14,470 research outputs found
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era
OpenAI has recently released GPT-4 (a.k.a. ChatGPT plus), which is
demonstrated to be one small step for generative AI (GAI), but one giant leap
for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Since its official release in
November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted numerous users with extensive
media coverage. Such unprecedented attention has also motivated numerous
researchers to investigate ChatGPT from various aspects. According to Google
scholar, there are more than 500 articles with ChatGPT in their titles or
mentioning it in their abstracts. Considering this, a review is urgently
needed, and our work fills this gap. Overall, this work is the first to survey
ChatGPT with a comprehensive review of its underlying technology, applications,
and challenges. Moreover, we present an outlook on how ChatGPT might evolve to
realize general-purpose AIGC (a.k.a. AI-generated content), which will be a
significant milestone for the development of AGI.Comment: A Survey on ChatGPT and GPT-4, 29 pages. Feedback is appreciated
([email protected]
RAPID: Enabling Fast Online Policy Learning in Dynamic Public Cloud Environments
Resource sharing between multiple workloads has become a prominent practice
among cloud service providers, motivated by demand for improved resource
utilization and reduced cost of ownership. Effective resource sharing, however,
remains an open challenge due to the adverse effects that resource contention
can have on high-priority, user-facing workloads with strict Quality of Service
(QoS) requirements. Although recent approaches have demonstrated promising
results, those works remain largely impractical in public cloud environments
since workloads are not known in advance and may only run for a brief period,
thus prohibiting offline learning and significantly hindering online learning.
In this paper, we propose RAPID, a novel framework for fast, fully-online
resource allocation policy learning in highly dynamic operating environments.
RAPID leverages lightweight QoS predictions, enabled by
domain-knowledge-inspired techniques for sample efficiency and bias reduction,
to decouple control from conventional feedback sources and guide policy
learning at a rate orders of magnitude faster than prior work. Evaluation on a
real-world server platform with representative cloud workloads confirms that
RAPID can learn stable resource allocation policies in minutes, as compared
with hours in prior state-of-the-art, while improving QoS by 9.0x and
increasing best-effort workload performance by 19-43%
BotMoE: Twitter Bot Detection with Community-Aware Mixtures of Modal-Specific Experts
Twitter bot detection has become a crucial task in efforts to combat online
misinformation, mitigate election interference, and curb malicious propaganda.
However, advanced Twitter bots often attempt to mimic the characteristics of
genuine users through feature manipulation and disguise themselves to fit in
diverse user communities, posing challenges for existing Twitter bot detection
models. To this end, we propose BotMoE, a Twitter bot detection framework that
jointly utilizes multiple user information modalities (metadata, textual
content, network structure) to improve the detection of deceptive bots.
Furthermore, BotMoE incorporates a community-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)
layer to improve domain generalization and adapt to different Twitter
communities. Specifically, BotMoE constructs modal-specific encoders for
metadata features, textual content, and graphical structure, which jointly
model Twitter users from three modal-specific perspectives. We then employ a
community-aware MoE layer to automatically assign users to different
communities and leverage the corresponding expert networks. Finally, user
representations from metadata, text, and graph perspectives are fused with an
expert fusion layer, combining all three modalities while measuring the
consistency of user information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BotMoE
significantly advances the state-of-the-art on three Twitter bot detection
benchmarks. Studies also confirm that BotMoE captures advanced and evasive
bots, alleviates the reliance on training data, and better generalizes to new
and previously unseen user communities.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 202
Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems
Programming requires much more than just writing code in a programming language. It is usually done in the context of a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface. Yet, this wide space of possibilities lacks a common structure for navigation. Work on programming systems fails to form a coherent body of research, making it hard to improve on past work and advance the state of the art.
In computer science, much has been said and done to allow comparison of programming languages, yet no similar theory exists for programming systems; we believe that programming systems deserve a theory too.
We present a framework of technical dimensions which capture the underlying characteristics of programming systems and provide a means for conceptualizing and comparing them.
We identify technical dimensions by examining past influential programming systems and reviewing their design principles, technical capabilities, and styles of user interaction. Technical dimensions capture characteristics that may be studied, compared and advanced independently. This makes it possible to talk about programming systems in a way that can be shared and constructively debated rather than relying solely on personal impressions.
Our framework is derived using a qualitative analysis of past programming systems. We outline two concrete ways of using our framework. First, we show how it can analyze a recently developed novel programming system. Then, we use it to identify an interesting unexplored point in the design space of programming systems.
Much research effort focuses on building programming systems that are easier to use, accessible to non-experts, moldable and/or powerful, but such efforts are disconnected. They are informal, guided by the personal vision of their authors and thus are only evaluable and comparable on the basis of individual experience using them. By providing foundations for more systematic research, we can help programming systems researchers to stand, at last, on the shoulders of giants
Offline and Online Models for Learning Pairwise Relations in Data
Pairwise relations between data points are essential for numerous machine learning algorithms. Many representation learning methods consider pairwise relations to identify the latent features and patterns in the data. This thesis, investigates learning of pairwise relations from two different perspectives: offline learning and online learning.The first part of the thesis focuses on offline learning by starting with an investigation of the performance modeling of a synchronization method in concurrent programming using a Markov chain whose state transition matrix models pairwise relations between involved cores in a computer process.Then the thesis focuses on a particular pairwise distance measure, the minimax distance, and explores memory-efficient approaches to computing this distance by proposing a hierarchical representation of the data with a linear memory requirement with respect to the number of data points, from which the exact pairwise minimax distances can be derived in a memory-efficient manner. Then, a memory-efficient sampling method is proposed that follows the aforementioned hierarchical representation of the data and samples the data points in a way that the minimax distances between all data points are maximally preserved. Finally, the thesis proposes a practical non-parametric clustering of vehicle motion trajectories to annotate traffic scenarios based on transitive relations between trajectories in an embedded space.The second part of the thesis takes an online learning perspective, and starts by presenting an online learning method for identifying bottlenecks in a road network by extracting the minimax path, where bottlenecks are considered as road segments with the highest cost, e.g., in the sense of travel time. Inspired by real-world road networks, the thesis assumes a stochastic traffic environment in which the road-specific probability distribution of travel time is unknown. Therefore, it needs to learn the parameters of the probability distribution through observations by modeling the bottleneck identification task as a combinatorial semi-bandit problem. The proposed approach takes into account the prior knowledge and follows a Bayesian approach to update the parameters. Moreover, it develops a combinatorial variant of Thompson Sampling and derives an upper bound for the corresponding Bayesian regret. Furthermore, the thesis proposes an approximate algorithm to address the respective computational intractability issue.Finally, the thesis considers contextual information of road network segments by extending the proposed model to a contextual combinatorial semi-bandit framework and investigates and develops various algorithms for this contextual combinatorial setting
Advancing Model Pruning via Bi-level Optimization
The deployment constraints in practical applications necessitate the pruning
of large-scale deep learning models, i.e., promoting their weight sparsity. As
illustrated by the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), pruning also has the
potential of improving their generalization ability. At the core of LTH,
iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) is the predominant pruning method to
successfully find 'winning tickets'. Yet, the computation cost of IMP grows
prohibitively as the targeted pruning ratio increases. To reduce the
computation overhead, various efficient 'one-shot' pruning methods have been
developed, but these schemes are usually unable to find winning tickets as good
as IMP. This raises the question of how to close the gap between pruning
accuracy and pruning efficiency? To tackle it, we pursue the algorithmic
advancement of model pruning. Specifically, we formulate the pruning problem
from a fresh and novel viewpoint, bi-level optimization (BLO). We show that the
BLO interpretation provides a technically-grounded optimization base for an
efficient implementation of the pruning-retraining learning paradigm used in
IMP. We also show that the proposed bi-level optimization-oriented pruning
method (termed BiP) is a special class of BLO problems with a bi-linear problem
structure. By leveraging such bi-linearity, we theoretically show that BiP can
be solved as easily as first-order optimization, thus inheriting the
computation efficiency. Through extensive experiments on both structured and
unstructured pruning with 5 model architectures and 4 data sets, we demonstrate
that BiP can find better winning tickets than IMP in most cases, and is
computationally as efficient as the one-shot pruning schemes, demonstrating 2-7
times speedup over IMP for the same level of model accuracy and sparsity.Comment: Thirty-sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
(NeurIPS 2022
Neural Architecture Search: Insights from 1000 Papers
In the past decade, advances in deep learning have resulted in breakthroughs
in a variety of areas, including computer vision, natural language
understanding, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. Specialized,
high-performing neural architectures are crucial to the success of deep
learning in these areas. Neural architecture search (NAS), the process of
automating the design of neural architectures for a given task, is an
inevitable next step in automating machine learning and has already outpaced
the best human-designed architectures on many tasks. In the past few years,
research in NAS has been progressing rapidly, with over 1000 papers released
since 2020 (Deng and Lindauer, 2021). In this survey, we provide an organized
and comprehensive guide to neural architecture search. We give a taxonomy of
search spaces, algorithms, and speedup techniques, and we discuss resources
such as benchmarks, best practices, other surveys, and open-source libraries
Associated Random Neural Networks for Collective Classification of Nodes in Botnet Attacks
Botnet attacks are a major threat to networked systems because of their
ability to turn the network nodes that they compromise into additional
attackers, leading to the spread of high volume attacks over long periods. The
detection of such Botnets is complicated by the fact that multiple network IP
addresses will be simultaneously compromised, so that Collective Classification
of compromised nodes, in addition to the already available traditional methods
that focus on individual nodes, can be useful. Thus this work introduces a
collective Botnet attack classification technique that operates on traffic from
an n-node IP network with a novel Associated Random Neural Network (ARNN) that
identifies the nodes which are compromised. The ARNN is a recurrent
architecture that incorporates two mutually associated, interconnected and
architecturally identical n-neuron random neural networks, that act
simultneously as mutual critics to reach the decision regarding which of n
nodes have been compromised. A novel gradient learning descent algorithm is
presented for the ARNN, and is shown to operate effectively both with
conventional off-line training from prior data, and with on-line incremental
training without prior off-line learning. Real data from a 107 node packet
network is used with over 700,000 packets to evaluate the ARNN, showing that it
provides accurate predictions. Comparisons with other well-known state of the
art methods using the same learning and testing datasets, show that the ARNN
offers significantly better performance
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