Photonic integrated circuits are facilitating the development of optical neural networks, which have the potential to be both faster and more energy efficient than their electronic counterparts since optical signals are especially well-suited for implementing matrix multiplications. However, accurate programming of photonic chips for optical matrix multiplication remains a difficult challenge. Here, we describe both simple analytical models and data-driven models for offline training of optical matrix multipliers. We train and evaluate the models using experimental data obtained from a fabricated chip featuring a Mach-Zehnder interferometer mesh implementing 3-by-3 matrix multiplication. The neural network-based models outperform the simple physics-based models in terms of prediction error. Furthermore, the neural network models are also able to predict the spectral variations in the matrix weights for up to 100 frequency channels covering the C-band. The use of neural network models for programming the chip for optical matrix multiplication yields increased performance on multiple machine learning tasks.
Developing a universal model that can efficiently and effectively respond to a wide range of information access requests -- from retrieval to recommendation to question answering -- has been a long-lasting goal in the information retrieval community. This paper argues that the flexibility, efficiency, and effectiveness brought by the recent development in dense retrieval and approximate nearest neighbor search have smoothed the path towards achieving this goal. We develop a generic and extensible dense retrieval framework, called \framework, that can handle a wide range of (personalized) information access requests, such as keyword search, query by example, and complementary item recommendation. Our proposed approach extends the capabilities of dense retrieval models for ad-hoc retrieval tasks by incorporating user-specific preferences through the development of a personalized attentive network. This allows for a more tailored and accurate personalized information access experience. Our experiments on real-world e-commerce data suggest the feasibility of developing universal information access models by demonstrating significant improvements even compared to competitive baselines specifically developed for each of these individual information access tasks. This work opens up a number of fundamental research directions for future exploration.
Graphs arising in statistical problems, signal processing, large networks, combinatorial optimization, and data analysis are often dense, which causes both computational and storage bottlenecks. One way of \textit{sparsifying} a \textit{weighted} graph, while sharing the same vertices as the original graph but reducing the number of edges, is through \textit{spectral sparsification}. We study this problem through the perspective of RandNLA. Specifically, we utilize randomized matrix multiplication to give a clean and simple analysis of how sampling according to edge weights gives a spectral approximation to graph Laplacians. Through the $CR$-MM algorithm, we attain a simple and computationally efficient sparsifier whose resulting Laplacian estimate is unbiased and of minimum variance. Furthermore, we define a new notion of \textit{additive spectral sparsifiers}, which has not been considered in the literature.
Autonomous racing is a research field gaining large popularity, as it pushes autonomous driving algorithms to their limits and serves as a catalyst for general autonomous driving. For scaled autonomous racing platforms, the computational constraint and complexity often limit the use of Model Predictive Control (MPC). As a consequence, geometric controllers are the most frequently deployed controllers. They prove to be performant while yielding implementation and operational simplicity. Yet, they inherently lack the incorporation of model dynamics, thus limiting the race car to a velocity domain where tire slip can be neglected. This paper presents Model- and Acceleration-based Pursuit (MAP) a high-performance model-based trajectory tracking algorithm that preserves the simplicity of geometric approaches while leveraging tire dynamics. The proposed algorithm allows accurate tracking of a trajectory at unprecedented velocities compared to State-of-the-Art (SotA) geometric controllers. The MAP controller is experimentally validated and outperforms the reference geometric controller four-fold in terms of lateral tracking error, yielding a tracking error of 0.055m at tested speeds up to 11m/s.
Wildlife conservation using continuous monitoring of environmental factors and biomedical classification, which generate a vast amount of sensor data, is a challenge due to limited bandwidth in the case of remote monitoring. It becomes critical to have classification where data is generated, and only classified data is used for monitoring. We present a novel multiplierless framework for in-filter acoustic classification using Margin Propagation (MP) approximation used in low-power edge devices deployable in remote areas with limited connectivity. The entire design of this classification framework is based on template-based kernel machine, which include feature extraction and inference, and uses basic primitives like addition/subtraction, shift, and comparator operations, for hardware implementation. Unlike full precision training methods for traditional classification, we use MP-based approximation for training, including backpropagation mitigating approximation errors. The proposed framework is general enough for acoustic classification. However, we demonstrate the hardware friendliness of this framework by implementing a parallel Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter bank in a kernel machine classifier optimized for a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The FIR filter acts as the feature extractor and non-linear kernel for the kernel machine implemented using MP approximation and a downsampling method to reduce the order of the filters. The FPGA implementation on Spartan 7 shows that the MP-approximated in-filter kernel machine is more efficient than traditional classification frameworks with just less than 1K slices.
Temporal facts, the facts for characterizing events that hold in specific time periods, are attracting rising attention in the knowledge graph (KG) research communities. In terms of quality management, the introduction of time restrictions brings new challenges to maintaining the temporal consistency of KGs and detecting potential temporal conflicts. Previous studies rely on manually enumerated temporal constraints to detect conflicts, which are labor-intensive and may have granularity issues. We start from the common pattern of temporal facts and constraints and propose a pattern-based temporal constraint mining method, PaTeCon. PaTeCon uses automatically determined graph patterns and their relevant statistical information over the given KG instead of human experts to generate time constraints. Specifically, PaTeCon dynamically attaches class restriction to candidate constraints according to their measuring scores.We evaluate PaTeCon on two large-scale datasets based on Wikidata and Freebase respectively. The experimental results show that pattern-based automatic constraint mining is powerful in generating valuable temporal constraints.
Autonomous vehicles are a growing technology that aims to enhance safety, accessibility, efficiency, and convenience through autonomous maneuvers ranging from lane change to overtaking. Overtaking is one of the most challenging maneuvers for autonomous vehicles, and current techniques for autonomous overtaking are limited to simple situations. This paper studies how to increase safety in autonomous overtaking by allowing the maneuver to be aborted. We propose a decision-making process based on a deep Q-Network to determine if and when the overtaking maneuver needs to be aborted. The proposed algorithm is empirically evaluated in simulation with varying traffic situations, indicating that the proposed method improves safety during overtaking maneuvers. Furthermore, the approach is demonstrated in real-world experiments using the autonomous shuttle iseAuto.
Recently, tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) has emerged as a promising tool for hyperspectral image (HSI) processing. In the t-SVD, there are two key building blocks: (i) the low-rank enhanced transform and (ii) the accompanying low-rank characterization of transformed frontal slices. Previous t-SVD methods mainly focus on the developments of (i), while neglecting the other important aspect, i.e., the exact characterization of transformed frontal slices. In this letter, we exploit the potentiality in both building blocks by leveraging the \underline{\bf H}ierarchical nonlinear transform and the \underline{\bf H}ierarchical matrix factorization to establish a new \underline{\bf T}ensor \underline{\bf F}actorization (termed as H2TF). Compared to shallow counter partners, e.g., low-rank matrix factorization or its convex surrogates, H2TF can better capture complex structures of transformed frontal slices due to its hierarchical modeling abilities. We then suggest the H2TF-based HSI denoising model and develop an alternating direction method of multipliers-based algorithm to address the resultant model. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art HSI denoising methods.
Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
Over the past few years, we have seen fundamental breakthroughs in core problems in machine learning, largely driven by advances in deep neural networks. At the same time, the amount of data collected in a wide array of scientific domains is dramatically increasing in both size and complexity. Taken together, this suggests many exciting opportunities for deep learning applications in scientific settings. But a significant challenge to this is simply knowing where to start. The sheer breadth and diversity of different deep learning techniques makes it difficult to determine what scientific problems might be most amenable to these methods, or which specific combination of methods might offer the most promising first approach. In this survey, we focus on addressing this central issue, providing an overview of many widely used deep learning models, spanning visual, sequential and graph structured data, associated tasks and different training methods, along with techniques to use deep learning with less data and better interpret these complex models --- two central considerations for many scientific use cases. We also include overviews of the full design process, implementation tips, and links to a plethora of tutorials, research summaries and open-sourced deep learning pipelines and pretrained models, developed by the community. We hope that this survey will help accelerate the use of deep learning across different scientific domains.
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.