This paper studies MapReduce-based heterogeneous coded distributed computing (CDC) where, besides different computing capabilities at workers, input files to be accessed by computing jobs have nonuniform popularity. We propose a file placement strategy that can handle an arbitrary number of input files. Furthermore, we design a nested coded shuffling strategy that can efficiently manage the nonuniformity of file popularity to maximize the coded multicasting opportunity. We then formulate the joint optimization of the proposed file placement and nested shuffling design variables to optimize the proposed CDC scheme. To reduce the high computational complexity in solving the resulting mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem, we propose a simple two-file-group-based file placement approach to obtain an approximate solution. Numerical results show that the optimized CDC scheme outperforms other alternatives. Also, the proposed two-file-group-based approach achieves nearly the same performance as the conventional branch-and-cut method in solving the MILP problem but with substantially lower computational complexity that is scalable over the number of files and workers. For computing jobs with aggregate target functions that commonly appear in machine learning applications, we propose a heterogeneous compressed CDC (C-CDC) scheme to further improve the shuffling efficiency. The C-CDC scheme uses a local data aggregation technique to compress the data to be shuffled for the shuffling load reduction. We again optimize the proposed C-CDC scheme and explore the two-file-group-based low-complexity approach for an approximate solution. Numerical results show the proposed C-CDC scheme provides a considerable shuffling load reduction over the CDC scheme, and also, the two-file-group-based file placement approach maintains good performance.
Quantum programs are notoriously difficult to code and verify due to unintuitive quantum knowledge associated with quantum programming. Automated tools relieving the tedium and errors associated with low-level quantum details would hence be highly desirable. In this paper, we initiate the study of program synthesis for quantum unitary programs that recursively define a family of unitary circuits for different input sizes, which are widely used in existing quantum programming languages. Specifically, we present QSynth, the first quantum program synthesis framework, including a new inductive quantum programming language, its specification, a sound logic for reasoning, and an encoding of the reasoning procedure into SMT instances. By leveraging existing SMT solvers, QSynth successfully synthesizes ten quantum unitary programs including quantum adder circuits, quantum eigenvalue inversion circuits and Quantum Fourier Transformation, which can be readily transpiled to executable programs on major quantum platforms, e.g., Q#, IBM Qiskit, and AWS Braket.
A variety of computing platform like Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and multicore Central Processing Unit (CPU) in data centers are suitable for acceleration of data-intensive workloads. Especially, FPGA platforms in data centers are gaining popularity for high-performance computations due to their high speed, reconfigurable nature and cost effectiveness. Such heterogeneous, highly parallel computational architectures in data centers, combined with high-speed communication technologies like 5G, are becoming increasingly suitable for real-time applications. However, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, high computational capabilities, and energy efficiency remain challenging issues in FPGA based data centers. In this context an energy efficient scheduling solution is required to maximize the resource profitability of FPGA. This paper introduces a power-aware scheduling methodology aimed at accommodating periodic hardware tasks within the available FPGAs of a data center at their potentially maximum speed. This proposed methodology guarantees the execution of these tasks us ing the maximum number of parallel computation units possible to implement in the FPGAs, with minimum power consumption. The proposed scheduling methodology is implemented in a data center with multiple Alveo-50 Xilinx-AMD FPGAs and Vitis 2023 tool. The evidence from the implementation shows the proposed scheduling methodology is efficient compared to existing solutions.
Recent studies have adopted pre-trained language models, such as CodeT5 and CodeGPT, for automated program generation tasks like code generation, repair, and translation. Numerous language model-based approaches have been proposed and evaluated on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating promising performance. However, there is still uncertainty about the reliability of these models, particularly their realistic ability to consistently transform code sequences. This raises the question: are these techniques sufficiently trustworthy for automated program generation? Consequently, Further research is needed to understand model logic and assess reliability and explainability. To bridge these research gaps, we conduct a thorough empirical study of eight popular language models on five representative datasets to determine the capabilities and limitations of automated program generation approaches. We further employ advanced explainable AI approaches to highlight the tokens that significantly contribute to the code transformation. We discover that state-of-the-art approaches suffer from inappropriate performance evaluation stemming from severe data duplication, causing over-optimistic results. Our explainability analysis reveals that, in various experimental scenarios, language models can recognize code grammar and structural information, but they exhibit limited robustness to changes in input sequences. Overall, more rigorous evaluation approaches and benchmarks are critical to enhance the reliability and explainability of automated program generation moving forward. Our findings provide important guidelines for this goal.
Hausa is a major Chadic language, spoken by over 100 million people in Africa. However, from a computational linguistic perspective, it is considered a low-resource language, with limited resources to support Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Online platforms often facilitate social interactions that can lead to the use of offensive and threatening language, which can go undetected due to the lack of detection systems designed for Hausa. This study aimed to address this issue by (1) conducting two user studies (n=308) to investigate cyberbullying-related issues, (2) collecting and annotating the first set of offensive and threatening datasets to support relevant downstream tasks in Hausa, (3) developing a detection system to flag offensive and threatening content, and (4) evaluating the detection system and the efficacy of the Google-based translation engine in detecting offensive and threatening terms in Hausa. We found that offensive and threatening content is quite common, particularly when discussing religion and politics. Our detection system was able to detect more than 70% of offensive and threatening content, although many of these were mistranslated by Google's translation engine. We attribute this to the subtle relationship between offensive and threatening content and idiomatic expressions in the Hausa language. We recommend that diverse stakeholders participate in understanding local conventions and demographics in order to develop a more effective detection system. These insights are essential for implementing targeted moderation strategies to create a safe and inclusive online environment.
This position paper outlines a new approach to adapting 3D user interface (UI) layouts given the complex nature of end-user preferences. Current optimization techniques, which mainly rely on weighted sum methods, can be inflexible and result in unsatisfactory adaptations. We propose using multi-objective optimization and interactive preference elicitation to provide semi-automated, flexible, and effective adaptations of 3D UIs. Our approach is demonstrated using an example of single-element 3D layout adaptation with ergonomic objectives. Future work is needed to address questions around the presentation and selection of optimal solutions, the impact on cognitive load, and the integration of preference learning. We conclude that, to make adaptive 3D UIs truly effective, we must acknowledge the limitations of our optimization objectives and techniques and emphasize the importance of user control.
This study introduces a new long-form database question answering dataset designed to evaluate how Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with a SQL interpreter. The task necessitates LLMs to strategically generate multiple SQL queries to retrieve sufficient data from a database, to reason with the acquired context, and to synthesize them into a comprehensive analytical narrative. Our findings highlight that this task poses great challenges even for the state-of-the-art GPT-4 model. We propose and evaluate two interaction strategies, and provide a fine-grained analysis of the individual stages within the interaction. A key discovery is the identification of two primary bottlenecks hindering effective interaction: the capacity for planning and the ability to generate multiple SQL queries. To address the challenge of accurately assessing answer quality, we introduce a multi-agent evaluation framework that simulates the academic peer-review process, enhancing the precision and reliability of our evaluations. This framework allows for a more nuanced understanding of the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in complex retrieval and reasoning tasks.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.