arXiv Computer Science @arxiv_cs@qoto.org

Building elastic and scalable edge resources is an inevitable prerequisite for providing platform-based smart city services. Smart city services are delivered through edge computing to provide low-latency applications. However, edge computing has always faced the challenge of limited resources. A single edge device cannot undertake the various intelligent computations in a smart city, and the large-scale deployment of edge devices from different service providers to build an edge resource platform has become a necessity. Selecting computing power from different service providers is a game-theoretic problem. To incentivize service providers to actively contribute their valuable resources and provide low-latency collaborative computing power, we introduce a game-theoretic deep learning model to reach a consensus among service providers on task scheduling and resource provisioning. Traditional centralized resource management approaches are inefficient and lack credibility, while the introduction of blockchain technology can enable decentralized resource trading and scheduling. We propose a contribution-based proof mechanism to provide the low-latency service of edge computing. The deep learning model consists of dual encoders and a single decoder, where the GNN (Graph Neural Network) encoder processes structured decision action data, and the RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) encoder handles time-series task scheduling data. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our model reduces latency by 584% compared to the state-of-the-art.

We present a novel framework for analyzing and interpreting electron microscopy images in semiconductor manufacturing using vision-language instruction tuning. The framework employs a unique teacher-student approach, leveraging pre-trained multimodal large language models such as GPT-4 to generate instruction-following data for zero-shot visual question answering (VQA) and classification tasks, customizing smaller multimodal models (SMMs) for microscopy image analysis, resulting in an instruction-tuned language-and-vision assistant. Our framework merges knowledge engineering with machine learning to integrate domain-specific expertise from larger to smaller multimodal models within this specialized field, greatly reducing the need for extensive human labeling. Our study presents a secure, cost-effective, and customizable approach for analyzing microscopy images, addressing the challenges of adopting proprietary models in semiconductor manufacturing.

Today's image generation systems are capable of producing realistic and high-quality images. However, user prompts often contain ambiguities, making it difficult for these systems to interpret users' potential intentions. Consequently, machines need to interact with users multiple rounds to better understand users' intents. The unpredictable costs of using or learning image generation models through multiple feedback interactions hinder their widespread adoption and full performance potential, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the user-friendliness of our image generation system. To achieve this, we propose a reflective human-machine co-adaptation strategy, named RHM-CAS. Externally, the Agent engages in meaningful language interactions with users to reflect on and refine the generated images. Internally, the Agent tries to optimize the policy based on user preferences, ensuring that the final outcomes closely align with user preferences. Various experiments on different tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Complexity is often seen as a inherent negative in information design, with the job of the designer being to reduce or eliminate complexity, and with principles like Tufte's "data-ink ratio" or "chartjunk" to operationalize minimalism and simplicity in visualizations. However, in this position paper, we call for a more expansive view of complexity as a design material, like color or texture or shape: an element of information design that can be used in many ways, many of which are beneficial to the goals of using data to understand the world around us. We describe complexity as a phenomenon that occurs not just in visual design but in every aspect of the sensemaking process, from data collection to interpretation. For each of these stages, we present examples of ways that these various forms of complexity can be used (or abused) in visualization design. We ultimately call on the visualization community to build a more nuanced view of complexity, to look for places to usefully integrate complexity in multiple stages of the design process, and, even when the goal is to reduce complexity, to look for the non-visual forms of complexity that may have otherwise been overlooked.

This study introduces an artificial neural network (ANN) for image classification task, inspired by the aversive olfactory learning circuits of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Despite the remarkable performance of ANNs in a variety of tasks, they face challenges such as excessive parameterization, high training costs and limited generalization capabilities. C. elegans, with its simple nervous system comprising only 302 neurons, serves as a paradigm in neurobiological research and is capable of complex behaviors including learning. This research identifies key neural circuits associated with aversive olfactory learning in C. elegans through behavioral experiments and high-throughput gene sequencing, translating them into an image classification ANN architecture. Additionally, two other image classification ANNs with distinct architectures were constructed for comparative performance analysis to highlight the advantages of bio-inspired design. The results indicate that the ANN inspired by the aversive olfactory learning circuits of C. elegans achieves higher accuracy, better consistency and faster convergence rates in image classification task, especially when tackling more complex classification challenges. This study not only showcases the potential of bio-inspired design in enhancing ANN capabilities but also provides a novel perspective and methodology for future ANN design.

In this work, we introduce the demonstration of symbolic music generation, focusing on providing short musical motifs that serve as the central theme of the narrative. For the generation, we adopt an autoregressive model which takes musical metadata as inputs and generates 4 bars of multitrack MIDI sequences. During training, we randomly drop tokens from the musical metadata to guarantee flexible control. It provides users with the freedom to select input types while maintaining generative performance, enabling greater flexibility in music composition. We validate the effectiveness of the strategy through experiments in terms of model capacity, musical fidelity, diversity, and controllability. Additionally, we scale up the model and compare it with other music generation model through a subjective test. Our results indicate its superiority in both control and music quality. We provide a URL link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0drPrFJdMQ to our demonstration video.

Advancements in object detection algorithms have opened new avenues for assistive technologies that cater to the needs of visually impaired individuals. This paper presents a novel approach for indoor assistance to the blind by addressing the challenge of small object detection. We propose a technique YOLO NAS Small architecture, a lightweight and efficient object detection model, optimized using the Super Gradients training framework. This combination enables real-time detection of small objects crucial for assisting the blind in navigating indoor environments, such as furniture, appliances, and household items. Proposed method emphasizes low latency and high accuracy, enabling timely and informative voice-based guidance to enhance the user's spatial awareness and interaction with their surroundings. The paper details the implementation, experimental results, and discusses the system's effectiveness in providing a practical solution for indoor assistance to the visually impaired.

The rapid proliferation of mobile devices and advancements in wireless technologies have given rise to a new era of healthcare delivery through mobile health (mHealth) applications. Design Science Research (DSR) is a widely used research paradigm that aims to create and evaluate innovative artifacts to solve real-world problems. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for employing DSR in mHealth application projects to address healthcare challenges and improve patient outcomes. We discussed various DSR principles and methodologies, highlighting their applicability and importance in developing and evaluating mHealth applications. Furthermore, we present several case studies to exemplify the successful implementation of DSR in mHealth projects and provide practical recommendations for researchers and practitioners.

This paper critically examines the AI Act's provisions on climate-related transparency, highlighting significant gaps and challenges in its implementation. We identify key shortcomings, including the exclusion of energy consumption during AI inference, the lack of coverage for indirect greenhouse gas emissions from AI applications, and the lack of standard reporting methodology. The paper proposes a novel interpretation to bring inference-related energy use back within the Act's scope and advocates for public access to climate-related disclosures to foster market accountability and public scrutiny. Cumulative server level energy reporting is recommended as the most suitable method. We also suggests broader policy changes, including sustainability risk assessments and renewable energy targets, to better address AI's environmental impact.

Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (TAI) integrates ethics that align with human values, looking at their influence on AI behaviour and decision-making. Primarily dependent on self-assessment, TAI evaluation aims to ensure ethical standards and safety in AI development and usage. This paper reviews the current TAI evaluation methods in the literature and offers a classification, contributing to understanding self-assessment methods in this field.

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have great potential in various visual tasks due to their rich spectral information. However, obtaining high-resolution hyperspectral images remains challenging due to limitations of physical imaging. Inspired by Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), we propose an efficient HSI super-resolution (HSI-SR) model to fuse a low-resolution HSI (LR-HSI) and a high-resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI), yielding a high-resolution HSI (HR-HSI). To achieve the effective integration of spatial information from HR-MSI, we design a fusion module based on KANs, called KAN-Fusion. Further inspired by the channel attention mechanism, we design a spectral channel attention module called KAN Channel Attention Block (KAN-CAB) for post-fusion feature extraction. As a channel attention module integrated with KANs, KAN-CAB not only enhances the fine-grained adjustment ability of deep networks, enabling networks to accurately simulate details of spectral sequences and spatial textures, but also effectively avoid Curse of Dimensionality (COD). Extensive experiments show that, compared to current state-of-the-art (SOTA) HSI-SR methods, proposed HSR-KAN achieves the best performance in terms of both qualitative and quantitative assessments. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Baisonm-Li/HSR-KAN.

Pre-trained Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) exhibit robust pattern recognition capabilities and share extensive similarities with the human brain, specifically Biological Neural Networks (BNNs). We are particularly intrigued by these models' ability to acquire new knowledge through fine-tuning. In this regard, Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) has gained widespread adoption as a substitute for full fine-tuning due to its cost reduction in training and mitigation of over-fitting risks by limiting the number of trainable parameters during adaptation. Since both ANNs and BNNs propagate information layer-by-layer, a common analogy can be drawn: weights in ANNs represent synapses in BNNs, while features (also known as latent variables or logits) in ANNs represent neurotransmitters released by neurons in BNNs. Mainstream PEFT methods aim to adjust feature or parameter values using only a limited number of trainable parameters (usually less than 1% of the total parameters), yet achieve surprisingly good results. Building upon this clue, we delve deeper into exploring the connections between feature adjustment and parameter adjustment, resulting in our proposed method Synapses & Neurons (SAN) that learns scaling matrices for features and propagates their effects towards posterior weight matrices. Our approach draws strong inspiration from well-known neuroscience phenomena - Long-term Potentiation (LTP) and Long-term Depression (LTD), which also reveal the relationship between synapse development and neurotransmitter release levels. We conducted extensive comparisons of PEFT on 26 datasets using attention-based networks as well as convolution-based networks, leading to significant improvements compared to other tuning methods (+8.5% over fully-finetune, +7% over Visual Prompt Tuning, and +3.2% over LoRA). The codes would be released.

Pedestrian Crossing Prediction (PCP) in driving scenes plays a critical role in ensuring the safe operation of intelligent vehicles. Due to the limited observations of pedestrian crossing behaviors in typical situations, recent studies have begun to leverage synthetic data with flexible variation to boost prediction performance, employing domain adaptation frameworks. However, different domain knowledge has distinct cross-domain distribution gaps, which necessitates suitable domain knowledge adaption ways for PCP tasks. In this work, we propose a Gated Syn-to-Real Knowledge transfer approach for PCP (Gated-S2R-PCP), which has two aims: 1) designing the suitable domain adaptation ways for different kinds of crossing-domain knowledge, and 2) transferring suitable knowledge for specific situations with gated knowledge fusion. Specifically, we design a framework that contains three domain adaption methods including style transfer, distribution approximation, and knowledge distillation for various information, such as visual, semantic, depth, location, etc. A Learnable Gated Unit (LGU) is employed to fuse suitable cross-domain knowledge to boost pedestrian crossing prediction. We construct a new synthetic benchmark S2R-PCP-3181 with 3181 sequences (489,740 frames) which contains the pedestrian locations, RGB frames, semantic images, and depth images. With the synthetic S2R-PCP-3181, we transfer the knowledge to two real challenging datasets of PIE and JAAD, and superior PCP performance is obtained to the state-of-the-art methods.

With the rapid advancement of AI, there is a growing trend to integrate AI into decision-making processes. However, AI systems may exhibit biases that lead decision-makers to draw unfair conclusions. Notably, the COMPAS system used in the American justice system to evaluate recidivism was found to favor racial majority groups; specifically, it violates a fairness standard called equalized odds. Various measures have been proposed to assess AI fairness. We present a framework for auditing AI fairness, involving third-party auditors and AI system providers, and we have created a tool to facilitate systematic examination of AI systems. The tool is open-sourced and publicly available. Unlike traditional AI systems, we advocate a transparent white-box and statistics-based approach. It can be utilized by third-party auditors, AI developers, or the general public for reference when judging the fairness criterion of AI systems.

Audio-Visual Source Localization (AVSL) aims to localize the source of sound within a video. In this paper, we identify a significant issue in existing benchmarks: the sounding objects are often easily recognized based solely on visual cues, which we refer to as visual bias. Such biases hinder these benchmarks from effectively evaluating AVSL models. To further validate our hypothesis regarding visual biases, we examine two representative AVSL benchmarks, VGG-SS and EpicSounding-Object, where the vision-only models outperform all audiovisual baselines. Our findings suggest that existing AVSL benchmarks need further refinement to facilitate audio-visual learning.

Iso-surface extraction from an implicit field is a fundamental process in various applications of computer vision and graphics. When dealing with geometric shapes with complicated geometric details, many existing algorithms suffer from high computational costs and memory usage. This paper proposes McGrids, a novel approach to improve the efficiency of iso-surface extraction. The key idea is to construct adaptive grids for iso-surface extraction rather than using a simple uniform grid as prior art does. Specifically, we formulate the problem of constructing adaptive grids as a probability sampling problem, which is then solved by Monte Carlo process. We demonstrate McGrids' capability with extensive experiments from both analytical SDFs computed from surface meshes and learned implicit fields from real multiview images. The experiment results show that our McGrids can significantly reduce the number of implicit field queries, resulting in significant memory reduction, while producing high-quality meshes with rich geometric details.

Computer-generated holography (CGH) is a promising technology for augmented reality displays, such as head-mounted or head-up displays. However, its high computational demand makes it impractical for implementation. Recent efforts to integrate neural networks into CGH have successfully accelerated computing speed, demonstrating the potential to overcome the trade-off between computational cost and image quality. Nevertheless, deploying neural network-based CGH algorithms on computationally limited embedded systems requires more efficient models with lower computational cost, memory footprint, and power consumption. In this study, we developed a lightweight model for complex hologram generation by introducing neural network quantization. Specifically, we built a model based on tensor holography and quantized it from 32-bit floating-point precision (FP32) to 8-bit integer precision (INT8). Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed INT8 model achieves hologram quality comparable to that of the FP32 model while reducing the model size by approximately 70% and increasing the speed fourfold. Additionally, we implemented the INT8 model on a system-on-module to demonstrate its deployability on embedded platforms and high power efficiency.

It is of critical importance to analyse the factors influencing college students' intention to use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to understand and predict learners' learning behaviours and academic outcomes. Nevertheless, a lack of congruity has been shown in extant research results. This study, therefore, conducted a meta-analysis of 27 empirical studies under an integrated theoretical framework, including 87 effect sizes of independent research and 33,833 sample data. The results revealed that the main variables are strongly correlated with students' behavioural intention to use GenAI. Among them, performance expectancy (r = 0.389) and attitudes (r = 0.576) play particularly critical roles, and effort expectancy and habit are moderated by locational factors. Gender, notably, only moderated attitudes on students' behavioural intention to use GenAI. This study provides valuable insights for addressing the debate regarding students' intention to use GenAI in existed research, improving educational technology, as well as offering support for school decision-makers and educators to apply GenAI in school settings.

The conventional approach to the fronthaul design for cell-free massive MIMO system follows the compress-and-precode (CP) paradigm. Accordingly, encoded bits and precoding coefficients are shared by the distributed unit (DU) on the fronthaul links, and precoding takes place at the radio units (RUs). Previous theoretical work has shown that CP can be potentially improved by a significant margin by precode-and-compress (PC) methods, in which all baseband processing is carried out at the DU, which compresses the precoded signals for transmission on the fronthaul links. The theoretical performance gain of PC methods are particularly pronounced when the DU implements multivariate quantization (MQ), applying joint quantization across the signals for all the RUs. However, existing solutions for MQ are characterized by a computational complexity that grows exponentially with the sum-fronthaul capacity from the DU to all RUs. This work sets out to design scalable MQ strategies for PC-based cell-free massive MIMO systems. For the low-fronthaul capacity regime, we present alpha-parallel MQ (alpha-PMQ), whose complexity is exponential only in the fronthaul capacity towards an individual RU, while performing close to full MQ. alpha-PMQ tailors MQ to the topology of the network by allowing for parallel local quantization steps for RUs that do not interfere too much with each other. For the high-fronthaul capacity regime, we then introduce neural MQ, which replaces the exhaustive search in MQ with gradient-based updates for a neural-network-based decoder, attaining a complexity that grows linearly with the sum-fronthaul capacity. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scalable MQ strategies outperform CP for both the low and high-fronthaul capacity regimes at the cost of increased computational complexity at the DU (but not at the RUs).

The general availability of powerful Large Language Models had a powerful impact on higher education, yet general models may not always be useful for the associated specialized tasks. When using these models, oftentimes the need for particular domain knowledge becomes quickly apparent, and the desire for customized bots arises. Customization holds the promise of leading to more accurate and contextually relevant responses, enhancing the educational experience. The purpose of this short technical experience report is to describe what "customizing" Large Language Models means in practical terms for higher education institutions. This report thus relates insights and experiences from one particular technical university in Switzerland, ETH Zurich.