An Online Spatial-Temporal Graph Trajectory Planner for Autonomous Vehicles

The autonomous driving industry is expected to grow by over 20 times in the coming decade and, thus, motivate researchers to delve into it. The primary focus of their research is to ensure safety, comfort, and efficiency. An autonomous vehicle has several modules responsible for one or more of the aforementioned items. Among these modules, the trajectory planner plays a pivotal role in the safety of the vehicle and the comfort of its passengers. The module is also responsible for respecting kinematic constraints and any applicable road constraints. In this paper, a novel online spatial-temporal graph trajectory planner is introduced to generate safe and comfortable trajectories. First, a spatial-temporal graph is constructed using the autonomous vehicle, its surrounding vehicles, and virtual nodes along the road with respect to the vehicle itself. Next, the graph is forwarded into a sequential network to obtain the desired states. To support the planner, a simple behavioral layer is also presented that determines kinematic constraints for the planner. Furthermore, a novel potential function is also proposed to train the network. Finally, the proposed planner is tested on three different complex driving tasks, and the performance is compared with two frequently used methods. The results show that the proposed planner generates safe and feasible trajectories while achieving similar or longer distances in the forward direction and comparable comfort ride.

Neuron Specialization: Leveraging intrinsic task modularity for multilingual machine translation

Training a unified multilingual model promotes knowledge transfer but inevitably introduces negative interference. Language-specific modeling methods show promise in reducing interference. However, they often rely on heuristics to distribute capacity and struggle to foster cross-lingual transfer via isolated modules. In this paper, we explore intrinsic task modularity within multilingual networks and leverage these observations to circumvent interference under multilingual translation. We show that neurons in the feed-forward layers tend to be activated in a language-specific manner. Meanwhile, these specialized neurons exhibit structural overlaps that reflect language proximity, which progress across layers. Based on these findings, we propose Neuron Specialization, an approach that identifies specialized neurons to modularize feed-forward layers and then continuously updates them through sparse networks. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves consistent performance gains over strong baselines with additional analyses demonstrating reduced interference and increased knowledge transfer.

ALISA: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference via Sparsity-Aware KV Caching

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) and has been foundational in developing large language models (LLMs) such as LLaMA and OPT, which have come to dominate a broad range of NLP tasks. Despite their superior accuracy, LLMs present unique challenges in practical inference, concerning the compute and memory-intensive nature. Thanks to the autoregressive characteristic of LLM inference, KV caching for the attention layers in Transformers can effectively accelerate LLM inference by substituting quadratic-complexity computation with linear-complexity memory accesses. Yet, this approach requires increasing memory as demand grows for processing longer sequences. The overhead leads to reduced throughput due to I/O bottlenecks and even out-of-memory errors, particularly on resource-constrained systems like a single commodity GPU. In this paper, we propose ALISA, a novel algorithm-system co-design solution to address the challenges imposed by KV caching. On the algorithm level, ALISA prioritizes tokens that are most important in generating a new token via a Sparse Window Attention (SWA) algorithm. SWA introduces high sparsity in attention layers and reduces the memory footprint of KV caching at negligible accuracy loss. On the system level, ALISA employs three-phase token-level dynamical scheduling and optimizes the trade-off between caching and recomputation, thus maximizing the overall performance in resource-constrained systems. In a single GPU-CPU system, we demonstrate that under varying workloads, ALISA improves the throughput of baseline systems such as FlexGen and vLLM by up to 3X and 1.9X, respectively.

HAIFIT: Human-Centered AI for Fashion Image Translation

In the realm of fashion design, sketches serve as the canvas for expressing an artist's distinctive drawing style and creative vision, capturing intricate details like stroke variations and texture nuances. The advent of sketch-to-image cross-modal translation technology has notably aided designers. However, existing methods often compromise these sketch details during image generation, resulting in images that deviate from the designer's intended concept. This limitation hampers the ability to offer designers a precise preview of the final output. To overcome this challenge, we introduce HAIFIT, a novel approach that transforms sketches into high-fidelity, lifelike clothing images by integrating multi-scale features and capturing extensive feature map dependencies from diverse perspectives. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations conducted on our self-collected dataset, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methods in generating photorealistic clothing images. Our method excels in preserving the distinctive style and intricate details essential for fashion design applications.

Repoformer: Selective Retrieval for Repository-Level Code Completion

Recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have initiated a new era in repository-level code completion. However, the invariable use of retrieval in existing methods exposes issues in both efficiency and robustness, with a large proportion of the retrieved contexts proving unhelpful or harmful to code language models (code LMs). To tackle the challenges, this paper proposes a selective RAG framework where retrieval is avoided when unnecessary. To power this framework, we design a self-supervised learning approach that enables a code LM to accurately self-evaluate whether retrieval can improve its output quality and robustly leverage the potentially noisy retrieved contexts. Using this LM as both the selective retrieval policy and the generation model, our framework consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art prompting with an invariable retrieval approach on diverse benchmarks including RepoEval, CrossCodeEval, and a new benchmark. Meanwhile, our selective retrieval strategy results in strong efficiency improvements by as much as 70% inference speedup without harming the performance. We demonstrate that our framework effectively accommodates different generation models, retrievers, and programming languages. These advancements position our framework as an important step towards more accurate and efficient repository-level code completion.

BRIEDGE: EEG-Adaptive Edge AI for Multi-Brain to Multi-Robot Interaction

Recent advances in EEG-based BCI technologies have revealed the potential of brain-to-robot collaboration through the integration of sensing, computing, communication, and control. In this paper, we present BRIEDGE as an end-to-end system for multi-brain to multi-robot interaction through an EEG-adaptive neural network and an encoding-decoding communication framework, as illustrated in Fig.1. As depicted, the edge mobile server or edge portable server will collect EEG data from the users and utilize the EEG-adaptive neural network to identify the users' intentions. The encoding-decoding communication framework then encodes the EEG-based semantic information and decodes it into commands in the process of data transmission. To better extract the joint features of heterogeneous EEG data as well as enhance classification accuracy, BRIEDGE introduces an informer-based ProbSparse self-attention mechanism. Meanwhile, parallel and secure transmissions for multi-user multi-task scenarios under physical channels are addressed by dynamic autoencoder and autodecoder communications. From mobile computing and edge AI perspectives, model compression schemes composed of pruning, weight sharing, and quantization are also used to deploy lightweight EEG-adaptive models running on both transmitter and receiver sides. Based on the effectiveness of these components, a code map representing various commands enables multiple users to control multiple intelligent agents concurrently. Our experiments in comparison with state-of-the-art works show that BRIEDGE achieves the best classification accuracy of heterogeneous EEG data, and more stable performance under noisy environments.

Prototyping and Experimental Results for Environment-Aware Millimeter Wave Beam Alignment via Channel Knowledge Map

Channel knowledge map (CKM), which aims to directly reflect the intrinsic channel properties of the local wireless environment, is a novel technique for achieving environmentaware communication. In this paper, to alleviate the large training overhead in millimeter wave (mmWave) beam alignment, an environment-aware and training-free beam alignment prototype is established based on a typical CKM, termed beam index map (BIM). To this end, a general CKM construction method is first presented, and an indoor BIM is constructed offline to learn the candidate transmit and receive beam index pairs for each grid in the experimental area. Furthermore, based on the location information of the receiver (or the dynamic obstacles) from the ultra-wide band (UWB) positioning system, the established BIM is used to achieve training-free beam alignment by directly providing the beam indexes for the transmitter and receiver. Three typical scenarios are considered in the experiment, including quasi-static environment with line-of-sight (LoS) link, quasistatic environment without LoS link and dynamic environment. Besides, the receiver orientation measured from the gyroscope is also used to help CKM predict more accurate beam indexes. The experiment results show that compared with the benchmark location-based beam alignment strategy, the CKM-based beam alignment strategy can achieve much higher received power, which is close to that achieved by exhaustive beam search, but with significantly reduced training overhead.

Qubit-Wise Architecture Search Method for Variational Quantum Circuits

Considering the noise level limit, one crucial aspect for quantum machine learning is to design a high-performing variational quantum circuit architecture with small number of quantum gates. As the classical neural architecture search (NAS), quantum architecture search methods (QAS) employ methods like reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms and supernet optimiza-tion to improve the search efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel qubit-wise architec-ture search (QWAS) method, which progres-sively search one-qubit configuration per stage, and combine with Monte Carlo Tree Search al-gorithm to find good quantum architectures by partitioning the search space into several good and bad subregions. The numerical experimental results indicate that our proposed method can balance the exploration and exploitation of cir-cuit performance and size in some real-world tasks, such as MNIST, Fashion and MOSI. As far as we know, QWAS achieves the state-of-art re-sults of all tasks in the terms of accuracy and circuit size.

G4G:A Generic Framework for High Fidelity Talking Face Generation with Fine-grained Intra-modal Alignment

Despite numerous completed studies, achieving high fidelity talking face generation with highly synchronized lip movements corresponding to arbitrary audio remains a significant challenge in the field. The shortcomings of published studies continue to confuse many researchers. This paper introduces G4G, a generic framework for high fidelity talking face generation with fine-grained intra-modal alignment. G4G can reenact the high fidelity of original video while producing highly synchronized lip movements regardless of given audio tones or volumes. The key to G4G's success is the use of a diagonal matrix to enhance the ordinary alignment of audio-image intra-modal features, which significantly increases the comparative learning between positive and negative samples. Additionally, a multi-scaled supervision module is introduced to comprehensively reenact the perceptional fidelity of original video across the facial region while emphasizing the synchronization of lip movements and the input audio. A fusion network is then used to further fuse the facial region and the rest. Our experimental results demonstrate significant achievements in reenactment of original video quality as well as highly synchronized talking lips. G4G is an outperforming generic framework that can produce talking videos competitively closer to ground truth level than current state-of-the-art methods.