The increasing computational and memory requirements of Deep Learning (DL) workloads has led to outstanding innovations in hardware architectures. An archetype of such architectures is the novel Versal AI Engine (AIE) by AMD/Xilinx. The AIE comprises multiple programmable processors optimized for vector-based algorithms. An AIE array consisting of 400 processor cores, operating at 1.25 GHz is able to deliver a peak throughput of 8 TFLOPs for 32-bit floating-point (fp32), and 128 TOPs for 8-bit integer (int8) precision. In this work, we propose MaxEVA: a novel framework to efficiently map Matrix Multiplication (MatMul) workloads on Versal AIE devices. Our framework maximizes the performance and energy efficiency of MatMul applications by efficiently exploiting features of the AIE architecture and resolving performance bottlenecks from multiple angles. When demonstrating on the VC1902 device of the VCK190 board, MaxEVA accomplishes up to 5.44 TFLOPs and 77.01 TOPs throughput for fp32 and int8 precisions, respectively. In terms of energy efficiency, MaxEVA attains up to 124.16 GFLOPs/W for fp32, and 1.16 TOPs/W for int8. Our proposed method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art approach by exhibiting up to 2.19x throughput gain and 20.4% higher energy efficiency. The MaxEVA framework provides notable insights to fill the knowledge gap in effectively designing MatMul-based DL workloads on the new Versal AIE devices.
We present DIALIGHT, a toolkit for developing and evaluating multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue (ToD) systems which facilitates systematic evaluations and comparisons between ToD systems using fine-tuning of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and those utilising the zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). In addition to automatic evaluation, this toolkit features (i) a secure, user-friendly web interface for fine-grained human evaluation at both local utterance level and global dialogue level, and (ii) a microservice-based backend, improving efficiency and scalability. Our evaluations reveal that while PLM fine-tuning leads to higher accuracy and coherence, LLM-based systems excel in producing diverse and likeable responses. However, we also identify significant challenges of LLMs in adherence to task-specific instructions and generating outputs in multiple languages, highlighting areas for future research. We hope this open-sourced toolkit will serve as a valuable resource for researchers aiming to develop and properly evaluate multilingual ToD systems and will lower, currently still high, entry barriers in the field.
In this paper, the adoption patterns of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools within software engineering are investigated. Influencing factors at the individual, technological, and societal levels are analyzed using a mixed-methods approach for an extensive comprehension of AI adoption. An initial structured interview was conducted with 100 software engineers, employing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Diffusion of Innovations theory (DOI), and the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) as guiding theories. A theoretical model named the Human-AI Collaboration and Adaptation Framework (HACAF) was deduced using the Gioia Methodology, characterizing AI adoption in software engineering. This model's validity was subsequently tested through Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), using data collected from 183 software professionals. The results indicate that the adoption of AI tools in these early integration stages is primarily driven by their compatibility with existing development workflows. This finding counters the traditional theories of technology acceptance. Contrary to expectations, the influence of perceived usefulness, social aspects, and personal innovativeness on adoption appeared to be less significant. This paper yields significant insights for the design of future AI tools and supplies a structure for devising effective strategies for organizational implementation.
In recent years, decentralized applications (dApps) built on blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and coded in languages such as Solidity, have gained attention for their potential to disrupt traditional centralized systems. Despite their rapid adoption, limited research has been conducted to understand the underlying code structure of these applications. In particular, each dApp is composed of multiple smart contracts, each containing a number of functions that can be called to trigger a specific event, e.g., a token transfer. In this paper, we reconstruct and analyse the network of contracts and functions calls within the dApp, which is helpful to unveil vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious attackers. We show how decentralization is architecturally implemented, identifying common development patterns and anomalies that could influence the system's robustness and efficiency. We find a consistent network structure characterized by modular, self-sufficient contracts and a complex web of function interactions, indicating common coding practices across the blockchain community. Critically, a small number of key functions within each dApp play a pivotal role in maintaining network connectivity, making them potential targets for cyber attacks and highlighting the need for robust security measures.
Presenting dynamic scenes without incurring motion artifacts visible to observers requires sustained effort from the display industry. A tool that predicts motion artifacts and simulates artifact elimination through optimizing the display configuration is highly desired to guide the design and manufacture of modern displays. Despite the popular demands, there is no such tool available in the market. In this study, we deliver an interactive toolkit, Binocular Perceived Motion Artifact Predictor (BiPMAP), as an executable file with GPU acceleration. BiPMAP accounts for an extensive collection of user-defined parameters and directly visualizes a variety of motion artifacts by presenting the perceived continuous and sampled moving stimuli side-by-side. For accurate artifact predictions, BiPMAP utilizes a novel model of the human contrast sensitivity function to effectively imitate the frequency modulation of the human visual system. In addition, BiPMAP is capable of deriving various in-plane motion artifacts for 2D displays and depth distortion in 3D stereoscopic displays.
Modern consumer electronic devices have started executing deep learning-based intelligence services on devices, not cloud servers, to keep personal data on devices and to reduce network and cloud costs. We find such a trend as the opportunity to personalize intelligence services by updating neural networks with user data without exposing the data out of devices: on-device training. However, the limited resources of devices incurs significant difficulties. We propose a light-weight on-device training framework, NNTrainer, which provides highly memory-efficient neural network training techniques and proactive swapping based on fine-grained execution order analysis for neural networks. Moreover, its optimizations do not sacrifice accuracy and are transparent to training algorithms; thus, prior algorithmic studies may be implemented on top of NNTrainer. The evaluations show that NNTrainer can reduce memory consumption down to 1/20 (saving 95%!) and effectively personalizes intelligence services on devices. NNTrainer is cross-platform and practical open-source software, which is being deployed to millions of mobile devices.
This paper explores the frontiers of large language models (LLMs) in psychology applications. Psychology has undergone several theoretical changes, and the current use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, particularly LLMs, promises to open up new research directions. We provide a detailed exploration of how LLMs like ChatGPT are transforming psychological research. It discusses the impact of LLMs across various branches of psychology, including cognitive and behavioral, clinical and counseling, educational and developmental, and social and cultural psychology, highlighting their potential to simulate aspects of human cognition and behavior. The paper delves into the capabilities of these models to emulate human-like text generation, offering innovative tools for literature review, hypothesis generation, experimental design, experimental subjects, data analysis, academic writing, and peer review in psychology. While LLMs are essential in advancing research methodologies in psychology, the paper also cautions about their technical and ethical challenges. There are issues like data privacy, the ethical implications of using LLMs in psychological research, and the need for a deeper understanding of these models' limitations. Researchers should responsibly use LLMs in psychological studies, adhering to ethical standards and considering the potential consequences of deploying these technologies in sensitive areas. Overall, the article provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of LLMs in psychology, exploring potential benefits and challenges. It serves as a call to action for researchers to leverage LLLs' advantages responsibly while addressing associated risks.
Traffic from distributed training of machine learning (ML) models makes up a large and growing fraction of the traffic mix in enterprise data centers. While work on distributed ML abounds, the network traffic generated by distributed ML has received little attention. Using measurements on a testbed network, we investigate the traffic characteristics generated by the training of the ResNet-50 neural network with an emphasis on studying its short-term burstiness. For the latter we propose metrics that quantify traffic burstiness at different time scales. Our analysis reveals that distributed ML traffic exhibits a very high degree of burstiness on short time scales, exceeding a 60:1 peak-to-mean ratio on time intervals as long as 5~ms. We observe that training software orchestrates transmissions in such a way that burst transmissions from different sources within the same application do not result in congestion and packet losses. An extrapolation of the measurement data to multiple applications underscores the challenges of distributed ML traffic for congestion and flow control algorithms.
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.
The Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) are regarded as the foundation for various downstream tasks with different data modalities. A pretrained foundation model, such as BERT, GPT-3, MAE, DALLE-E, and ChatGPT, is trained on large-scale data which provides a reasonable parameter initialization for a wide range of downstream applications. The idea of pretraining behind PFMs plays an important role in the application of large models. Different from previous methods that apply convolution and recurrent modules for feature extractions, the generative pre-training (GPT) method applies Transformer as the feature extractor and is trained on large datasets with an autoregressive paradigm. Similarly, the BERT apples transformers to train on large datasets as a contextual language model. Recently, the ChatGPT shows promising success on large language models, which applies an autoregressive language model with zero shot or few show prompting. With the extraordinary success of PFMs, AI has made waves in a variety of fields over the past few years. Considerable methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics have been proposed in the literature, the need is raising for an updated survey. This study provides a comprehensive review of recent research advancements, current and future challenges, and opportunities for PFMs in text, image, graph, as well as other data modalities. We first review the basic components and existing pretraining in natural language processing, computer vision, and graph learning. We then discuss other advanced PFMs for other data modalities and unified PFMs considering the data quality and quantity. Besides, we discuss relevant research about the fundamentals of the PFM, including model efficiency and compression, security, and privacy. Finally, we lay out key implications, future research directions, challenges, and open problems.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.