Dance of Channel and Sequence: An Efficient Attention-Based Approach for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

In recent developments, predictive models for multivariate time series analysis have exhibited commendable performance through the adoption of the prevalent principle of channel independence. Nevertheless, it is imperative to acknowledge the intricate interplay among channels, which fundamentally influences the outcomes of multivariate predictions. Consequently, the notion of channel independence, while offering utility to a certain extent, becomes increasingly impractical, leading to information degradation. In response to this pressing concern, we present CSformer, an innovative framework characterized by a meticulously engineered two-stage self-attention mechanism. This mechanism is purposefully designed to enable the segregated extraction of sequence-specific and channel-specific information, while sharing parameters to promote synergy and mutual reinforcement between sequences and channels. Simultaneously, we introduce sequence adapters and channel adapters, ensuring the model's ability to discern salient features across various dimensions. Rigorous experimentation, spanning multiple real-world datasets, underscores the robustness of our approach, consistently establishing its position at the forefront of predictive performance across all datasets. This augmentation substantially enhances the capacity for feature extraction inherent to multivariate time series data, facilitating a more comprehensive exploitation of the available information.

Deciphering 'What' and 'Where' Visual Pathways from Spectral Clustering of Layer-Distributed Neural Representations

We present an approach for analyzing grouping information contained within a neural network's activations, permitting extraction of spatial layout and semantic segmentation from the behavior of large pre-trained vision models. Unlike prior work, our method conducts a wholistic analysis of a network's activation state, leveraging features from all layers and obviating the need to guess which part of the model contains relevant information. Motivated by classic spectral clustering, we formulate this analysis in terms of an optimization objective involving a set of affinity matrices, each formed by comparing features within a different layer. Solving this optimization problem using gradient descent allows our technique to scale from single images to dataset-level analysis, including, in the latter, both intra- and inter-image relationships. Analyzing a pre-trained generative transformer provides insight into the computational strategy learned by such models. Equating affinity with key-query similarity across attention layers yields eigenvectors encoding scene spatial layout, whereas defining affinity by value vector similarity yields eigenvectors encoding object identity. This result suggests that key and query vectors coordinate attentional information flow according to spatial proximity (a `where' pathway), while value vectors refine a semantic category representation (a `what' pathway).

Improving the Expressive Power of Deep Neural Networks through Integral Activation Transform

The impressive expressive power of deep neural networks (DNNs) underlies their widespread applicability. However, while the theoretical capacity of deep architectures is high, the practical expressive power achieved through successful training often falls short. Building on the insights gained from Neural ODEs, which explore the depth of DNNs as a continuous variable, in this work, we generalize the traditional fully connected DNN through the concept of continuous width. In the Generalized Deep Neural Network (GDNN), the traditional notion of neurons in each layer is replaced by a continuous state function. Using the finite rank parameterization of the weight integral kernel, we establish that GDNN can be obtained by employing the Integral Activation Transform (IAT) as activation layers within the traditional DNN framework. The IAT maps the input vector to a function space using some basis functions, followed by nonlinear activation in the function space, and then extracts information through the integration with another collection of basis functions. A specific variant, IAT-ReLU, featuring the ReLU nonlinearity, serves as a smooth generalization of the scalar ReLU activation. Notably, IAT-ReLU exhibits a continuous activation pattern when continuous basis functions are employed, making it smooth and enhancing the trainability of the DNN. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that IAT-ReLU outperforms regular ReLU in terms of trainability and better smoothness.

Compact 3D Scene Representation via Self-Organizing Gaussian Grids

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as a highly promising technique for modeling of static 3D scenes. In contrast to Neural Radiance Fields, it utilizes efficient rasterization allowing for very fast rendering at high-quality. However, the storage size is significantly higher, which hinders practical deployment, e.g.~on resource constrained devices. In this paper, we introduce a compact scene representation organizing the parameters of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into a 2D grid with local homogeneity, ensuring a drastic reduction in storage requirements without compromising visual quality during rendering. Central to our idea is the explicit exploitation of perceptual redundancies present in natural scenes. In essence, the inherent nature of a scene allows for numerous permutations of Gaussian parameters to equivalently represent it. To this end, we propose a novel highly parallel algorithm that regularly arranges the high-dimensional Gaussian parameters into a 2D grid while preserving their neighborhood structure. During training, we further enforce local smoothness between the sorted parameters in the grid. The uncompressed Gaussians use the same structure as 3DGS, ensuring a seamless integration with established renderers. Our method achieves a reduction factor of 8x to 26x in size for complex scenes with no increase in training time, marking a substantial leap forward in the domain of 3D scene distribution and consumption. Additional information can be found on our project page: https://fraunhoferhhi.github.io/Self-Organizing-Gaussians/

Localization and Discrete Beamforming with a Large Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

In millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular systems, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are foreseeably deployed with a large number of reflecting elements to achieve high beamforming gains. The large-sized RIS will make radio links fall in the near-field localization regime with spatial non-stationarity issues. Moreover, the discrete phase restriction on the RIS reflection coefficient incurs exponential complexity for discrete beamforming. It remains an open problem to find the optimal RIS reflection coefficient design in polynomial time. To address these issues, we propose a scalable partitioned-far-field protocol that considers both the near-filed non-stationarity and discrete beamforming. The protocol approximates near-field signal propagation using a partitioned-far-field representation to inherit the sparsity from the sophisticated far-field and facilitate the near-field localization scheme. To improve the theoretical localization performance, we propose a fast passive beamforming (FPB) algorithm that optimally solves the discrete RIS beamforming problem, reducing the search complexity from exponential order to linear order. Furthermore, by exploiting the partitioned structure of RIS, we introduce a two-stage coarse-to-fine localization algorithm that leverages both the time delay and angle information. Numerical results demonstrate that centimeter-level localization precision is achieved under medium and high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), revealing that RISs can provide support for low-cost and high-precision localization in future cellular systems.

Adversarial AutoMixup

Data mixing augmentation has been widely applied to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks. Recently, offline data mixing augmentation, e.g. handcrafted and saliency information-based mixup, has been gradually replaced by automatic mixing approaches. Through minimizing two sub-tasks, namely, mixed sample generation and mixup classification in an end-to-end way, AutoMix significantly improves accuracy on image classification tasks. However, as the optimization objective is consistent for the two sub-tasks, this approach is prone to generating consistent instead of diverse mixed samples, which results in overfitting for target task training. In this paper, we propose AdAutomixup, an adversarial automatic mixup augmentation approach that generates challenging samples to train a robust classifier for image classification, by alternatively optimizing the classifier and the mixup sample generator. AdAutomixup comprises two modules, a mixed example generator, and a target classifier. The mixed sample generator aims to produce hard mixed examples to challenge the target classifier while the target classifier`s aim is to learn robust features from hard mixed examples to improve generalization. To prevent the collapse of the inherent meanings of images, we further introduce an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher and cosine similarity to train AdAutomixup in an end-to-end way. Extensive experiments on seven image benchmarks consistently prove that our approach outperforms the state of the art in various classification scenarios.

A Computationally Efficient Neural Video Compression Accelerator Based on a Sparse CNN-Transformer Hybrid Network

Video compression is widely used in digital television, surveillance systems, and virtual reality. Real-time video decoding is crucial in practical scenarios. Recently, neural video compression (NVC) combines traditional coding with deep learning, achieving impressive compression efficiency. Nevertheless, the NVC models involve high computational costs and complex memory access patterns, challenging real-time hardware implementations. To relieve this burden, we propose an algorithm and hardware co-design framework named NVCA for video decoding on resource-limited devices. Firstly, a CNN-Transformer hybrid network is developed to improve compression performance by capturing multi-scale non-local features. In addition, we propose a fast algorithm-based sparse strategy that leverages the dual advantages of pruning and fast algorithms, sufficiently reducing computational complexity while maintaining video compression efficiency. Secondly, a reconfigurable sparse computing core is designed to flexibly support sparse convolutions and deconvolutions based on the fast algorithm-based sparse strategy. Furthermore, a novel heterogeneous layer chaining dataflow is incorporated to reduce off-chip memory traffic stemming from extensive inter-frame motion and residual information. Thirdly, the overall architecture of NVCA is designed and synthesized in TSMC 28nm CMOS technology. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our design provides superior coding quality and up to 22.7x decoding speed improvements over other video compression designs. Meanwhile, our design achieves up to 2.2x improvements in energy efficiency compared to prior accelerators.

Revisiting the Entropy Semiring for Neural Speech Recognition

In streaming settings, speech recognition models have to map sub-sequences of speech to text before the full audio stream becomes available. However, since alignment information between speech and text is rarely available during training, models need to learn it in a completely self-supervised way. In practice, the exponential number of possible alignments makes this extremely challenging, with models often learning peaky or sub-optimal alignments. Prima facie, the exponential nature of the alignment space makes it difficult to even quantify the uncertainty of a model's alignment distribution. Fortunately, it has been known for decades that the entropy of a probabilistic finite state transducer can be computed in time linear to the size of the transducer via a dynamic programming reduction based on semirings. In this work, we revisit the entropy semiring for neural speech recognition models, and show how alignment entropy can be used to supervise models through regularization or distillation. We also contribute an open-source implementation of CTC and RNN-T in the semiring framework that includes numerically stable and highly parallel variants of the entropy semiring. Empirically, we observe that the addition of alignment distillation improves the accuracy and latency of an already well-optimized teacher-student distillation model, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the Librispeech dataset in the streaming scenario.

A Unified Framework for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction via Large Language Models

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial task in online recommendation platforms as it involves estimating the probability of user engagement with advertisements or items by clicking on them. Given the availability of various services like online shopping, ride-sharing, food delivery, and professional services on commercial platforms, recommendation systems in these platforms are required to make CTR predictions across multiple domains rather than just a single domain. However, multi-domain click-through rate (MDCTR) prediction remains a challenging task in online recommendation due to the complex mutual influence between domains. Traditional MDCTR models typically encode domains as discrete identifiers, ignoring rich semantic information underlying. Consequently, they can hardly generalize to new domains. Besides, existing models can be easily dominated by some specific domains, which results in significant performance drops in the other domains (\ie the ``seesaw phenomenon``). In this paper, we propose a novel solution Uni-CTR to address the above challenges. Uni-CTR leverages a backbone Large Language Model (LLM) to learn layer-wise semantic representations that capture commonalities between domains. Uni-CTR also uses several domain-specific networks to capture the characteristics of each domain. Note that we design a masked loss strategy so that these domain-specific networks are decoupled from backbone LLM. This allows domain-specific networks to remain unchanged when incorporating new or removing domains, thereby enhancing the flexibility and scalability of the system significantly. Experimental results on three public datasets show that Uni-CTR outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) MDCTR models significantly. Furthermore, Uni-CTR demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in zero-shot prediction. We have applied Uni-CTR in industrial scenarios, confirming its efficiency.

Beyond the Label Itself: Latent Labels Enhance Semi-supervised Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation

As the exorbitant expense of labeling autopilot datasets and the growing trend of utilizing unlabeled data, semi-supervised segmentation on point clouds becomes increasingly imperative. Intuitively, finding out more ``unspoken words'' (i.e., latent instance information) beyond the label itself should be helpful to improve performance. In this paper, we discover two types of latent labels behind the displayed label embedded in LiDAR and image data. First, in the LiDAR Branch, we propose a novel augmentation, Cylinder-Mix, which is able to augment more yet reliable samples for training. Second, in the Image Branch, we propose the Instance Position-scale Learning (IPSL) Module to learn and fuse the information of instance position and scale, which is from a 2D pre-trained detector and a type of latent label obtained from 3D to 2D projection. Finally, the two latent labels are embedded into the multi-modal panoptic segmentation network. The ablation of the IPSL module demonstrates its robust adaptability, and the experiments evaluated on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art method, LaserMix.