Geospatial observations combined with computational models have become key to understanding the physical systems of our environment and enable the design of best practices to reduce societal harm. Cloud-based deployments help to scale up these modeling and AI workflows. Yet, for practitioners to make robust conclusions, model tuning and testing is crucial, a resource intensive process which involves the variation of model input variables. We have developed the Variational Exploration Module which facilitates the optimization and validation of modeling workflows deployed in the cloud by orchestrating workflow executions and using Bayesian and machine learning-based methods to analyze model behavior. User configurations allow the combination of diverse sampling strategies in multi-agent environments. The flexibility and robustness of the model-agnostic module is demonstrated using real-world applications.
The increasing demand for autonomous machines in construction environments necessitates the development of robust object detection algorithms that can perform effectively across various weather and environmental conditions. This paper introduces a new semantic segmentation dataset specifically tailored for construction sites, taking into account the diverse challenges posed by adverse weather and environmental conditions. The dataset is designed to enhance the training and evaluation of object detection models, fostering their adaptability and reliability in real-world construction applications. Our dataset comprises annotated images captured under a wide range of different weather conditions, including but not limited to sunny days, rainy periods, foggy atmospheres, and low-light situations. Additionally, environmental factors such as the existence of dirt/mud on the camera lens are integrated into the dataset through actual captures and synthetic generation to simulate the complex conditions prevalent in construction sites. We also generate synthetic images of the annotations including precise semantic segmentation masks for various objects commonly found in construction environments, such as wheel loader machines, personnel, cars, and structural elements. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on our proposed benchmark. The results highlight the dataset's success in adversarial training models across diverse conditions, showcasing its efficacy compared to existing datasets that lack such environmental variability.
Reconstructing an object from photos and placing it virtually in a new environment goes beyond the standard novel view synthesis task as the appearance of the object has to not only adapt to the novel viewpoint but also to the new lighting conditions and yet evaluations of inverse rendering methods rely on novel view synthesis data or simplistic synthetic datasets for quantitative analysis. This work presents a real-world dataset for measuring the reconstruction and rendering of objects for relighting. To this end, we capture the environment lighting and ground truth images of the same objects in multiple environments allowing to reconstruct the objects from images taken in one environment and quantify the quality of the rendered views for the unseen lighting environments. Further, we introduce a simple baseline composed of off-the-shelf methods and test several state-of-the-art methods on the relighting task and show that novel view synthesis is not a reliable proxy to measure performance. Code and dataset are available at //github.com/isl-org/objects-with-lighting .
We present a comprehensive, user-centric approach to understand preferences in AI-based productivity agents and develop personalized solutions tailored to users' needs. Utilizing a two-phase method, we first conducted a survey with 363 participants, exploring various aspects of productivity, communication style, agent approach, personality traits, personalization, and privacy. Drawing on the survey insights, we developed a GPT-4 powered personalized productivity agent that utilizes telemetry data gathered via Viva Insights from information workers to provide tailored assistance. We compared its performance with alternative productivity-assistive tools, such as dashboard and narrative, in a study involving 40 participants. Our findings highlight the importance of user-centric design, adaptability, and the balance between personalization and privacy in AI-assisted productivity tools. By building on the insights distilled from our study, we believe that our work can enable and guide future research to further enhance productivity solutions, ultimately leading to optimized efficiency and user experiences for information workers.
Serverless computing relieves developers from the burden of resource management, thus providing ease-of-use to the users and the opportunity to optimize resource utilization for the providers. However, today's serverless systems lack performance guarantees for function invocations, thus limiting support for performance-critical applications: we observed severe performance variability (up to 6x). Providers lack visibility into user functions and hence find it challenging to right-size them: we observed heavy resource underutilization (up to 80%). To understand the causes behind the performance variability and underutilization, we conducted a measurement study of commonly deployed serverless functions and learned that the function performance and resource utilization depend crucially on function semantics and inputs. Our key insight is to delay making resource allocation decisions until after the function inputs are available. We introduce Shabari, a resource management framework for serverless systems that makes decisions as late as possible to right-size each invocation to meet functions' performance objectives (SLOs) and improve resource utilization. Shabari uses an online learning agent to right-size each function invocation based on the features of the function input and makes cold-start-aware scheduling decisions. For a range of serverless functions and inputs, Shabari reduces SLO violations by 11-73% while not wasting any vCPUs and reducing wasted memory by 64-94% in the median case, compared to state-of-the-art systems, including Aquatope, Parrotfish, and Cypress.
Sentiment analysis and emotion detection are important research topics in natural language processing (NLP) and benefit many downstream tasks. With the widespread application of LLMs, researchers have started exploring the application of LLMs based on instruction-tuning in the field of sentiment analysis. However, these models only focus on single aspects of affective classification tasks (e.g. sentimental polarity or categorical emotions), and overlook the regression tasks (e.g. sentiment strength or emotion intensity), which leads to poor performance in downstream tasks. The main reason is the lack of comprehensive affective instruction tuning datasets and evaluation benchmarks, which cover various affective classification and regression tasks. Moreover, although emotional information is useful for downstream tasks, existing downstream datasets lack high-quality and comprehensive affective annotations. In this paper, we propose EmoLLMs, the first series of open-sourced instruction-following LLMs for comprehensive affective analysis based on fine-tuning various LLMs with instruction data, the first multi-task affective analysis instruction dataset (AAID) with 234K data samples based on various classification and regression tasks to support LLM instruction tuning, and a comprehensive affective evaluation benchmark (AEB) with 14 tasks from various sources and domains to test the generalization ability of LLMs. We propose a series of EmoLLMs by fine-tuning LLMs with AAID to solve various affective instruction tasks. We compare our model with a variety of LLMs on AEB, where our models outperform all other open-sourced LLMs, and surpass ChatGPT and GPT-4 in most tasks, which shows that the series of EmoLLMs achieve the ChatGPT-level and GPT-4-level generalization capabilities on affective analysis tasks, and demonstrates our models can be used as affective annotation tools.
Beyond 5G and 6G networks are expected to support new and challenging use cases and applications that depend on a certain level of Quality of Service (QoS) to operate smoothly. Predicting the QoS in a timely manner is of high importance, especially for safety-critical applications as in the case of vehicular communications. Although until recent years the QoS prediction has been carried out by centralized Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, a number of privacy, computational, and operational concerns have emerged. Alternative solutions have been surfaced (e.g. Split Learning, Federated Learning), distributing AI tasks of reduced complexity across nodes, while preserving the privacy of the data. However, new challenges rise when it comes to scalable distributed learning approaches, taking into account the heterogeneous nature of future wireless networks. The current work proposes DISTINQT, a privacy-aware distributed learning framework for QoS prediction. Our framework supports multiple heterogeneous nodes, in terms of data types and model architectures, by sharing computations across them. This, enables the incorporation of diverse knowledge into a sole learning process that will enhance the robustness and generalization capabilities of the final QoS prediction model. DISTINQT also contributes to data privacy preservation by encoding any raw input data into a non-linear latent representation before any transmission. Evaluation results showcase that our framework achieves a statistically identical performance compared to its centralized version and an average performance improvement of up to 65% against six state-of-the-art centralized baseline solutions in the Tele-Operated Driving use case.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.