, which alleviates the likelihood computation for the censored data, drastically improving the speed of the model while maintaining admirable accuracy. Our approach demonstrates robustness and substantial computational scalability, compared to state-of-the-art methods for censored spatial responses across various simulation settings. Finally, the fit of this fully Bayesian model to the concentration of PFOS in groundwater available at 24,959 sites across California, where 46.62\% responses are censored, produces prediction surface and uncertainty quantification in real time, thereby substantiating the applicability and scalability of the proposed method. Code for implementation is made available via GitHub.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a solution to current traffic congestion by providing on-demand air mobility in urban areas. Effective traffic management is crucial for efficient operation of UAM systems, especially for high-demand scenarios. In this paper, we present a centralized traffic management framework for on-demand UAM systems. Specifically, we provide a scheduling policy, called VertiSync, which schedules the aircraft for either servicing trip requests or rebalancing in the system subject to aircraft safety margins and energy requirements. We characterize the system-level throughput of VertiSync, which determines the demand threshold at which passenger waiting times transition from being stabilized to being increasing over time. We show that the proposed policy is able to maximize throughput for sufficiently large fleet sizes. We demonstrate the performance of VertiSync through a case study for the city of Los Angeles, and show that it significantly reduces passenger waiting times compared to a first-come first-serve scheduling policy.
We present a simple self-supervised method to enhance the performance of ViT features for dense downstream tasks. Our Lightweight Feature Transform (LiFT) is a straightforward and compact postprocessing network that can be applied to enhance the features of any pre-trained ViT backbone. LiFT is fast and easy to train with a self-supervised objective, and it boosts the density of ViT features for minimal extra inference cost. Furthermore, we demonstrate that LiFT can be applied with approaches that use additional task-specific downstream modules, as we integrate LiFT with ViTDet for COCO detection and segmentation. Despite the simplicity of LiFT, we find that it is not simply learning a more complex version of bilinear interpolation. Instead, our LiFT training protocol leads to several desirable emergent properties that benefit ViT features in dense downstream tasks. This includes greater scale invariance for features, and better object boundary maps. By simply training LiFT for a few epochs, we show improved performance on keypoint correspondence, detection, segmentation, and object discovery tasks. Overall, LiFT provides an easy way to unlock the benefits of denser feature arrays for a fraction of the computational cost. For more details, refer to our project page at //www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/LiFT/.
Existence constraints were defined in the Relational Data Model, but, unfortunately, are not provided by any Relational Database Management System, except for their NOT NULL particular case. Our (Elementary) Mathematical Data Model extended them to function products and introduced their dual non-existence constraints. MatBase, an intelligent data and knowledge base management system prototype based on both these data models, not only provides existence and non-existence constraints, but also automatically generates code for their enforcement. This paper presents and discusses the algorithms used by MatBase to enforce these types of constraints.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been revolutionized by the use of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT. Despite setting new records in nearly every NLP task, PLMs still face a number of challenges including poor interpretability, weak reasoning capability, and the need for a lot of expensive annotated data when applied to downstream tasks. By integrating external knowledge into PLMs, \textit{\underline{K}nowledge-\underline{E}nhanced \underline{P}re-trained \underline{L}anguage \underline{M}odels} (KEPLMs) have the potential to overcome the above-mentioned limitations. In this paper, we examine KEPLMs systematically through a series of studies. Specifically, we outline the common types and different formats of knowledge to be integrated into KEPLMs, detail the existing methods for building and evaluating KEPLMS, present the applications of KEPLMs in downstream tasks, and discuss the future research directions. Researchers will benefit from this survey by gaining a quick and comprehensive overview of the latest developments in this field.
This work aims to provide an engagement decision support tool for Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air combat in the context of Defensive Counter Air (DCA) missions. In BVR air combat, engagement decision refers to the choice of the moment the pilot engages a target by assuming an offensive stance and executing corresponding maneuvers. To model this decision, we use the Brazilian Air Force's Aerospace Simulation Environment (\textit{Ambiente de Simula\c{c}\~ao Aeroespacial - ASA} in Portuguese), which generated 3,729 constructive simulations lasting 12 minutes each and a total of 10,316 engagements. We analyzed all samples by an operational metric called the DCA index, which represents, based on the experience of subject matter experts, the degree of success in this type of mission. This metric considers the distances of the aircraft of the same team and the opposite team, the point of Combat Air Patrol, and the number of missiles used. By defining the engagement status right before it starts and the average of the DCA index throughout the engagement, we create a supervised learning model to determine the quality of a new engagement. An algorithm based on decision trees, working with the XGBoost library, provides a regression model to predict the DCA index with a coefficient of determination close to 0.8 and a Root Mean Square Error of 0.05 that can furnish parameters to the BVR pilot to decide whether or not to engage. Thus, using data obtained through simulations, this work contributes by building a decision support system based on machine learning for BVR air combat.
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks. Recently, an upgraded version of BERT has been released with Whole Word Masking (WWM), which mitigate the drawbacks of masking partial WordPiece tokens in pre-training BERT. In this technical report, we adapt whole word masking in Chinese text, that masking the whole word instead of masking Chinese characters, which could bring another challenge in Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training task. The model was trained on the latest Chinese Wikipedia dump. We aim to provide easy extensibility and better performance for Chinese BERT without changing any neural architecture or even hyper-parameters. The model is verified on various NLP tasks, across sentence-level to document-level, including sentiment classification (ChnSentiCorp, Sina Weibo), named entity recognition (People Daily, MSRA-NER), natural language inference (XNLI), sentence pair matching (LCQMC, BQ Corpus), and machine reading comprehension (CMRC 2018, DRCD, CAIL RC). Experimental results on these datasets show that the whole word masking could bring another significant gain. Moreover, we also examine the effectiveness of Chinese pre-trained models: BERT, ERNIE, BERT-wwm. We release the pre-trained model (both TensorFlow and PyTorch) on GitHub: //github.com/ymcui/Chinese-BERT-wwm
We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.