NL2KQL: From Natural Language to Kusto Query

Data is growing rapidly in volume and complexity. Proficiency in database query languages is pivotal for crafting effective queries. As coding assistants become more prevalent, there is significant opportunity to enhance database query languages. The Kusto Query Language (KQL) is a widely used query language for large semi-structured data such as logs, telemetries, and time-series for big data analytics platforms. This paper introduces NL2KQL an innovative framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to convert natural language queries (NLQs) to KQL queries. The proposed NL2KQL framework includes several key components: Schema Refiner which narrows down the schema to its most pertinent elements; the Few-shot Selector which dynamically selects relevant examples from a few-shot dataset; and the Query Refiner which repairs syntactic and semantic errors in KQL queries. Additionally, this study outlines a method for generating large datasets of synthetic NLQ-KQL pairs which are valid within a specific database contexts. To validate NL2KQL's performance, we utilize an array of online (based on query execution) and offline (based on query parsing) metrics. Through ablation studies, the significance of each framework component is examined, and the datasets used for benchmarking are made publicly available. This work is the first of its kind and is compared with available baselines to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Towards the Development of a Real-Time Deepfake Audio Detection System in Communication Platforms

Deepfake audio poses a rising threat in communication platforms, necessitating real-time detection for audio stream integrity. Unlike traditional non-real-time approaches, this study assesses the viability of employing static deepfake audio detection models in real-time communication platforms. An executable software is developed for cross-platform compatibility, enabling real-time execution. Two deepfake audio detection models based on Resnet and LCNN architectures are implemented using the ASVspoof 2019 dataset, achieving benchmark performances compared to ASVspoof 2019 challenge baselines. The study proposes strategies and frameworks for enhancing these models, paving the way for real-time deepfake audio detection in communication platforms. This work contributes to the advancement of audio stream security, ensuring robust detection capabilities in dynamic, real-time communication scenarios.

Unified, Verifiable Neural Simulators for Electromagnetic Wave Inverse Problems

Simulators based on neural networks offer a path to orders-of-magnitude faster electromagnetic wave simulations. Existing models, however, only address narrowly tailored classes of problems and only scale to systems of a few dozen degrees of freedom (DoFs). Here, we demonstrate a single, unified model capable of addressing scattering simulations with thousands of DoFs, of any wavelength, any illumination wavefront, and freeform materials, within broad configurable bounds. Based on an attentional multi-conditioning strategy, our method also allows non-recurrent supervision on and prediction of intermediate physical states, which provides improved generalization with no additional data-generation cost. Using this O(1)-time intermediate prediction capability, we propose and prove a rigorous, efficiently computable upper bound on prediction error, allowing accuracy guarantees at inference time for all predictions. After training solely on randomized systems, we demonstrate the unified model across a suite of challenging multi-disciplinary inverse problems, finding strong efficacy and speed improvements up to 96% for problems in optical tomography, beam shaping through volumetric random media, and freeform photonic inverse design, with no problem-specific training. Our findings demonstrate a path to universal, verifiably accurate neural surrogates for existing scattering simulators, and our conditioning and training methods are directly applicable to any PDE admitting a time-domain iterative solver.

Force-EvT: A Closer Look at Robotic Gripper Force Measurement with Event-based Vision Transformer

Robotic grippers are receiving increasing attention in various industries as essential components of robots for interacting and manipulating objects. While significant progress has been made in the past, conventional rigid grippers still have limitations in handling irregular objects and can damage fragile objects. We have shown that soft grippers offer deformability to adapt to a variety of object shapes and maximize object protection. At the same time, dynamic vision sensors (e.g., event-based cameras) are capable of capturing small changes in brightness and streaming them asynchronously as events, unlike RGB cameras, which do not perform well in low-light and fast-moving environments. In this paper, a dynamic-vision-based algorithm is proposed to measure the force applied to the gripper. In particular, we first set up a DVXplorer Lite series event camera to capture twenty-five sets of event data. Second, motivated by the impressive performance of the Vision Transformer (ViT) algorithm in dense image prediction tasks, we propose a new approach that demonstrates the potential for real-time force estimation and meets the requirements of real-world scenarios. We extensively evaluate the proposed algorithm on a wide range of scenarios and settings, and show that it consistently outperforms recent approaches.

AMOR: Ambiguous Authorship Order

As we all know, writing scientific papers together with our beloved colleagues is a truly remarkable experience (partially): endless discussions about the same useless paragraph over and over again, followed by long days and long nights -- both at the same time. What a wonderful ride it is! What a beautiful life we have. But wait, there's one tiny little problem that utterly shatters the peace, turning even renowned scientists into bloodthirsty monsters: author order. The reason is that, contrary to widespread opinion, it's not the font size that matters, but the way things are ordered. Of course, this is a fairly well-known fact among scientists all across the planet (and beyond) and explains clearly why we regularly have to read about yet another escalated paper submission in local police reports. In this paper, we take an important step backwards to tackle this issue by solving the so-called author ordering problem (AOP) once and for all. Specifically, we propose AMOR, a system that replaces silly constructs like co-first or co-middle authorship with a simple yet easy probabilistic approach based on random shuffling of the author list at viewing time. In addition to AOP, we also solve the ambiguous author ordering citation problem} (AAOCP) on the fly. Stop author violence, be human.

TON-VIO: Online Time Offset Modeling Networks for Robust Temporal Alignment in High Dynamic Motion VIO

Temporal misalignment (time offset) between sensors is common in low cost visual-inertial odometry (VIO) systems. Such temporal misalignment introduces inconsistent constraints for state estimation, leading to a significant positioning drift especially in high dynamic motion scenarios. In this article, we focus on online temporal calibration to reduce the positioning drift caused by the time offset for high dynamic motion VIO. For the time offset observation model, most existing methods rely on accurate state estimation or stable visual tracking. For the prediction model, current methods oversimplify the time offset as a constant value with white Gaussian noise. However, these ideal conditions are seldom satisfied in real high dynamic scenarios, resulting in the poor performance. In this paper, we introduce online time offset modeling networks (TON) to enhance real-time temporal calibration. TON improves the accuracy of time offset observation and prediction modeling. Specifically, for observation modeling, we propose feature velocity observation networks to enhance velocity computation for features in unstable visual tracking conditions. For prediction modeling, we present time offset prediction networks to learn its evolution pattern. To highlight the effectiveness of our method, we integrate the proposed TON into both optimization-based and filter-based VIO systems. Simulation and real-world experiments are conducted to demonstrate the enhanced performance of our approach. Additionally, to contribute to the VIO community, we will open-source the code of our method on: https://github.com/Franky-X/FVON-TPN.

A Novel Sector-Based Algorithm for an Optimized Star-Galaxy Classification

This paper introduces a novel sector-based methodology for star-galaxy classification, leveraging the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey data (SDSS-DR18). By strategically segmenting the sky into sectors aligned with SDSS observational patterns and employing a dedicated convolutional neural network (CNN), we achieve state-of-the-art performance for star galaxy classification. Our preliminary results demonstrate a promising pathway for efficient and precise astronomical analysis, especially in real-time observational settings.

Digital Twin Channel for 6G: Concepts, Architectures and Potential Applications

Digital twin channel (DTC) is the real-time mapping of a wireless channel from the physical world to the digital world, which is expected to provide significant performance enhancements for the sixth-generation (6G) air-interface design. In this work, we first define five evolution levels of channel twins with the progression of wireless communication. The fifth level, autonomous DTC, is elaborated with multi-dimensional factors such as methodology, characterization precision, and data category. Then, we provide detailed insights into the requirements and architecture of a complete DTC for 6G. Subsequently, a sensing-enhanced real-time channel prediction platform and experimental validations are exhibited. Finally, drawing from the vision of the 6G network, we explore the potential applications and the open issues in future DTC research.

Transfer learning applications for anomaly detection in wind turbines

Anomaly detection in wind turbines typically involves using normal behaviour models to detect faults early. However, training autoencoder models for each turbine is time-consuming and resource intensive. Thus, transfer learning becomes essential for wind turbines with limited data or applications with limited computational resources. This study examines how cross-turbine transfer learning can be applied to autoencoder-based anomaly detection. Here, autoencoders are combined with constant thresholds for the reconstruction error to determine if input data contains an anomaly. The models are initially trained on one year's worth of data from one or more source wind turbines. They are then fine-tuned using smaller amounts of data from another turbine. Three methods for fine-tuning are investigated: adjusting the entire autoencoder, only the decoder, or only the threshold of the model. The performance of the transfer learning models is compared to baseline models that were trained on one year's worth of data from the target wind turbine. The results of the tests conducted in this study indicate that models trained on data of multiple wind turbines do not improve the anomaly detection capability compared to models trained on data of one source wind turbine. In addition, modifying the model's threshold can lead to comparable or even superior performance compared to the baseline, whereas fine-tuning the decoder or autoencoder further enhances the models' performance.

The RealHumanEval: Evaluating Large Language Models' Abilities to Support Programmers

Evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for code has primarily relied on static benchmarks, including HumanEval (Chen et al., 2021), which measure the ability of LLMs to generate complete code that passes unit tests. As LLMs are increasingly used as programmer assistants, we study whether gains on existing benchmarks translate to gains in programmer productivity when coding with LLMs, including time spent coding. In addition to static benchmarks, we investigate the utility of preference metrics that might be used as proxies to measure LLM helpfulness, such as code acceptance or copy rates. To do so, we introduce RealHumanEval, a web interface to measure the ability of LLMs to assist programmers, through either autocomplete or chat support. We conducted a user study (N=213) using RealHumanEval in which users interacted with six LLMs of varying base model performance. Despite static benchmarks not incorporating humans-in-the-loop, we find that improvements in benchmark performance lead to increased programmer productivity; however gaps in benchmark versus human performance are not proportional -- a trend that holds across both forms of LLM support. In contrast, we find that programmer preferences do not correlate with their actual performance, motivating the need for better, human-centric proxy signals. We also open-source RealHumanEval to enable human-centric evaluation of new models and the study data to facilitate efforts to improve code models.