The emergence of intelligent applications has fostered the development of a task-oriented communication paradigm, where a comprehensive, universal, and practical metric is crucial for unleashing the potential of this paradigm. To this end, we introduce an innovative metric, the Task-oriented Age of Information (TAoI), to measure whether the content of information is relevant to the system task, thereby assisting the system in efficiently completing designated tasks. Also, we study the TAoI in a remote monitoring system, whose task is to identify target images and transmit them for subsequent analysis. We formulate the dynamic transmission problem as a Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) and transform it into an equivalent Markov Decision Process (MDP) to minimize TAoI and find the optimal transmission policy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the optimal strategy is a threshold-based policy regarding TAoI and propose a relative value iteration algorithm based on the threshold structure to obtain the optimal transmission policy. Finally, simulation results show the superior performance of the optimal transmission policy compared to the baseline policies.
The capacity of LLMs to carry out automated qualitative analysis has been questioned by corpus linguists, and it has been argued that corpus-based discourse analysis incorporating LLMs is hindered by issues of unsatisfying performance, hallucination, and irreproducibility. Our proposed method, TACOMORE, aims to address these concerns by serving as an effective prompting framework in this domain. The framework consists of four principles, i.e., Task, Context, Model and Reproducibility, and specifies five fundamental elements of a good prompt, i.e., Role Description, Task Definition, Task Procedures, Contextual Information and Output Format. We conduct experiments on three LLMs, i.e., GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro and Gemini-1.5.Flash, and find that TACOMORE helps improve LLM performance in three representative discourse analysis tasks, i.e., the analysis of keywords, collocates and concordances, based on an open corpus of COVID-19 research articles. Our findings show the efficacy of the proposed prompting framework TACOMORE in corpus-based discourse analysis in terms of Accuracy, Ethicality, Reasoning, and Reproducibility, and provide novel insights into the application and evaluation of LLMs in automated qualitative studies.
Binary code analysis and comprehension is critical to applications in reverse engineering and computer security tasks where source code is not available. Unfortunately, unlike source code, binary code lacks semantics and is more difficult for human engineers to understand and analyze. In this paper, we present ContraBin, a contrastive learning technique that integrates source code and comment information along with binaries to create an embedding capable of aiding binary analysis and comprehension tasks. Specifically, we present three components in ContraBin: (1) a primary contrastive learning method for initial pre-training, (2) a simplex interpolation method to integrate source code, comments, and binary code, and (3) an intermediate representation learning algorithm to train a binary code embedding. We further analyze the impact of human-written and synthetic comments on binary code comprehension tasks, revealing a significant performance disparity. While synthetic comments provide substantial benefits, human-written comments are found to introduce noise, even resulting in performance drops compared to using no comments. These findings reshape the narrative around the role of comment types in binary code analysis. We evaluate the effectiveness of ContraBin through four indicative downstream tasks related to binary code: algorithmic functionality classification, function name recovery, code summarization, and reverse engineering. The results show that ContraBin considerably improves performance on all four tasks, measured by accuracy, mean of average precision, and BLEU scores as appropriate. ContraBin is the first language representation model to incorporate source code, binary code, and comments into contrastive code representation learning and is intended to contribute to the field of binary code analysis. The dataset used in this study is available for further research.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, robotics, and Internet of Things, multi-robot systems are progressively acquiring human-like environmental perception and understanding capabilities, empowering them to complete complex tasks through autonomous decision-making and interaction. However, the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) faces significant challenges in terms of spectrum resources, sensing accuracy, communication latency, and energy supply. To address these issues, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided IoRT network is proposed to enhance the overall performance of robotic communication, sensing, computation, and energy harvesting. In the case studies, by jointly optimizing parameters such as transceiver beamforming, robot trajectories, and RIS coefficients, solutions based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and multi-objective optimization are proposed to solve problems such as beamforming design, path planning, target sensing, and data aggregation. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed solutions in improve communication quality, sensing accuracy, computation error, and energy efficiency of RIS-aided IoRT networks.
Recent improvements in the quality of the generations by large language models have spurred research into identifying machine-generated text. Such work often presents high-performing detectors. However, humans and machines can produce text in different styles and domains, yet the performance impact of such on machine generated text detection systems remains unclear. In this paper, we audit the classification performance for detecting machine-generated text by evaluating on texts with varying writing styles. We find that classifiers are highly sensitive to stylistic changes and differences in text complexity, and in some cases degrade entirely to random classifiers. We further find that detection systems are particularly susceptible to misclassify easy-to-read texts while they have high performance for complex texts, leading to concerns about the reliability of detection systems. We recommend that future work attends to stylistic factors and reading difficulty levels of human-written and machine-generated text.
The expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has driven substantial investment in computational infrastructure, especially by cloud computing providers. Quantifying the energy footprint of this infrastructure requires models parameterized by the power demand of AI hardware during training. We empirically measured the instantaneous power draw of an 8-GPU NVIDIA H100 HGX node during the training of open-source image classifier (ResNet) and large-language models (Llama2-13b). The maximum observed power draw was approximately 8.4 kW, 18% lower than the manufacturer-rated 10.2 kW, even with GPUs near full utilization. Holding model architecture constant, increasing batch size from 512 to 4096 images for ResNet reduced total training energy consumption by a factor of 4. These findings can inform capacity planning for data center operators and energy use estimates by researchers. Future work will investigate the impact of cooling technology and carbon-aware scheduling on AI workload energy consumption.
Articulated object manipulation is a challenging task, requiring constrained motion and adaptive control to handle the unknown dynamics of the manipulated objects. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely employed to tackle various scenarios and types of articulated objects, the complexity of these tasks, stemming from multiple intertwined objectives makes learning a control policy in the full task space highly difficult. To address this issue, we propose a Subspace-wise hybrid RL (SwRL) framework that learns policies for each divided task space, or subspace, based on independent objectives. This approach enables adaptive force modulation to accommodate the unknown dynamics of objects. Additionally, it effectively leverages the previously underlooked redundant subspace, thereby maximizing the robot's dexterity. Our method enhances both learning efficiency and task execution performance, as validated through simulations and real-world experiments. Supplementary video is available at //youtu.be/PkNxv0P8Atk
While formal models of concurrency tend to focus on synchronous communication, asynchronous communication is relevant in practice. In this paper, we will discuss asynchronous communication in the context of session-based concurrency, the model of computation in which session types specify the structure of the two-party protocols implemented by the channels of a communicating process. We overview recent work on addressing the challenge of ensuring the deadlock-freedom property for message-passing processes that communicate asynchronously in cyclic process networks governed by session types. We offer a gradual presentation of three typed process frameworks and outline how they may be used to guarantee deadlock freedom for a concurrent functional language with sessions.
Recently, graph neural networks have been gaining a lot of attention to simulate dynamical systems due to their inductive nature leading to zero-shot generalizability. Similarly, physics-informed inductive biases in deep-learning frameworks have been shown to give superior performance in learning the dynamics of physical systems. There is a growing volume of literature that attempts to combine these two approaches. Here, we evaluate the performance of thirteen different graph neural networks, namely, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian graph neural networks, graph neural ODE, and their variants with explicit constraints and different architectures. We briefly explain the theoretical formulation highlighting the similarities and differences in the inductive biases and graph architecture of these systems. We evaluate these models on spring, pendulum, gravitational, and 3D deformable solid systems to compare the performance in terms of rollout error, conserved quantities such as energy and momentum, and generalizability to unseen system sizes. Our study demonstrates that GNNs with additional inductive biases, such as explicit constraints and decoupling of kinetic and potential energies, exhibit significantly enhanced performance. Further, all the physics-informed GNNs exhibit zero-shot generalizability to system sizes an order of magnitude larger than the training system, thus providing a promising route to simulate large-scale realistic systems.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
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.