Compute-In-Memory (CiM) is a promising solution to accelerate Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) as it can avoid energy-intensive DNN weight movement and use memory arrays to perform low-energy, high-density computations. These benefits have inspired research across the CiM stack, but CiM research often focuses on only one level of the stack (i.e., devices, circuits, architecture, workload, or mapping) or only one design point (e.g., one fabricated chip). There is a need for a full-stack modeling tool to evaluate design decisions in the context of full systems (e.g., see how a circuit impacts system energy) and to perform rapid early-stage exploration of the CiM co-design space. To address this need, we propose CiMLoop: an open-source tool to model diverse CiM systems and explore decisions across the CiM stack. CiMLoop introduces (1) a flexible specification that lets users describe, model, and map workloads to both circuits and architecture, (2) an accurate energy model that captures the interaction between DNN operand values, hardware data representations, and analog/digital values propagated by circuits, and (3) a fast statistical model that can explore the design space orders-of-magnitude more quickly than other high-accuracy models. Using CiMLoop, researchers can evaluate design choices at different levels of the CiM stack, co-design across all levels, fairly compare different implementations, and rapidly explore the design space.
Recently, perception task based on Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation has drawn more and more attention, and BEV representation is promising as the foundation for next-generation Autonomous Vehicle (AV) perception. However, most existing BEV solutions either require considerable resources to execute on-vehicle inference or suffer from modest performance. This paper proposes a simple yet effective framework, termed Fast-BEV , which is capable of performing faster BEV perception on the on-vehicle chips. Towards this goal, we first empirically find that the BEV representation can be sufficiently powerful without expensive transformer based transformation nor depth representation. Our Fast-BEV consists of five parts, We novelly propose (1) a lightweight deployment-friendly view transformation which fast transfers 2D image feature to 3D voxel space, (2) an multi-scale image encoder which leverages multi-scale information for better performance, (3) an efficient BEV encoder which is particularly designed to speed up on-vehicle inference. We further introduce (4) a strong data augmentation strategy for both image and BEV space to avoid over-fitting, (5) a multi-frame feature fusion mechanism to leverage the temporal information. Through experiments, on 2080Ti platform, our R50 model can run 52.6 FPS with 47.3% NDS on the nuScenes validation set, exceeding the 41.3 FPS and 47.5% NDS of the BEVDepth-R50 model and 30.2 FPS and 45.7% NDS of the BEVDet4D-R50 model. Our largest model (R101@900x1600) establishes a competitive 53.5% NDS on the nuScenes validation set. We further develop a benchmark with considerable accuracy and efficiency on current popular on-vehicle chips. The code is released at: //github.com/Sense-GVT/Fast-BEV.
Facial Action Units (AU) is a vital concept in the realm of affective computing, and AU detection has always been a hot research topic. Existing methods suffer from overfitting issues due to the utilization of a large number of learnable parameters on scarce AU-annotated datasets or heavy reliance on substantial additional relevant data. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) provides a promising paradigm to address these challenges, whereas its existing methods lack design for AU characteristics. Therefore, we innovatively investigate PETL paradigm to AU detection, introducing AUFormer and proposing a novel Mixture-of-Knowledge Expert (MoKE) collaboration mechanism. An individual MoKE specific to a certain AU with minimal learnable parameters first integrates personalized multi-scale and correlation knowledge. Then the MoKE collaborates with other MoKEs in the expert group to obtain aggregated information and inject it into the frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) to achieve parameter-efficient AU detection. Additionally, we design a Margin-truncated Difficulty-aware Weighted Asymmetric Loss (MDWA-Loss), which can encourage the model to focus more on activated AUs, differentiate the difficulty of unactivated AUs, and discard potential mislabeled samples. Extensive experiments from various perspectives, including within-domain, cross-domain, data efficiency, and micro-expression domain, demonstrate AUFormer's state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization abilities without relying on additional relevant data. The code for AUFormer is available at //github.com/yuankaishen2001/AUFormer.
The recently introduced Segment-Anything Model (SAM) has the potential to greatly accelerate the development of segmentation models. However, directly applying SAM to surgical images has key limitations including (1) the requirement of image-specific prompts at test-time, thereby preventing fully automated segmentation, and (2) ineffectiveness due to substantial domain gap between natural and surgical images. In this work, we propose CycleSAM, an approach for one-shot surgical scene segmentation that uses the training image-mask pair at test-time to automatically identify points in the test images that correspond to each object class, which can then be used to prompt SAM to produce object masks. To produce high-fidelity matches, we introduce a novel spatial cycle-consistency constraint that enforces point proposals in the test image to rematch to points within the object foreground region in the training image. Then, to address the domain gap, rather than directly using the visual features from SAM, we employ a ResNet50 encoder pretrained on surgical images in a self-supervised fashion, thereby maintaining high label-efficiency. We evaluate CycleSAM for one-shot segmentation on two diverse surgical semantic segmentation datasets, comprehensively outperforming baseline approaches and reaching up to 50% of fully-supervised performance.
Differentiable 3D-Gaussian splatting (GS) is emerging as a prominent technique in computer vision and graphics for reconstructing 3D scenes. GS represents a scene as a set of 3D Gaussians with varying opacities and employs a computationally efficient splatting operation along with analytical derivatives to compute the 3D Gaussian parameters given scene images captured from various viewpoints. Unfortunately, capturing surround view ($360^{\circ}$ viewpoint) images is impossible or impractical in many real-world imaging scenarios, including underwater imaging, rooms inside a building, and autonomous navigation. In these restricted baseline imaging scenarios, the GS algorithm suffers from a well-known 'missing cone' problem, which results in poor reconstruction along the depth axis. In this manuscript, we demonstrate that using transient data (from sonars) allows us to address the missing cone problem by sampling high-frequency data along the depth axis. We extend the Gaussian splatting algorithms for two commonly used sonars and propose fusion algorithms that simultaneously utilize RGB camera data and sonar data. Through simulations, emulations, and hardware experiments across various imaging scenarios, we show that the proposed fusion algorithms lead to significantly better novel view synthesis (5 dB improvement in PSNR) and 3D geometry reconstruction (60% lower Chamfer distance).
We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community. This dataset includes over 3.5 million documents with rich metadata, making it one of the most extensive collections of debate evidence. OpenDebateEvidence captures the complexity of arguments in high school and college debates, providing valuable resources for training and evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of fine-tuning state-of-the-art large language models for argumentative abstractive summarization across various methods, models, and datasets. By providing this comprehensive resource, we aim to advance computational argumentation and support practical applications for debaters, educators, and researchers. OpenDebateEvidence is publicly available to support further research and innovation in computational argumentation. Access it here: //huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist
Database Management Systems (DBMSs) are vital components in modern data-driven systems. Their complexity often leads to logic bugs, which are implementation errors within the DBMSs that can lead to incorrect query results, data exposure, unauthorized access, etc., without necessarily causing visible system failures. Existing detection employs two strategies: rule-based bug detection and coverage-guided fuzzing. In general, rule specification itself is challenging; as a result, rule-based detection is limited to specific and simple rules. Coverage-guided fuzzing blindly explores code paths or blocks, many of which are unlikely to contain logic bugs; therefore, this strategy is cost-ineffective. In this paper, we design SQLaser, a SQL-clause-guided fuzzer for detecting logic bugs in DBMSs. Through a comprehensive examination of most existing logic bugs across four distinct DBMSs, excluding those causing system crashes, we have identified 35 logic bug patterns. These patterns manifest as certain SQL clause combinations that commonly result in logic bugs, and behind these clause combinations are a sequence of functions. We therefore model logic bug patterns as error-prone function chains (ie, sequences of functions). We further develop a directed fuzzer with a new path-to-path distance-calculation mechanism for effectively testing these chains and discovering additional logic bugs. This mechanism enables SQLaser to swiftly navigate to target sites and uncover potential bugs emerging from these paths. Our evaluation, conducted on SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and TiDB, demonstrates that SQLaser significantly accelerates bug discovery compared to other fuzzing approaches, reducing detection time by approximately 60%.
In an effort to improve the efficiency and scalability of single-image super-resolution (SISR) applications, we introduce AnySR, to rebuild existing arbitrary-scale SR methods into any-scale, any-resource implementation. As a contrast to off-the-shelf methods that solve SR tasks across various scales with the same computing costs, our AnySR innovates in: 1) building arbitrary-scale tasks as any-resource implementation, reducing resource requirements for smaller scales without additional parameters; 2) enhancing any-scale performance in a feature-interweaving fashion, inserting scale pairs into features at regular intervals and ensuring correct feature/scale processing. The efficacy of our AnySR is fully demonstrated by rebuilding most existing arbitrary-scale SISR methods and validating on five popular SISR test datasets. The results show that our AnySR implements SISR tasks in a computing-more-efficient fashion, and performs on par with existing arbitrary-scale SISR methods. For the first time, we realize SISR tasks as not only any-scale in literature, but also as any-resource. Code is available at //github.com/CrispyFeSo4/AnySR.
Numerous locomotion controllers have been designed based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to facilitate blind quadrupedal locomotion traversing challenging terrains. Nevertheless, locomotion control is still a challenging task for quadruped robots traversing diverse terrains amidst unforeseen disturbances. Recently, privileged learning has been employed to learn reliable and robust quadrupedal locomotion over various terrains based on a teacher-student architecture. However, its one-encoder structure is not adequate in addressing external force perturbations. The student policy would experience inevitable performance degradation due to the feature embedding discrepancy between the feature encoder of the teacher policy and the one of the student policy. Hence, this paper presents a privileged learning framework with multiple feature encoders and a residual policy network for robust and reliable quadruped locomotion subject to various external perturbations. The multi-encoder structure can decouple latent features from different privileged information, ultimately leading to enhanced performance of the learned policy in terms of robustness, stability, and reliability. The efficiency of the proposed feature encoding module is analyzed in depth using extensive simulation data. The introduction of the residual policy network helps mitigate the performance degradation experienced by the student policy that attempts to clone the behaviors of a teacher policy. The proposed framework is evaluated on a Unitree GO1 robot, showcasing its performance enhancement over the state-of-the-art privileged learning algorithm through extensive experiments conducted on diverse terrains. Ablation studies are conducted to illustrate the efficiency of the residual policy network.
Convolutions have become essential in state-of-the-art end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition~(ASR) systems due to their efficient modelling of local context. Notably, its use in Conformers has led to superior performance compared to vanilla Transformer-based ASR systems. While components other than the convolution module in the Conformer have been reexamined, altering the convolution module itself has been far less explored. Towards this, we introduce Multi-Convformer that uses multiple convolution kernels within the convolution module of the Conformer in conjunction with gating. This helps in improved modeling of local dependencies at varying granularities. Our model rivals existing Conformer variants such as CgMLP and E-Branchformer in performance, while being more parameter efficient. We empirically compare our approach with Conformer and its variants across four different datasets and three different modelling paradigms and show up to 8% relative word error rate~(WER) improvements.
Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structural causal model (SCM). This allows one to reason about the effects of changes to this process (i.e., interventions) and what would have happened in hindsight (i.e., counterfactuals). We categorize work in \causalml into five groups according to the problems they tackle: (1) causal supervised learning, (2) causal generative modeling, (3) causal explanations, (4) causal fairness, (5) causal reinforcement learning. For each category, we systematically compare its methods and point out open problems. Further, we review modality-specific applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph representation learning. Finally, we provide an overview of causal benchmarks and a critical discussion of the state of this nascent field, including recommendations for future work.