Cloud service providers provide over 50,000 distinct and dynamically changing set of cloud server options. To help roboticists make cost-effective decisions, we present FogROS2-Config, an open toolkit that takes ROS2 nodes as input and automatically runs relevant benchmarks to quickly return a menu of cloud compute services that tradeoff latency and cost. Because it is infeasible to try every hardware configuration, FogROS2-Config quickly samples tests a small set of edge case servers. We evaluate FogROS2-Config on three robotics application tasks: visual SLAM, grasp planning. and motion planning. FogROS2-Config can reduce the cost by up to 20x. By comparing with a Pareto frontier for cost and latency by running the application task on feasible server configurations, we evaluate cost and latency models and confirm that FogROS2-Config selects efficient hardware configurations to balance cost and latency.
For web agents to be practically useful, they must adapt to the continuously evolving web environment characterized by frequent updates to user interfaces and content. However, most existing benchmarks only capture the static aspects of the web. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebCanvas, an innovative online evaluation framework for web agents that effectively addresses the dynamic nature of web interactions. WebCanvas contains three main components to facilitate realistic assessments: (1) A novel evaluation metric which reliably capture critical intermediate actions or states necessary for task completions while disregarding noise caused by insignificant events or changed web-elements. (2) A benchmark dataset called Mind2Web-Live, a refined version of original Mind2Web static dataset containing 542 tasks with 2439 intermediate evaluation states; (3) Lightweight and generalizable annotation tools and testing pipelines that enables the community to collect and maintain the high-quality, up-to-date dataset. Building on WebCanvas, we open-source an agent framework with extensible modules for reasoning, providing a foundation for the community to conduct online inference and evaluations. Our best-performing agent achieves a task success rate of 23.1% and a task completion rate of 48.8% on the Mind2Web-Live test set. Additionally, we analyze the performance discrepancies across various websites, domains, and experimental environments. We encourage the community to contribute further insights on online agent evaluation, thereby advancing this field of research.
Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) finds widespread applications in security surveillance, traffic monitoring, industrial monitoring, and healthcare. Despite extensive research efforts, there remains a lack of concise reviews that provide insightful guidance for researchers. Such reviews would serve as quick references to grasp current challenges, research trends, and future directions. In this paper, we present such a review, examining models and datasets from various perspectives. We emphasize the critical relationship between model and dataset, where the quality and diversity of datasets profoundly influence model performance, and dataset development adapts to the evolving needs of emerging approaches. Our review identifies practical issues, including the absence of comprehensive datasets with diverse scenarios. To address this, we introduce a new dataset, Multi-Scenario Anomaly Detection (MSAD), comprising 14 distinct scenarios captured from various camera views. Our dataset has diverse motion patterns and challenging variations, such as different lighting and weather conditions, providing a robust foundation for training superior models. We conduct an in-depth analysis of recent representative models using MSAD and highlight its potential in addressing the challenges of detecting anomalies across diverse and evolving surveillance scenarios. Our dataset is available here.
Existing checkpointing approaches seem ill-suited for distributed training even though hardware limitations make model parallelism, i.e., sharding model state across multiple accelerators, a requirement for model scaling. Consolidating distributed model state into a single checkpoint unacceptably slows down training, and is impractical at extreme scales. Distributed checkpoints, in contrast, are tightly coupled to the model parallelism and hardware configurations of the training run, and thus unusable on different configurations. To address this problem, we propose Universal Checkpointing, a technique that enables efficient checkpoint creation while providing the flexibility of resuming on arbitrary parallelism strategy and hardware configurations. Universal Checkpointing unlocks unprecedented capabilities for large-scale training such as improved resilience to hardware failures through continued training on remaining healthy hardware, and reduced training time through opportunistic exploitation of elastic capacity. The key insight of Universal Checkpointing is the selection of the optimal representation in each phase of the checkpointing life cycle: distributed representation for saving, and consolidated representation for loading. This is achieved using two key mechanisms. First, the universal checkpoint format, which consists of a consolidated representation of each model parameter and metadata for mapping parameter fragments into training ranks of arbitrary model-parallelism configuration. Second, the universal checkpoint language, a simple but powerful specification language for converting distributed checkpoints into the universal checkpoint format. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of Universal Checkpointing on state-of-the-art model architectures and a wide range of parallelism techniques.
The advancement of function-calling agent models requires diverse, reliable, and high-quality datasets. This paper presents APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to synthesize verifiable high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. We leverage APIGen and collect 3,673 executable APIs across 21 different categories to generate diverse function-calling datasets in a scalable and structured manner. Each data in our dataset is verified through three hierarchical stages: format checking, actual function executions, and semantic verification, ensuring its reliability and correctness. We demonstrate that models trained with our curated datasets, even with only 7B parameters, can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark, outperforming multiple GPT-4 models. Moreover, our 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. We release a dataset containing 60,000 high-quality entries, aiming to advance the field of function-calling agent domains. The dataset is available on Huggingface: //huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/xlam-function-calling-60k and the project homepage: //apigen-pipeline.github.io/
Federated learning offers a compelling solution to the challenges of networking and data privacy within aerial and space networks by utilizing vast private edge data and computing capabilities accessible through drones, balloons, and satellites. While current research has focused on optimizing the learning process, computing efficiency, and minimizing communication overhead, the issue of heterogeneity and class imbalance remains a significant barrier to rapid model convergence. In our study, we explore the influence of heterogeneity on class imbalance, which diminishes performance in ASN-based federated learning. We illustrate the correlation between heterogeneity and class imbalance within grouped data and show how constraints such as battery life exacerbate the class imbalance challenge. Our findings indicate that ASN-based FL faces heightened class imbalance issues even with similar levels of heterogeneity compared to other scenarios. Finally, we analyze the impact of varying degrees of heterogeneity on FL training and evaluate the efficacy of current state-of-the-art algorithms under these conditions. Our results reveal that the heterogeneity challenge is more pronounced in ASN-based federated learning and that prevailing algorithms often fail to effectively address high levels of heterogeneity.
Computing systems have been evolving to be more pervasive, heterogeneous, and dynamic. An increasing number of emerging domains now rely on diverse edge to cloud continuum where the execution of applications often spans various tiers of systems with significantly heterogeneous computational capabilities. Resources in each tier are often handled in isolation due to scalability and privacy concerns. However, better overall resource utilization could be achieved if different tiers of systems had the means to communicate their computational capabilities. In this paper, we propose H-EYE, a universal approach to holistically capture diverse computational characteristics of edge-cloud systems with arbitrary topologies and to manage the assignment of tasks to the computational resources with the whole continuum in the scope. Our proposed work introduces two significant innovations: (1) We present a multi-layer, graph-based hardware (HW) representation and a modular performance modeling interface that could capture interactions and inference between different computing and communication resources in the system at desired level of detail. (2) We introduce a novel orchestrator mechanism that leverages the graph-based HW representation to hierarchically locate target devices that a given set of tasks could be mapped to. Orchestrator provides isolation for various device groups and allows hierarchical abstraction to scalably find mappings that satisfy system deadlines. The orchestrator internally relies on a novel traverser that takes shared resource slowdown into account. We demonstrate the utility and flexibility of H-EYE on edge-server systems that are deployed on the field in two different disciplines, improving up to 47% latency over baselines with less than 2% scheduling overhead
Integrating language models into robotic exploration frameworks improves performance in unmapped environments by providing the ability to reason over semantic groundings, contextual cues, and temporal states. The proposed method employs large language models (GPT-3.5 and Claude Haiku) to reason over these cues and express that reasoning in terms of natural language, which can be used to inform future states. We are motivated by the context of search-and-rescue applications where efficient exploration is critical. We find that by leveraging natural language, semantics, and tracking temporal states, the proposed method greatly reduces exploration path distance and further exposes the need for environment-dependent heuristics. Moreover, the method is highly robust to a variety of environments and noisy vision detections, as shown with a 100% success rate in a series of comprehensive experiments across three different environments conducted in a custom simulation pipeline operating in Unreal Engine.
The customization of services in Fifth-generation (5G) and Beyond 5G (B5G) networks relies heavily on network slicing, which creates multiple virtual networks on a shared physical infrastructure, tailored to meet specific requirements of distinct applications, using Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). It is imperative to ensure that network services meet the performance and reliability requirements of various applications and users, thus, service assurance is one of the critical components in network slicing. One of the key functionalities of network slicing is the ability to scale Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) in response to changing resource demand and to meet Customer Service Level agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we introduce a proactive closed-loop algorithm for end-to-end network orchestration, designed to provide service assurance in 5G and B5G networks. We focus on dynamically scaling resources to meet key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to each network slice and operate in parallel across multiple slices, making it scalable and capable of managing completely automatically real-time service assurance. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively fulfills service assurance requirements for different network slice types, thereby minimizing network resource utilization and reducing the over-provisioning of spare resources.
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.
Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs into five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey helps to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.