The Components of Collaborative Joint Perception and Prediction -- A Conceptual Framework

Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) benefit from Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, which enables the exchange of sensor data to achieve Collaborative Perception (CP). To reduce cumulative errors in perception modules and mitigate the visual occlusion, this paper introduces a new task, Collaborative Joint Perception and Prediction (Co-P&P), and provides a conceptual framework for its implementation to improve motion prediction of surrounding objects, thereby enhancing vehicle awareness in complex traffic scenarios. The framework consists of two decoupled core modules, Collaborative Scene Completion (CSC) and Joint Perception and Prediction (P&P) module, which simplify practical deployment and enhance scalability. Additionally, we outline the challenges in Co-P&P and discuss future directions for this research area.

Weaver: Foundation Models for Creative Writing

This work introduces Weaver, our first family of large language models (LLMs) dedicated to content creation. Weaver is pre-trained on a carefully selected corpus that focuses on improving the writing capabilities of large language models. We then fine-tune Weaver for creative and professional writing purposes and align it to the preference of professional writers using a suit of novel methods for instruction data synthesis and LLM alignment, making it able to produce more human-like texts and follow more diverse instructions for content creation. The Weaver family consists of models of Weaver Mini (1.8B), Weaver Base (6B), Weaver Pro (14B), and Weaver Ultra (34B) sizes, suitable for different applications and can be dynamically dispatched by a routing agent according to query complexity to balance response quality and computation cost. Evaluation on a carefully curated benchmark for assessing the writing capabilities of LLMs shows Weaver models of all sizes outperform generalist LLMs several times larger than them. Notably, our most-capable Weaver Ultra model surpasses GPT-4, a state-of-the-art generalist LLM, on various writing scenarios, demonstrating the advantage of training specialized LLMs for writing purposes. Moreover, Weaver natively supports retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and function calling (tool usage). We present various use cases of these abilities for improving AI-assisted writing systems, including integration of external knowledge bases, tools, or APIs, and providing personalized writing assistance. Furthermore, we discuss and summarize a guideline and best practices for pre-training and fine-tuning domain-specific LLMs.

Implementation of a Binary Neural Network on a Passive Array of Magnetic Tunnel Junctions

The increasing scale of neural networks and their growing application space have produced demand for more energy- and memory-efficient artificial-intelligence-specific hardware. Avenues to mitigate the main issue, the von Neumann bottleneck, include in-memory and near-memory architectures, as well as algorithmic approaches. Here we leverage the low-power and the inherently binary operation of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) to demonstrate neural network hardware inference based on passive arrays of MTJs. In general, transferring a trained network model to hardware for inference is confronted by degradation in performance due to device-to-device variations, write errors, parasitic resistance, and nonidealities in the substrate. To quantify the effect of these hardware realities, we benchmark 300 unique weight matrix solutions of a 2-layer perceptron to classify the Wine dataset for both classification accuracy and write fidelity. Despite device imperfections, we achieve software-equivalent accuracy of up to 95.3 % with proper tuning of network parameters in 15 x 15 MTJ arrays having a range of device sizes. The success of this tuning process shows that new metrics are needed to characterize the performance and quality of networks reproduced in mixed signal hardware.

Joint CFO, Gridless Channel Estimation and Data Detection for Underwater Acoustic OFDM Systems

In this paper, we propose an iterative receiver based on gridless variational Bayesian line spectra estimation (VALSE) named JCCD-VALSE that \emph{j}ointly estimates the \emph{c}arrier frequency offset (CFO), the \emph{c}hannel with high resolution and carries out \emph{d}ata decoding. Based on a modularized point of view and motivated by the high resolution and low complexity gridless VALSE algorithm, three modules named the VALSE module, the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) module and the decoder module are built. Soft information is exchanged between the modules to progressively improve the channel estimation and data decoding accuracy. Since the delays of multipaths of the channel are treated as continuous parameters, instead of on a grid, the leakage effect is avoided. Besides, the proposed approach is a more complete Bayesian approach as all the nuisance parameters such as the noise variance, the parameters of the prior distribution of the channel, the number of paths are automatically estimated. Numerical simulations and sea test data are utilized to demonstrate that the proposed approach performs significantly better than the existing grid-based generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) based \emph{j}oint \emph{c}hannel and \emph{d}ata decoding approach (JCD-GAMP). Furthermore, it is also verified that joint processing including CFO estimation provides performance gain.