In modern systems that rely on the use of Battery Management Systems (BMS), longevity and the re-use of battery packs have always been important topics of discussion. These battery packs would be stored inside warehouses where they would need to be properly monitored and configured before their re-integration into the new systems. Traditional use of wired connections can be very cumbersome, and sometimes even impossible, due to the outer layers and packaging. To circumvent these issues, we propose an extension to the conventional BMS design that incorporates the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) for the purpose of wireless battery pack status readout. Additionally, to ensure that these packs are only managed by authenticated devices and that the data that is communicated with is protected against outside eavesdropping and tampering, we present a solution in the form of a lightweight security layer on top of the NFC protocol. To show the feasibility of our design, an accompanying prototype has been implemented and evaluated.
The Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) paradigm, and its reference architecture proposed by the O-RAN Alliance, is paving the way toward open, interoperable, observable and truly intelligent cellular networks. Crucial to this evolution is Machine Learning (ML), which will play a pivotal role by providing the necessary tools to realize the vision of self-organizing O-RAN systems. However, to be actionable, ML algorithms need to demonstrate high reliability, effectiveness in delivering high performance, and the ability to adapt to varying network conditions, traffic demands and performance requirements. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent design for O-RAN applications that can learn control policies under varying Service Level Agreement (SLAs) with heterogeneous minimum performance requirements. We focus on the case of RAN slicing and SLAs specifying maximum tolerable end-to-end latency levels. We use the OpenRAN Gym open-source environment to train a DRL agent that can adapt to varying SLAs and compare it against the state-of-the-art. We show that our agent maintains a low SLA violation rate that is 8.3x and 14.4x lower than approaches based on Deep Q- Learning (DQN) and Q-Learning while consuming respectively 0.3x and 0.6x fewer resources without the need for re-training.
The primary aim of Knowledge Graph embeddings (KGE) is to learn low-dimensional representations of entities and relations for predicting missing facts. While rotation-based methods like RotatE and QuatE perform well in KGE, they face two challenges: limited model flexibility requiring proportional increases in relation size with entity dimension, and difficulties in generalizing the model for higher-dimensional rotations. To address these issues, we introduce OrthogonalE, a novel KGE model employing matrices for entities and block-diagonal orthogonal matrices with Riemannian optimization for relations. This approach enhances the generality and flexibility of KGE models. The experimental results indicate that our new KGE model, OrthogonalE, is both general and flexible, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art KGE models while substantially reducing the number of relation parameters.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in processing both natural and programming languages, which have enabled various applications in software engineering, such as requirement engineering, code generation, and software testing. However, existing code generation benchmarks do not necessarily assess the code understanding performance of LLMs, especially for the subtle inconsistencies that may arise between code and its semantics described in natural language. In this paper, we propose a novel method to systematically assess the code understanding performance of LLMs, particularly focusing on subtle differences between code and its descriptions, by introducing code mutations to existing code generation datasets. Code mutations are small changes that alter the semantics of the original code, creating a mismatch with the natural language description. We apply different types of code mutations, such as operator replacement and statement deletion, to generate inconsistent code-description pairs. We then use these pairs to test the ability of LLMs to correctly detect the inconsistencies. We propose a new LLM testing method, called Mutation-based Consistency Testing (MCT), and conduct a case study on the two popular LLMs, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, using the state-of-the-art code generation benchmark, HumanEval-X, which consists of six programming languages (Python, C++, Java, Go, JavaScript, and Rust). We compare the performance of the LLMs across different types of code mutations and programming languages and analyze the results. We find that the LLMs show significant variation in their code understanding performance and that they have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the mutation type and language.
With the increasing demand for computing capability given limited resource and power budgets, it is crucial to deploy applications to customized accelerators like FPGAs. However, FPGA programming is non-trivial. Although existing high-level synthesis (HLS) tools improve productivity to a certain extent, they are limited in scope and capability to support sufficient FPGA-oriented optimizations. This paper focuses on FPGA-based accelerators and proposes POM, an optimizing framework built on multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR). POM has several features which demonstrate its scope and capability of performance optimization. First, most HLS tools depend exclusively on a single-level IR to perform all the optimizations, introducing excessive information into the IR and making debugging an arduous task. In contrast, POM introduces three layers of IR to perform operations at suitable abstraction levels, streamlining the implementation and debugging process and exhibiting better flexibility, extensibility, and systematicness. Second, POM integrates the polyhedral model into MLIR, enabling advanced dependence analysis and various FPGA-oriented loop transformations. By representing nested loops with integer sets and maps, loop transformations can be conducted conveniently through manipulations on polyhedral semantics. Finally, to further relieve design effort, POM has a user-friendly programming interface (DSL) that allows a concise description of computation and includes a rich collection of scheduling primitives. An automatic design space exploration (DSE) engine is provided to search for high-performance optimization schemes efficiently and generate optimized accelerators automatically. Experimental results show that POM achieves a $6.46\times$ average speedup on typical benchmark suites and a $6.06\times$ average speedup on real-world applications compared to the state-of-the-art.
During Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy (PCNL) operations, the surgeon is required to define the incision point on the patient's back, align the needle to a pre-planned path, and perform puncture operations afterward. The procedure is currently performed manually using ultrasound or fluoroscopy imaging for needle orientation, which, however, implies limited accuracy and low reproducibility. This work incorporates Augmented Reality (AR) visualization with an optical see-through head-mounted display (OST-HMD) and Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) framework to empower the surgeon's task completion performance. In detail, Eye-to-Hand calibration, system registration, and hologram model registration are performed to realize visual guidance. A Cartesian impedance controller is used to guide the operator during the needle puncture task execution. Experiments are conducted to verify the system performance compared with conventional manual puncture procedures and a 2D monitor-based visualisation interface. The results showed that the proposed framework achieves the lowest median and standard deviation error across all the experimental groups, respectively. Furthermore, the NASA-TLX user evaluation results indicate that the proposed framework requires the lowest workload score for task completion compared to other experimental setups. The proposed framework exhibits significant potential for clinical application in the PCNL task, as it enhances the surgeon's perception capability, facilitates collision-free needle insertion path planning, and minimises errors in task completion.
Utilizing state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs), automatic code generation models play a pivotal role in enhancing the productivity of software development procedures. As the adoption of LLMs becomes more widespread in software coding ecosystems, a pressing issue has emerged: does the generated code contain social bias and unfairness, such as those related to age, gender, and race? This issue concerns the integrity, fairness, and ethical foundation of software applications that depend on the code generated by these models, yet is under-explored in the literature. This paper presents a novel bias testing framework that is specifically designed for code generation tasks. Based on this framework, we conduct an extensive evaluation of the bias in code generated by five state-of-the-art LLMs. Our findings reveal that 20.29% to 44.93% code functions generated by the models under study are biased when handling bias sensitive tasks (i.e., tasks that involve sensitive attributes such as age and gender). This indicates that the existing LLMs can be unfair in code generation, posing risks of unintended and harmful software behaviors. To mitigate bias for code generation models, we evaluate five bias mitigation prompt strategies, i.e., utilizing bias testing results to refine the code (zero-shot), one-, few-shot, and two Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts. Our evaluation results illustrate that these strategies are all effective in mitigating bias. Overall, one-shot and few-shot learning are the two most effective. For GPT-4, 80% to 90% code bias can be removed with one-shot learning.
Although there have been remarkable advances in dialogue systems through the dialogue systems technology competition (DSTC), it remains one of the key challenges to building a robust task-oriented dialogue system with a speech interface. Most of the progress has been made for text-based dialogue systems since there are abundant datasets with written corpora while those with spoken dialogues are very scarce. However, as can be seen from voice assistant systems such as Siri and Alexa, it is of practical importance to transfer the success to spoken dialogues. In this paper, we describe our engineering effort in building a highly successful model that participated in the speech-aware dialogue systems technology challenge track in DSTC11. Our model consists of three major modules: (1) automatic speech recognition error correction to bridge the gap between the spoken and the text utterances, (2) text-based dialogue system (D3ST) for estimating the slots and values using slot descriptions, and (3) post-processing for recovering the error of the estimated slot value. Our experiments show that it is important to use an explicit automatic speech recognition error correction module, post-processing, and data augmentation to adapt a text-based dialogue state tracker for spoken dialogue corpora.
Existing dense or paragraph video captioning approaches rely on holistic representations of videos, possibly coupled with learned object/action representations, to condition hierarchical language decoders. However, they fundamentally lack the commonsense knowledge of the world required to reason about progression of events, causality, and even the function of certain objects within a scene. To address this limitation we propose a novel video captioning Transformer-based model, that takes into account both implicit (visuo-lingual and purely linguistic) and explicit (knowledge-base) commonsense knowledge. We show that these forms of knowledge, in isolation and in combination, enhance the quality of produced captions. Further, inspired by imitation learning, we propose a new task of instruction generation, where the goal is to produce a set of linguistic instructions from a video demonstration of its performance. We formalize the task using the ALFRED dataset [54] generated using an AI2-THOR environment. While instruction generation is conceptually similar to paragraph captioning, it differs in the fact that it exhibits stronger object persistence, as well as spatially-aware and causal sentence structure. We show that our commonsense knowledge enhanced approach produces significant improvements on this task (up to 57% in METEOR and 8.5% in CIDEr), as well as the state-of-the-art result on more traditional video captioning in the ActivityNet Captions dataset [29].
Within the rapidly developing Internet of Things (IoT), numerous and diverse physical devices, Edge devices, Cloud infrastructure, and their quality of service requirements (QoS), need to be represented within a unified specification in order to enable rapid IoT application development, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration. But heterogeneities among different configuration knowledge representation models pose limitations for acquisition, discovery and curation of configuration knowledge for coordinated IoT applications. This paper proposes a unified data model to represent IoT resource configuration knowledge artifacts. It also proposes IoT-CANE (Context-Aware recommendatioN systEm) to facilitate incremental knowledge acquisition and declarative context driven knowledge recommendation.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.