Penetrative AI: Making LLMs Comprehend the Physical World

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities across a range of tasks. Questions, however, persist about the nature of LLMs and their potential to integrate common-sense human knowledge when performing tasks involving information about the real physical world. This paper delves into these questions by exploring how LLMs can be extended to interact with and reason about the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, a concept that we term "\textit{Penetrative AI}". The paper explores such an extension at two levels of LLMs' ability to penetrate into the physical world via the processing of sensory signals. Our preliminary findings indicate that LLMs, with ChatGPT being the representative example in our exploration, have considerable and unique proficiency in employing the knowledge they learned during training for interpreting IoT sensor data and reasoning over them about tasks in the physical realm. Not only this opens up new applications for LLMs beyond traditional text-based tasks, but also enables new ways of incorporating human knowledge in cyber-physical systems.

PriMask: Cascadable and Collusion-Resilient Data Masking for Mobile Cloud Inference

Mobile cloud offloading is indispensable for inference tasks based on large-scale deep models. However, transmitting privacy-rich inference data to the cloud incurs concerns. This paper presents the design of a system called PriMask, in which the mobile device uses a secret small-scale neural network called MaskNet to mask the data before transmission. PriMask significantly weakens the cloud's capability to recover the data or extract certain private attributes. The MaskNet is em cascadable in that the mobile can opt in to or out of its use seamlessly without any modifications to the cloud's inference service. Moreover, the mobiles use different MaskNets, such that the collusion between the cloud and some mobiles does not weaken the protection for other mobiles. We devise a {\em split adversarial learning} method to train a neural network that generates a new MaskNet quickly (within two seconds) at run time. We apply PriMask to three mobile sensing applications with diverse modalities and complexities, i.e., human activity recognition, urban environment crowdsensing, and driver behavior recognition. Results show PriMask's effectiveness in all three applications.

Enhancing Deep Learning Performance of Massive MIMO CSI Feedback

CSI feedback is an important problem of Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology because the feedback overhead is proportional to the number of sub-channels and the number of antennas, both of which scale with the size of the Massive MIMO system. Deep learning-based CSI feedback methods have been widely adopted recently owing to their superior performance. Despite the success, current approaches have not fully exploited the relationship between the characteristics of CSI data and the deep learning framework. In this paper, we propose a jigsaw puzzles aided training strategy (JPTS) to enhance the deep learning-based Massive MIMO CSI feedback approaches by maximizing mutual information between the original CSI and the compressed CSI. We apply JPTS on top of existing state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that by adopting this training strategy, the accuracy can be boosted by 12.07% and 7.01% on average in indoor and outdoor environments, respectively. The proposed method is ready to adopt to existing deep learning frameworks of Massive MIMO CSI feedback. Codes of JPTS are available on GitHub for reproducibility.

CQNet: Complex Input Quantized Neural Network designed for Massive MIMO CSI Feedback

The Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system is a core technology of the next generation communication. With the growing complexity of CSI in massive MIMO system, traditional compressive sensing based CSI feedback has become a bottleneck problem that is limited in piratical. Recently, numerous deep learning based CSI feedback approaches demonstrate the efficiency and potential. However, the existing methods lack a reasonable interpretation of the deep learning model and the accuracy of the model decreases significantly as the CSI compression rate increases. In this paper, from the intrinsic properties of CSI data itself, we devised the corresponding deep learning building blocks to compose a novel neural network CQNet and experiment result shows CQNet outperform the state-of-the-art method with less computational overhead by achieving an average performance improvement of 8.07% in both outdoor and indoor scenarios. In addition, this paper also investigates the reasons for the decrease in model accuracy at large compression rates and proposes a strategy to embed a quantization layer to achieve effective compression, by which the original accuracy loss of 67.19% on average is reduced to 21.96% on average, and the compression rate is increased by 8 times on the original benchmark.

On-the-fly Closed-loop Autonomous Materials Discovery via Bayesian Active Learning

Active learning - the field of machine learning (ML) dedicated to optimal experiment design, has played a part in science as far back as the 18th century when Laplace used it to guide his discovery of celestial mechanics [1]. In this work we focus a closed-loop, active learning-driven autonomous system on another major challenge, the discovery of advanced materials against the exceedingly complex synthesis-processes-structure-property landscape. We demonstrate autonomous research methodology (i.e. autonomous hypothesis definition and evaluation) that can place complex, advanced materials in reach, allowing scientists to fail smarter, learn faster, and spend less resources in their studies, while simultaneously improving trust in scientific results and machine learning tools. Additionally, this robot science enables science-over-the-network, reducing the economic impact of scientists being physically separated from their labs. We used the real-time closed-loop, autonomous system for materials exploration and optimization (CAMEO) at the synchrotron beamline to accelerate the fundamentally interconnected tasks of rapid phase mapping and property optimization, with each cycle taking seconds to minutes, resulting in the discovery of a novel epitaxial nanocomposite phase-change memory material.