ADMN: A Layer-Wise Adaptive Multimodal Network for Dynamic Input Noise and Compute Resources

Multimodal deep learning systems are deployed in dynamic scenarios due to the robustness afforded by multiple sensing modalities. Nevertheless, they struggle with varying compute resource availability (due to multi-tenancy, device heterogeneity, etc.) and fluctuating quality of inputs (from sensor feed corruption, environmental noise, etc.). Current multimodal systems employ static resource provisioning and cannot easily adapt when compute resources change over time. Additionally, their reliance on processing sensor data with fixed feature extractors is ill-equipped to handle variations in modality quality. Consequently, uninformative modalities, such as those with high noise, needlessly consume resources better allocated towards other modalities. We propose ADMN, a layer-wise Adaptive Depth Multimodal Network capable of tackling both challenges - it adjusts the total number of active layers across all modalities to meet compute resource constraints, and continually reallocates layers across input modalities according to their modality quality. Our evaluations showcase ADMN can match the accuracy of state-of-the-art networks while reducing up to 75% of their floating-point operations.

GWRF: A Generalizable Wireless Radiance Field for Wireless Signal Propagation Modeling

We present Generalizable Wireless Radiance Fields (GWRF), a framework for modeling wireless signal propagation at arbitrary 3D transmitter and receiver positions. Unlike previous methods that adapt vanilla Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) from the optical to the wireless signal domain, requiring extensive per-scene training, GWRF generalizes effectively across scenes. First, a geometry-aware Transformer encoder-based wireless scene representation module incorporates information from geographically proximate transmitters to learn a generalizable wireless radiance field. Second, a neural-driven ray tracing algorithm operates on this field to automatically compute signal reception at the receiver. Experimental results demonstrate that GWRF outperforms existing methods on single scenes and achieves state-of-the-art performance on unseen scenes.

RG-Attn: Radian Glue Attention for Multi-modality Multi-agent Cooperative Perception

Cooperative perception offers an optimal solution to overcome the perception limitations of single-agent systems by leveraging Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication for data sharing and fusion across multiple agents. However, most existing approaches focus on single-modality data exchange, limiting the potential of both homogeneous and heterogeneous fusion across agents. This overlooks the opportunity to utilize multi-modality data per agent, restricting the system's performance. In the automotive industry, manufacturers adopt diverse sensor configurations, resulting in heterogeneous combinations of sensor modalities across agents. To harness the potential of every possible data source for optimal performance, we design a robust LiDAR and camera cross-modality fusion module, Radian-Glue-Attention (RG-Attn), applicable to both intra-agent cross-modality fusion and inter-agent cross-modality fusion scenarios, owing to the convenient coordinate conversion by transformation matrix and the unified sampling/inversion mechanism. We also propose two different architectures, named Paint-To-Puzzle (PTP) and Co-Sketching-Co-Coloring (CoS-CoCo), for conducting cooperative perception. PTP aims for maximum precision performance and achieves smaller data packet size by limiting cross-agent fusion to a single instance, but requiring all participants to be equipped with LiDAR. In contrast, CoS-CoCo supports agents with any configuration-LiDAR-only, camera-only, or LiDAR-camera-both, presenting more generalization ability. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both real and simulated cooperative perception datasets. The code will be released at GitHub in early 2025.

Nimbus: Secure and Efficient Two-Party Inference for Transformers

Transformer models have gained significant attention due to their power in machine learning tasks. Their extensive deployment has raised concerns about the potential leakage of sensitive information during inference. However, when being applied to Transformers, existing approaches based on secure two-party computation (2PC) bring about efficiency limitations in two folds: (1) resource-intensive matrix multiplications in linear layers, and (2) complex non-linear activation functions like $\mathsf{GELU}$ and $\mathsf{Softmax}$. This work presents a new two-party inference framework $\mathsf{Nimbus}$ for Transformer models. For the linear layer, we propose a new 2PC paradigm along with an encoding approach to securely compute matrix multiplications based on an outer-product insight, which achieves $2.9\times \sim 12.5\times$ performance improvements compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) protocol. For the non-linear layer, through a new observation of utilizing the input distribution, we propose an approach of low-degree polynomial approximation for $\mathsf{GELU}$ and $\mathsf{Softmax}$, which improves the performance of the SOTA polynomial approximation by $2.9\times \sim 4.0\times$, where the average accuracy loss of our approach is 0.08\% compared to the non-2PC inference without privacy. Compared with the SOTA two-party inference, $\mathsf{Nimbus}$ improves the end-to-end performance of \bert{} inference by $2.7\times \sim 4.7\times$ across different network settings.

Instruct or Interact? Exploring and Eliciting LLMs' Capability in Code Snippet Adaptation Through Prompt Engineering

Code snippet adaptation is a fundamental activity in the software development process. Unlike code generation, code snippet adaptation is not a "free creation", which requires developers to tailor a given code snippet in order to fit specific requirements and the code context. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have confirmed their effectiveness in the code generation task with promising results. However, their performance on adaptation, a reuse-oriented and context-dependent code change prediction task, is still unclear. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the performance and issues of LLMs on the adaptation task. We first evaluate the adaptation performances of three popular LLMs and compare them to the code generation task. Our result indicates that their adaptation ability is weaker than generation, with a nearly 15% decrease on pass@1 and more context-related errors. By manually inspecting 200 cases, we further investigate the causes of LLMs' sub-optimal performance, which can be classified into three categories, i.e., Unclear Requirement, Requirement Misalignment and Context Misapplication. Based on the above empirical research, we propose an interactive prompting approach to eliciting LLMs' adaptation ability. Experimental result reveals that our approach greatly improve LLMs' adaptation performance. The best-performing Human-LLM interaction successfully solves 159 out of the 202 identified defects and improves the pass@1 and pass@5 by over 40% compared to the initial instruction-based prompt. Considering human efforts, we suggest multi-agent interaction as a trade-off, which can achieve comparable performance with excellent generalization ability. We deem that our approach could provide methodological assistance for autonomous code snippet reuse and adaptation with LLMs.

Point-PRC: A Prompt Learning Based Regulation Framework for Generalizable Point Cloud Analysis

This paper investigates the 3D domain generalization (3DDG) ability of large 3D models based on prevalent prompt learning. Recent works demonstrate the performances of 3D point cloud recognition can be boosted remarkably by parameter-efficient prompt tuning. However, we observe that the improvement on downstream tasks comes at the expense of a severe drop in 3D domain generalization. To resolve this challenge, we present a comprehensive regulation framework that allows the learnable prompts to actively interact with the well-learned general knowledge in large 3D models to maintain good generalization. Specifically, the proposed framework imposes multiple explicit constraints on the prompt learning trajectory by maximizing the mutual agreement between task-specific predictions and task-agnostic knowledge. We design the regulation framework as a plug-and-play module to embed into existing representative large 3D models. Surprisingly, our method not only realizes consistently increasing generalization ability but also enhances task-specific 3D recognition performances across various 3DDG benchmarks by a clear margin. Considering the lack of study and evaluation on 3DDG, we also create three new benchmarks, namely base-to-new, cross-dataset and few-shot generalization benchmarks, to enrich the field and inspire future research. Code and benchmarks are available at \url{https://github.com/auniquesun/Point-PRC}.

Multi-head Sequence Tagging Model for Grammatical Error Correction

To solve the Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) problem , a mapping between a source sequence and a target one is needed, where the two differ only on few spans. For this reason, the attention has been shifted to the non-autoregressive or sequence tagging models. In which, the GEC has been simplified from Seq2Seq to labeling the input tokens with edit commands chosen from a large edit space. Due to this large number of classes and the limitation of the available datasets, the current sequence tagging approaches still have some issues handling a broad range of grammatical errors just by being laser-focused on one single task. To this end, we simplified the GEC further by dividing it into seven related subtasks: Insertion, Deletion, Merge, Substitution, Transformation, Detection, and Correction, with Correction being our primary focus. A distinct classification head is dedicated to each of these subtasks. the novel multi-head and multi-task learning model is proposed to effectively utilize training data and harness the information from related task training signals. To mitigate the limited number of available training samples, a new denoising autoencoder is used to generate a new synthetic dataset to be used for pretraining. Additionally, a new character-level transformation is proposed to enhance the sequence-to-edit function and improve the model's vocabulary coverage. Our single/ensemble model achieves an F0.5 of 74.4/77.0, and 68.6/69.1 on BEA-19 (test) and CoNLL-14 (test) respectively. Moreover, evaluated on JFLEG test set, the GLEU scores are 61.6 and 61.7 for the single and ensemble models, respectively. It mostly outperforms recently published state-of-the-art results by a considerable margin.

See Behind Walls in Real-time Using Aerial Drones and Augmented Reality

This work presents ARD2, a framework that enables real-time through-wall surveillance using two aerial drones and an augmented reality (AR) device. ARD2 consists of two main steps: target direction estimation and contour reconstruction. In the first stage, ARD2 leverages geometric relationships between the drones, the user, and the target to project the target's direction onto the user's AR display. In the second stage, images from the drones are synthesized to reconstruct the target's contour, allowing the user to visualize the target behind walls. Experimental results demonstrate the system's accuracy in both direction estimation and contour reconstruction.

Extending the Benefits of Parallel Elasticity across Multiple Actuation Tasks: A Geometric and Optimization-Based Approach

A spring in parallel with an effort source (e.g., electric motor or human muscle) can reduce its energy consumption and effort (i.e., torque or force) depending on the spring stiffness, spring preload, and actuation task. However, selecting the spring stiffness and preload that guarantees effort or energy reduction for an arbitrary set of tasks is a design challenge. This work formulates a convex optimization problem to guarantee that a parallel spring reduces the root-mean-square source effort or energy consumption for multiple tasks. Specifically, we guarantee the benefits across multiple tasks by enforcing a set of convex quadratic constraints in our optimization variables -- the parallel spring stiffness and preload. These quadratic constraints are equivalent to ellipses in the stiffness and preload plane, any combination of stiffness and preload inside the ellipse represents a parallel spring that minimizes effort source or energy consumption with respect to an actuator without a spring. This geometric interpretation intuitively guides the stiffness and preload selection process. We analytically and experimentally prove the convex quadratic function of the spring stiffness and preload. As applications, we analyze the stiffness and preload selection of a parallel spring for a knee exoskeleton using human muscle as the effort source and a prosthetic ankle powered by electric motors. To promote adoption, the optimization and geometric methods are available as supplemental open-source software that can be executed in a web browser.

MARLP: Time-series Forecasting Control for Agricultural Managed Aquifer Recharge

The rapid decline in groundwater around the world poses a significant challenge to sustainable agriculture. To address this issue, agricultural managed aquifer recharge (Ag-MAR) is proposed to recharge the aquifer by artificially flooding agricultural lands using surface water. Ag-MAR requires a carefully selected flooding schedule to avoid affecting the oxygen absorption of crop roots. However, current Ag-MAR scheduling does not take into account complex environmental factors such as weather and soil oxygen, resulting in crop damage and insufficient recharging amounts. This paper proposes MARLP, the first end-to-end data-driven control system for Ag-MAR. We first formulate Ag-MAR as an optimization problem. To that end, we analyze four-year in-field datasets, which reveal the multi-periodicity feature of the soil oxygen level trends and the opportunity to use external weather forecasts and flooding proposals as exogenous clues for soil oxygen prediction. Then, we design a two-stage forecasting framework. In the first stage, it extracts both the cross-variate dependency and the periodic patterns from historical data to conduct preliminary forecasting. In the second stage, it uses weather-soil and flooding-soil causality to facilitate an accurate prediction of soil oxygen levels. Finally, we conduct model predictive control (MPC) for Ag-MAR flooding. To address the challenge of large action spaces, we devise a heuristic planning module to reduce the number of flooding proposals to enable the search for optimal solutions. Real-world experiments show that MARLP reduces the oxygen deficit ratio by 86.8% while improving the recharging amount in unit time by 35.8%, compared with the previous four years.