This paper investigates full-duplex (FD) multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system design with coarse quantization. We first analyze the impact of self-interference (SI) on quantization in FD single-input single-output systems. The analysis elucidates that the minimum required number of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) bits is logarithmically proportional to the ratio of total received power to the received power of desired signals. Motivated by this, we design a FD MIMO beamforming method that effectively manages the SI. Dividing a spectral efficiency maximization beamforming problem into two sub-problems for alternating optimization, we address the first by optimizing the precoder: obtaining a generalized eigenvalue problem from the first-order optimality condition, where the principal eigenvector is the optimal stationary solution, and adopting a power iteration method to identify this eigenvector. Subsequently, a quantization-aware minimum mean square error combiner is computed for the derived precoder. Through numerical studies, we observe that the proposed beamformer reduces the minimum required number of ADC bits for achieving higher spectral efficiency than that of half-duplex (HD) systems, compared to FD benchmarks. The overall analysis shows that, unlike with quantized HD systems, more than 6 bits are required for the ADC to fully realize the potential of the quantized FD system.
This paper introduces EcoPull, a sustainable Internet of Things (IoT) framework empowered by tiny machine learning (TinyML) models for fetching images from wireless visual sensor networks. Two types of learnable TinyML models are installed in the IoT devices: i) a behavior model and ii) an image compressor model. The first filters out irrelevant images for the current task, reducing unnecessary transmission and resource competition among the devices. The second allows IoT devices to communicate with the receiver via latent representations of images, reducing communication bandwidth usage. However, integrating learnable modules into IoT devices comes at the cost of increased energy consumption due to inference. The numerical results show that the proposed framework can save > 70% energy compared to the baseline while maintaining the quality of the retrieved images at the ES.
This paper investigates the effectiveness of self-supervised pre-trained transformers compared to supervised pre-trained transformers and conventional neural networks (ConvNets) for detecting various types of deepfakes. We focus on their potential for improved generalization, particularly when training data is limited. Despite the notable success of large vision-language models utilizing transformer architectures in various tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot learning, the deepfake detection community has still shown some reluctance to adopt pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs), especially large ones, as feature extractors. One concern is their perceived excessive capacity, which often demands extensive data, and the resulting suboptimal generalization when training or fine-tuning data is small or less diverse. This contrasts poorly with ConvNets, which have already established themselves as robust feature extractors. Additionally, training and optimizing transformers from scratch requires significant computational resources, making this accessible primarily to large companies and hindering broader investigation within the academic community. Recent advancements in using self-supervised learning (SSL) in transformers, such as DINO and its derivatives, have showcased significant adaptability across diverse vision tasks and possess explicit semantic segmentation capabilities. By leveraging DINO for deepfake detection with modest training data and implementing partial fine-tuning, we observe comparable adaptability to the task and the natural explainability of the detection result via the attention mechanism. Moreover, partial fine-tuning of transformers for deepfake detection offers a more resource-efficient alternative, requiring significantly fewer computational resources.
This paper introduces uRAG--a framework with a unified retrieval engine that serves multiple downstream retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Each RAG system consumes the retrieval results for a unique purpose, such as open-domain question answering, fact verification, entity linking, and relation extraction. We introduce a generic training guideline that standardizes the communication between the search engine and the downstream RAG systems that engage in optimizing the retrieval model. This lays the groundwork for us to build a large-scale experimentation ecosystem consisting of 18 RAG systems that engage in training and 18 unknown RAG systems that use the uRAG as the new users of the search engine. Using this experimentation ecosystem, we answer a number of fundamental research questions that improve our understanding of promises and challenges in developing search engines for machines.
This paper introduces a method of identifying a maximal set of safe strategies from data for stochastic systems with unknown dynamics using barrier certificates. The first step is learning the dynamics of the system via Gaussian process (GP) regression and obtaining probabilistic errors for this estimate. Then, we develop an algorithm for constructing piecewise stochastic barrier functions to find a maximal permissible strategy set using the learned GP model, which is based on sequentially pruning the worst controls until a maximal set is identified. The permissible strategies are guaranteed to maintain probabilistic safety for the true system. This is especially important for learning-enabled systems, because a rich strategy space enables additional data collection and complex behaviors while remaining safe. Case studies on linear and nonlinear systems demonstrate that increasing the size of the dataset for learning the system grows the permissible strategy set.
In recent advances in automatic text recognition (ATR), deep neural networks have demonstrated the ability to implicitly capture language statistics, potentially reducing the need for traditional language models. This study directly addresses whether explicit language models, specifically n-gram models, still contribute to the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures in the field of handwriting recognition. We evaluate two prominent neural network architectures, PyLaia and DAN, with and without the integration of explicit n-gram language models. Our experiments on three datasets - IAM, RIMES, and NorHand v2 - at both line and page level, investigate optimal parameters for n-gram models, including their order, weight, smoothing methods and tokenization level. The results show that incorporating character or subword n-gram models significantly improves the performance of ATR models on all datasets, challenging the notion that deep learning models alone are sufficient for optimal performance. In particular, the combination of DAN with a character language model outperforms current benchmarks, confirming the value of hybrid approaches in modern document analysis systems.
Generative large-scale language models create the fifth paradigm of scientific research, organically combine data science and computational intelligence, transform the research paradigm of natural language processing and multimodal information processing, promote the new trend of AI-enabled social science research, and provide new ideas for digital humanities research and application. This article profoundly explores the application of large-scale language models in digital humanities research, revealing their significant potential in ancient book protection, intelligent processing, and academic innovation. The article first outlines the importance of ancient book resources and the necessity of digital preservation, followed by a detailed introduction to developing large-scale language models, such as ChatGPT, and their applications in document management, content understanding, and cross-cultural research. Through specific cases, the article demonstrates how AI can assist in the organization, classification, and content generation of ancient books. Then, it explores the prospects of AI applications in artistic innovation and cultural heritage preservation. Finally, the article explores the challenges and opportunities in the interaction of technology, information, and society in the digital humanities triggered by AI technologies.
With the extremely rapid advances in remote sensing (RS) technology, a great quantity of Earth observation (EO) data featuring considerable and complicated heterogeneity is readily available nowadays, which renders researchers an opportunity to tackle current geoscience applications in a fresh way. With the joint utilization of EO data, much research on multimodal RS data fusion has made tremendous progress in recent years, yet these developed traditional algorithms inevitably meet the performance bottleneck due to the lack of the ability to comprehensively analyse and interpret these strongly heterogeneous data. Hence, this non-negligible limitation further arouses an intense demand for an alternative tool with powerful processing competence. Deep learning (DL), as a cutting-edge technology, has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs in numerous computer vision tasks owing to its impressive ability in data representation and reconstruction. Naturally, it has been successfully applied to the field of multimodal RS data fusion, yielding great improvement compared with traditional methods. This survey aims to present a systematic overview in DL-based multimodal RS data fusion. More specifically, some essential knowledge about this topic is first given. Subsequently, a literature survey is conducted to analyse the trends of this field. Some prevalent sub-fields in the multimodal RS data fusion are then reviewed in terms of the to-be-fused data modalities, i.e., spatiospectral, spatiotemporal, light detection and ranging-optical, synthetic aperture radar-optical, and RS-Geospatial Big Data fusion. Furthermore, We collect and summarize some valuable resources for the sake of the development in multimodal RS data fusion. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential future directions are highlighted.
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the local geometry and update iteratively. Even though solving non-convex functions is NP-hard in the worst case, the optimization quality in practice is often not an issue -- optimizers are largely believed to find approximate global minima. Researchers hypothesize a unified explanation for this intriguing phenomenon: most of the local minima of the practically-used objectives are approximately global minima. We rigorously formalize it for concrete instances of machine learning problems.
The difficulty of deploying various deep learning (DL) models on diverse DL hardwares has boosted the research and development of DL compilers in the community. Several DL compilers have been proposed from both industry and academia such as Tensorflow XLA and TVM. Similarly, the DL compilers take the DL models described in different DL frameworks as input, and then generate optimized codes for diverse DL hardwares as output. However, none of the existing survey has analyzed the unique design of the DL compilers comprehensively. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive survey of existing DL compilers by dissecting the commonly adopted design in details, with emphasis on the DL oriented multi-level IRs, and frontend/backend optimizations. Specifically, we provide a comprehensive comparison among existing DL compilers from various aspects. In addition, we present detailed analysis of the multi-level IR design and compiler optimization techniques. Finally, several insights are highlighted as the potential research directions of DL compiler. This is the first survey paper focusing on the unique design of DL compiler, which we hope can pave the road for future research towards the DL compiler.
Compared with cheap addition operation, multiplication operation is of much higher computation complexity. The widely-used convolutions in deep neural networks are exactly cross-correlation to measure the similarity between input feature and convolution filters, which involves massive multiplications between float values. In this paper, we present adder networks (AdderNets) to trade these massive multiplications in deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), for much cheaper additions to reduce computation costs. In AdderNets, we take the $\ell_1$-norm distance between filters and input feature as the output response. The influence of this new similarity measure on the optimization of neural network have been thoroughly analyzed. To achieve a better performance, we develop a special back-propagation approach for AdderNets by investigating the full-precision gradient. We then propose an adaptive learning rate strategy to enhance the training procedure of AdderNets according to the magnitude of each neuron's gradient. As a result, the proposed AdderNets can achieve 74.9% Top-1 accuracy 91.7% Top-5 accuracy using ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset without any multiplication in convolution layer.