This paper presents InfiniteEn, a multi-source energy harvesting platform designed for the Internet of Batteryless Things (IoBT). InfiniteEn incorporates an efficient energy combiner to combine energy from different harvesting sources. The energy combiner uses capacitor-to-capacitor energy transfer to combine energy from multiple sources and achieves a nominal efficiency of 88\%. In addition to multiplexing different sources, the energy combiner facilitates the estimation of the harvesting rate and the calibration of the capacity of the energy buffer. The energy storage architecture of InfiniteEn employs an array of storage buffers that can be configured on demand to cope with varying energy harvesting rates and load's energy requirements. To address the challenge of tracking the energy state of batteryless devices with minimum energy overhead, this work introduces the concept of a Load Monitoring Module (LMM). InfiniteEn is a load-agnostic platform, meaning that it does not require any prior knowledge of the energy profile of the load to track its energy states. The LMM assists InfiniteEn in tracking the energy state of the load and dynamically modifying the storage buffers to meet the load's energy requirements. Furthermore, the module can detect and signal any abnormalities in the energy consumption pattern of the load caused by a hardware or software defect. Experiments demonstrate that LMM has a response time of less than 11 ms to energy state changes.
Cloud native technologies have been observed to expand into the realm of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical Systems, of which an important application domain is robotics. In this paper, we review the cloudification practice in the robotics domain from both literature and industrial perspectives. We propose RoboKube, an adaptive framework that is based on the Kubernetes (K8s) ecosystem to set up a common platform across the device-cloud continuum for the deployment of cloudified Robotic Operating System (ROS) powered applications, to facilitate the cloud native evolution in robotics. We examine the process of modernizing ROS applications using cloud-native technologies, focusing on both the platform and application perspectives. In addition, we address the challenges of networking setups for heterogeneous environments. This paper intends to serves as a guide for developers and researchers, offering insights into containerization strategies, ROS node distribution and clustering, and deployment options. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we present a case study involving the cloudification of a teleoperation testbed.
This paper investigates the application of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in the design of embedded systems using machine learning (ML). As a case study, it addresses the challenging problem of static silent store prediction. This involves identifying redundant memory writes based only on static program features. Eliminating such stores enhances performance and energy efficiency by reducing memory access and bus traffic, especially in the presence of emerging non-volatile memory technologies. To achieve this, we propose a methodology consisting of: 1) the development of relevant ML models for explaining silent store prediction, and 2) the application of XAI to explain these models. We employ two state-of-the-art model-agnostic XAI methods to analyze the causes of silent stores. Through the case study, we evaluate the effectiveness of the methods. We find that these methods provide explanations for silent store predictions, which are consistent with known causes of silent store occurrences from previous studies. Typically, this allows us to confirm the prevalence of silent stores in operations that write the zero constant into memory, or the absence of silent stores in operations involving loop induction variables. This suggests the potential relevance of XAI in analyzing ML models' decision in embedded system design. From the case study, we share some valuable insights and pitfalls we encountered. More generally, this study aims to lay the groundwork for future research in the emerging field of XAI for embedded system design.
Sourced from various sensors and organized chronologically, Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) data involves crucial spatial-temporal dependencies, e.g., correlations among sensors. To capture these dependencies, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools, yet their effectiveness is restricted by the quality of graph construction from MTS data. Typically, existing approaches construct graphs solely from MTS signals, which may introduce bias due to a small training dataset and may not accurately represent underlying dependencies. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework named K-Link, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode extensive general knowledge and thereby providing effective solutions to reduce the bias. Leveraging the knowledge embedded in LLMs, such as physical principles, we extract a \textit{Knowledge-Link graph}, capturing vast semantic knowledge of sensors and the linkage of the sensor-level knowledge. To harness the potential of the knowledge-link graph in enhancing the graph derived from MTS data, we propose a graph alignment module, facilitating the transfer of semantic knowledge within the knowledge-link graph into the MTS-derived graph. By doing so, we can improve the graph quality, ensuring effective representation learning with GNNs for MTS data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for superior performance across various MTS-related downstream tasks.
People with Visual Impairments (PVI) typically recognize objects through haptic perception. Knowing objects and materials before touching is desired by the target users but under-explored in the field of human-centered robotics. To fill this gap, in this work, a wearable vision-based robotic system, MateRobot, is established for PVI to recognize materials and object categories beforehand. To address the computational constraints of mobile platforms, we propose a lightweight yet accurate model MateViT to perform pixel-wise semantic segmentation, simultaneously recognizing both objects and materials. Our methods achieve respective 40.2% and 51.1% of mIoU on COCOStuff-10K and DMS datasets, surpassing the previous method with +5.7% and +7.0% gains. Moreover, on the field test with participants, our wearable system reaches a score of 28 in the NASA-Task Load Index, indicating low cognitive demands and ease of use. Our MateRobot demonstrates the feasibility of recognizing material property through visual cues and offers a promising step towards improving the functionality of wearable robots for PVI. The source code has been made publicly available at //junweizheng93.github.io/publications/MATERobot/MATERobot.html.
This paper presents an accurate and fast 3D global localization method, 3D-BBS, that extends the existing branch-and-bound (BnB)-based 2D scan matching (BBS) algorithm. To reduce memory consumption, we utilize a sparse hash table for storing hierarchical 3D voxel maps. To improve the processing cost of BBS in 3D space, we propose an efficient roto-translational space branching. Furthermore, we devise a batched BnB algorithm to fully leverage GPU parallel processing. Through experiments in simulated and real environments, we demonstrated that the 3D-BBS enabled accurate global localization with only a 3D LiDAR scan roughly aligned in the gravity direction and a 3D pre-built map. This method required only 878 msec on average to perform global localization and outperformed state-of-the-art global registration methods in terms of accuracy and processing speed.
In the continuously advancing AI landscape, crafting context-rich and meaningful responses via Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential. Researchers are becoming more aware of the challenges that LLMs with fewer parameters encounter when trying to provide suitable answers to open-ended questions. To address these hurdles, the integration of cutting-edge strategies, augmentation of rich external domain knowledge to LLMs, offers significant improvements. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines graph-driven context retrieval in conjunction to knowledge graphs based enhancement, honing the proficiency of LLMs, especially in domain specific community question answering platforms like AskUbuntu, Unix, and ServerFault. We conduct experiments on various LLMs with different parameter sizes to evaluate their ability to ground knowledge and determine factual accuracy in answers to open-ended questions. Our methodology GraphContextGen consistently outperforms dominant text-based retrieval systems, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability to a larger number of use cases. This advancement highlights the importance of pairing context rich data retrieval with LLMs, offering a renewed approach to knowledge sourcing and generation in AI systems. We also show that, due to rich contextual data retrieval, the crucial entities, along with the generated answer, remain factually coherent with the gold answer.
Distributed Stream Processing (DSP) focuses on the near real-time processing of large streams of unbounded data. To increase processing capacities, DSP systems are able to dynamically scale across a cluster of commodity nodes, ensuring a good Quality of Service despite variable workloads. However, selecting scaleout configurations which maximize resource utilization remains a challenge. This is especially true in environments where workloads change over time and node failures are all but inevitable. Furthermore, configuration parameters such as memory allocation and checkpointing intervals impact performance and resource usage as well. Sub-optimal configurations easily lead to high operational costs, poor performance, or unacceptable loss of service. In this paper, we present Demeter, a method for dynamically optimizing key DSP system configuration parameters for resource efficiency. Demeter uses Time Series Forecasting to predict future workloads and Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization to model runtime behaviors in relation to parameter settings and workload rates. Together, these techniques allow us to determine whether or not enough is known about the predicted workload rate to proactively initiate short-lived parallel profiling runs for data gathering. Once trained, the models guide the adjustment of multiple, potentially dependent system configuration parameters ensuring optimized performance and resource usage in response to changing workload rates. Our experiments on a commodity cluster using Apache Flink demonstrate that Demeter significantly improves the operational efficiency of long-running benchmark jobs.
Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved considerable success in generation tasks. As sampling from DPMs is equivalent to solving diffusion SDE or ODE which is time-consuming, numerous fast sampling methods built upon improved differential equation solvers are proposed. The majority of such techniques consider solving the diffusion ODE due to its superior efficiency. However, stochastic sampling could offer additional advantages in generating diverse and high-quality data. In this work, we engage in a comprehensive analysis of stochastic sampling from two aspects: variance-controlled diffusion SDE and linear multi-step SDE solver. Based on our analysis, we propose SA-Solver, which is an improved efficient stochastic Adams method for solving diffusion SDE to generate data with high quality. Our experiments show that SA-Solver achieves: 1) improved or comparable performance compared with the existing state-of-the-art sampling methods for few-step sampling; 2) SOTA FID scores on substantial benchmark datasets under a suitable number of function evaluations (NFEs).
This paper presents an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Knowledge Graph (KG) construction and reasoning. We employ eight distinct datasets that encompass aspects including entity, relation and event extraction, link prediction, and question answering. Empirically, our findings suggest that GPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT in the majority of tasks and even surpasses fine-tuned models in certain reasoning and question-answering datasets. Moreover, our investigation extends to the potential generalization ability of LLMs for information extraction, which culminates in the presentation of the Virtual Knowledge Extraction task and the development of the VINE dataset. Drawing on these empirical findings, we further propose AutoKG, a multi-agent-based approach employing LLMs for KG construction and reasoning, which aims to chart the future of this field and offer exciting opportunities for advancement. We anticipate that our research can provide invaluable insights for future undertakings of KG\footnote{Code and datasets will be available in //github.com/zjunlp/AutoKG.
This paper presents a comprehensive and practical guide for practitioners and end-users working with Large Language Models (LLMs) in their downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We provide discussions and insights into the usage of LLMs from the perspectives of models, data, and downstream tasks. Firstly, we offer an introduction and brief summary of current GPT- and BERT-style LLMs. Then, we discuss the influence of pre-training data, training data, and test data. Most importantly, we provide a detailed discussion about the use and non-use cases of large language models for various natural language processing tasks, such as knowledge-intensive tasks, traditional natural language understanding tasks, natural language generation tasks, emergent abilities, and considerations for specific tasks.We present various use cases and non-use cases to illustrate the practical applications and limitations of LLMs in real-world scenarios. We also try to understand the importance of data and the specific challenges associated with each NLP task. Furthermore, we explore the impact of spurious biases on LLMs and delve into other essential considerations, such as efficiency, cost, and latency, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of deploying LLMs in practice. This comprehensive guide aims to provide researchers and practitioners with valuable insights and best practices for working with LLMs, thereby enabling the successful implementation of these models in a wide range of NLP tasks. A curated list of practical guide resources of LLMs, regularly updated, can be found at \url{//github.com/Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide}.