Log data have facilitated various tasks of software development and maintenance, such as testing, debugging and diagnosing. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, log parsing is typically required to transform log messages into structured data for automated log analysis. Given the abundance of log parsers that employ various techniques, evaluating these tools to comprehend their characteristics and performance becomes imperative. Loghub serves as a commonly used dataset for benchmarking log parsers, but it suffers from limited scale and representativeness, posing significant challenges for studies to comprehensively evaluate existing log parsers or develop new methods. This limitation is particularly pronounced when assessing these log parsers for production use. To address these limitations, we provide a new collection of annotated log datasets, denoted Loghub-2.0, which can better reflect the characteristics of log data in real-world software systems. Loghub-2.0 comprises 14 datasets with an average of 3.6 million log lines in each dataset. Based on Loghub-2.0, we conduct a thorough re-evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art log parsers in a more rigorous and practical setting. Particularly, we introduce a new evaluation metric to mitigate the sensitivity of existing metrics to imbalanced data distributions. We are also the first to investigate the granular performance of log parsers on logs that represent rare system events, offering in-depth details for software diagnosis. Accurately parsing such logs is essential, yet it remains a challenge. We believe this work could shed light on the evaluation and design of log parsers in practical settings, thereby facilitating their deployment in production systems.
Movable antenna (MA) technology, which can reconfigure wireless channels by flexibly moving antenna positions in a specified region, has great potential for improving communication performance. In this paper, we consider a new setup of MAs-enabled multicasting, where we adopt a simple setting in which a linear MA array-enabled source (${\rm{S}}$) transmits a common message to two single-antenna users ${\rm{U}}_1$ and ${\rm{U}}_2$. We aim to maximize the minimum rate among these two users, by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming and antenna positions at ${\rm{S}}$. Instead of utilizing the widely-used alternating optimization (AO) approach, we reveal, with rigorous proof, that the above two variables can be optimized separately: i) the optimal antenna positions can be firstly determined via the successive convex approximation technique, based on the rule of maximizing the correlation between ${\rm{S}}$-${\rm{U}}_1$ and ${\rm{S}}$-${\rm{U}}_2$ channels; ii) afterwards, the optimal closed-form transmit beamforming can be derived via simple arguments. Compared to AO, this new approach yields the same performance but reduces the computational complexities significantly. Moreover, it can provide insightful conclusions which are not possible with AO.
Improper parsing of attacker-controlled input is a leading source of software security vulnerabilities, especially when programmers transcribe informal format descriptions in RFCs into efficient parsing logic in low-level, memory unsafe languages. Several researchers have proposed formal specification languages for data formats from which efficient code can be extracted. However, distilling informal requirements into formal specifications is challenging and, despite their benefits, new, formal languages are hard for people to learn and use. In this work, we present 3DGen, a framework that makes use of AI agents to transform mixed informal input, including natural language documents (i.e., RFCs) and example inputs into format specifications in a language called 3D. To support humans in understanding and trusting the generated specifications, 3DGen uses symbolic methods to also synthesize test inputs that can be validated against an external oracle. Symbolic test generation also helps in distinguishing multiple plausible solutions. Through a process of repeated refinement, 3DGen produces a 3D specification that conforms to a test suite, and which yields safe, efficient, provably correct, parsing code in C. We have evaluated 3DGen on 20 Internet standard formats, demonstrating the potential for AI-agents to produce formally verified C code at a non-trivial scale. A key enabler is the use of a domain-specific language to limit AI outputs to a class for which automated, symbolic analysis is tractable.
Conversational recommender systems have emerged as a potent solution for efficiently eliciting user preferences. These systems interactively present queries associated with "key terms" to users and leverage user feedback to estimate user preferences more efficiently. Nonetheless, most existing algorithms adopt a centralized approach. In this paper, we introduce FedConPE, a phase elimination-based federated conversational bandit algorithm, where $M$ agents collaboratively solve a global contextual linear bandit problem with the help of a central server while ensuring secure data management. To effectively coordinate all the clients and aggregate their collected data, FedConPE uses an adaptive approach to construct key terms that minimize uncertainty across all dimensions in the feature space. Furthermore, compared with existing federated linear bandit algorithms, FedConPE offers improved computational and communication efficiency as well as enhanced privacy protections. Our theoretical analysis shows that FedConPE is minimax near-optimal in terms of cumulative regret. We also establish upper bounds for communication costs and conversation frequency. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that FedConPE outperforms existing conversational bandit algorithms while using fewer conversations.
In this study, we address one of the challenges of developing NER models for scholarly domains, namely the scarcity of suitable labeled data. We experiment with an approach using predictions from a fine-tuned LLM model to aid non-domain experts in annotating scientific entities within astronomy literature, with the goal of uncovering whether such a collaborative process can approximate domain expertise. Our results reveal moderate agreement between a domain expert and the LLM-assisted non-experts, as well as fair agreement between the domain expert and the LLM model's predictions. In an additional experiment, we compare the performance of finetuned and default LLMs on this task. We have also introduced a specialized scientific entity annotation scheme for astronomy, validated by a domain expert. Our approach adopts a scholarly research contribution-centric perspective, focusing exclusively on scientific entities relevant to the research theme. The resultant dataset, containing 5,000 annotated astronomy article titles, is made publicly available.
Compact robotic platforms with powerful compute and actuation capabilities are key enablers for practical, real-world deployments of multi-agent research. This article introduces a tightly integrated hardware, control, and simulation software stack on a fleet of holonomic ground robot platforms designed with this motivation. Our robots, a fleet of customised DJI Robomaster S1 vehicles, offer a balance between small robots that do not possess sufficient compute or actuation capabilities and larger robots that are unsuitable for indoor multi-robot tests. They run a modular ROS2-based optimal estimation and control stack for full onboard autonomy, contain ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication infrastructure, and can zero-shot run multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) policies trained in our vectorized multi-agent simulation framework. We present an in-depth review of other platforms currently available, showcase new experimental validation of our system's capabilities, and introduce case studies that highlight the versatility and reliabilty of our system as a testbed for a wide range of research demonstrations. Our system as well as supplementary material is available online: //proroklab.github.io/cambridge-robomaster
Agile methods are state of the art in software development. Companies worldwide apply agile to counter the dynamics of the markets. We know, that various factors like culture influence the successfully application of agile methods in practice and the sucess is differing from company to company. To counter these problems, we combine two causal models presented in literature: The Agile Practices Impact Model and the Model of Cultural Impact. In this paper, we want to better understand the two facets of factors in agile: Those influencing their application and those impacting the results when applying them. This papers core contribution is the Agile Influence and Imact Model, describing the factors influencing agile elements and the impact on specific characteristics in a systematic manner.
Deep learning have achieved promising results on a wide spectrum of AI applications. Larger datasets and models consistently yield better performance. However, we generally spend longer training time on more computation and communication. In this survey, we aim to provide a clear sketch about the optimizations for large-scale deep learning with regard to the model accuracy and model efficiency. We investigate algorithms that are most commonly used for optimizing, elaborate the debatable topic of generalization gap arises in large-batch training, and review the SOTA strategies in addressing the communication overhead and reducing the memory footprints.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Deep neural networks have been able to outperform humans in some cases like image recognition and image classification. However, with the emergence of various novel categories, the ability to continuously widen the learning capability of such networks from limited samples, still remains a challenge. Techniques like Meta-Learning and/or few-shot learning showed promising results, where they can learn or generalize to a novel category/task based on prior knowledge. In this paper, we perform a study of the existing few-shot meta-learning techniques in the computer vision domain based on their method and evaluation metrics. We provide a taxonomy for the techniques and categorize them as data-augmentation, embedding, optimization and semantics based learning for few-shot, one-shot and zero-shot settings. We then describe the seminal work done in each category and discuss their approach towards solving the predicament of learning from few samples. Lastly we provide a comparison of these techniques on the commonly used benchmark datasets: Omniglot, and MiniImagenet, along with a discussion towards the future direction of improving the performance of these techniques towards the final goal of outperforming humans.
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.