South America
MosquIoT: A System Based on IoT and Machine Learning for the Monitoring of Aedes aegypti (Diptera: Culicidae)
Aira, Javier, Montes, Teresa Olivares, Delicado, Francisco M., Vezzani, Darìo
Millions of people around the world are infected with mosquito-borne diseases each year. One of the most dangerous species is Aedes aegypti, the main vector of viruses such as dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika, among others. Mosquito prevention and eradication campaigns are essential to avoid major public health consequences. In this respect, entomological surveillance is an important tool. At present, this traditional monitoring tool is executed manually and requires digital transformation to help authorities make better decisions, improve their planning efforts, speed up execution, and better manage available resources. Therefore, new technological tools based on proven techniques need to be designed and developed. However, such tools should also be cost-effective, autonomous, reliable, and easy to implement, and should be enabled by connectivity and multi-platform software applications. This paper presents the design, development, and testing of an innovative system named MosquIoT. It is based on traditional ovitraps with embedded Internet of Things (IoT) and Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) technologies, which enable the detection and quantification of Ae. aegypti eggs. This innovative and promising solution may help dynamically understand the behavior of Ae. aegypti populations in cities, shifting from the current reactive entomological monitoring model to a proactive and predictive digital one.
MultiMUC: Multilingual Template Filling on MUC-4
Gantt, William, Behzad, Shabnam, An, Hannah YoungEun, Chen, Yunmo, White, Aaron Steven, Van Durme, Benjamin, Yarmohammadi, Mahsa
We introduce MultiMUC, the first multilingual parallel corpus for template filling, comprising translations of the classic MUC-4 template filling benchmark into five languages: Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, and Russian. We obtain automatic translations from a strong multilingual machine translation system and manually project the original English annotations into each target language. For all languages, we also provide human translations for sentences in the dev and test splits that contain annotated template arguments. Finally, we present baselines on MultiMUC both with state-of-the-art template filling models and with ChatGPT.
Neural Network Training on Encrypted Data with TFHE
Montero, Luis, Frery, Jordan, Kherfallah, Celia, Bredehoft, Roman, Stoian, Andrei
We present an approach to outsourcing of training neural networks while preserving data confidentiality from malicious parties. We use fully homomorphic encryption to build a unified training approach that works on encrypted data and learns quantized neural network models. The data can be horizontally or vertically split between multiple parties, enabling collaboration on confidential data. We train logistic regression and multi-layer perceptrons on several datasets.
Stolen Subwords: Importance of Vocabularies for Machine Translation Model Stealing
In learning-based functionality stealing, the attacker is trying to build a local model based on the victim's outputs. The attacker has to make choices regarding the local model's architecture, optimization method and, specifically for NLP models, subword vocabulary, such as BPE. On the machine translation task, we explore (1) whether the choice of the vocabulary plays a role in model stealing scenarios and (2) if it is possible to extract the victim's vocabulary. We find that the vocabulary itself does not have a large effect on the local model's performance. Given gray-box model access, it is possible to collect the victim's vocabulary by collecting the outputs (detokenized subwords on the output). The results of the minimum effect of vocabulary choice are important more broadly for black-box knowledge distillation.
Charting the Future of AI in Project-Based Learning: A Co-Design Exploration with Students
Zheng, Chengbo, Yuan, Kangyu, Guo, Bingcan, Mogavi, Reza Hadi, Peng, Zhenhui, Ma, Shuai, Ma, Xiaojuan
The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by students in learning presents new challenges for assessing their learning outcomes in project-based learning (PBL). This paper introduces a co-design study to explore the potential of students' AI usage data as a novel material for PBL assessment. We conducted workshops with 18 college students, encouraging them to speculate an alternative world where they could freely employ AI in PBL while needing to report this process to assess their skills and contributions. Our workshops yielded various scenarios of students' use of AI in PBL and ways of analyzing these uses grounded by students' vision of education goal transformation. We also found students with different attitudes toward AI exhibited distinct preferences in how to analyze and understand the use of AI. Based on these findings, we discuss future research opportunities on student-AI interactions and understanding AI-enhanced learning.
Gravity-Informed Deep Learning Framework for Predicting Ship Traffic Flow and Invasion Risk of Non-Indigenous Species via Ballast Water Discharge
Song, Ruixin, Spadon, Gabriel, Pelot, Ronald, Matwin, Stan, Soares, Amilcar
Invasive species in water bodies pose a major threat to the environment and biodiversity globally. Due to increased transportation and trade, non-native species have been introduced to new environments, causing damage to ecosystems and leading to economic losses in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Therefore, there is a pressing need for risk assessment and management techniques to mitigate the impact of these invasions. This study aims to develop a new physics-inspired model to forecast maritime shipping traffic and thus inform risk assessment of invasive species spread through global transportation networks. Inspired by the gravity model for international trades, our model considers various factors that influence the likelihood and impact of vessel activities, such as shipping flux density, distance between ports, trade flow, and centrality measures of transportation hubs. Additionally, by analyzing the risk network of invasive species, we provide a comprehensive framework for assessing the invasion threat level given a pair of origin and destination. Accordingly, this paper introduces transformers to gravity models to rebuild the short- and long-term dependencies that make the risk analysis feasible. Thus, we introduce a physics-inspired framework that achieves an 89% segmentation accuracy for existing and non-existing trajectories and an 84.8% accuracy for the number of vessels flowing between key port areas, representing more than 10% improvement over the traditional deep-gravity model. Along these lines, this research contributes to a better understanding of invasive species risk assessment. It allows policymakers, conservationists, and stakeholders to prioritize management actions by identifying high-risk invasion pathways. Besides, our model is versatile and can include new data sources, making it suitable for assessing species invasion risks in a changing global landscape.
Model Tells You What to Discard: Adaptive KV Cache Compression for LLMs
Ge, Suyu, Zhang, Yunan, Liu, Liyuan, Zhang, Minjia, Han, Jiawei, Gao, Jianfeng
In this study, we introduce adaptive KV cache compression, a plug-and-play method that reduces the memory footprint of generative inference for Large Language Models (LLMs). Different from the conventional KV cache that retains key and value vectors for all context tokens, we conduct targeted profiling to discern the intrinsic structure of attention modules. Based on the recognized structure, we then construct the KV cache in an adaptive manner: evicting long-range contexts on attention heads emphasizing local contexts, discarding non-special tokens on attention heads centered on special tokens, and only employing the standard KV cache for attention heads that broadly attend to all tokens. Moreover, with the lightweight attention profiling used to guide the construction of the adaptive KV cache, FastGen can be deployed without resource-intensive fine-tuning or re-training. In our experiments across various asks, FastGen demonstrates substantial reduction on GPU memory consumption with negligible generation quality loss. We will release our code and the compatible CUDA kernel for reproducibility.
Measuring Policy Distance for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Hu, Tianyi, Pu, Zhiqiang, Ai, Xiaolin, Qiu, Tenghai, Yi, Jianqiang
Diversity plays a crucial role in improving the performance of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Currently, many diversity-based methods have been developed to overcome the drawbacks of excessive parameter sharing in traditional MARL. However, there remains a lack of a general metric to quantify policy differences among agents. Such a metric would not only facilitate the evaluation of the diversity evolution in multi-agent systems, but also provide guidance for the design of diversity-based MARL algorithms. In this paper, we propose the multi-agent policy distance (MAPD), a general tool for measuring policy differences in MARL. By learning the conditional representations of agents' decisions, MAPD can computes the policy distance between any pair of agents. Furthermore, we extend MAPD to a customizable version, which can quantify differences among agent policies on specified aspects. Based on the online deployment of MAPD, we design a multi-agent dynamic parameter sharing (MADPS) algorithm as an example of the MAPD's applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is effective in measuring differences in agent policies and specific behavioral tendencies. Moreover, in comparison to other methods of parameter sharing, MADPS exhibits superior performance.
A Centralized Reinforcement Learning Framework for Adaptive Clustering with Low Control Overhead in IoT Networks
Jurado-Lasso, F. Fernando, Jurado, J. F., Fafoutis, Xenofon
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a pivotal role in enabling Internet of Things (IoT) devices with sensing and actuation capabilities. Operating in remote and resource-constrained environments, these IoT devices face challenges related to energy consumption, crucial for network longevity. Clustering protocols have emerged as an effective solution to alleviate energy burdens on IoT devices. This paper introduces Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy with Reinforcement Learning-based Controller (LEACH-RLC), a novel clustering protocol that employs a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) for strategic selection of cluster heads (CHs) and node-to-cluster assignments. Additionally, it integrates a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent to minimize control overhead by learning optimal timings for generating new clusters. Addressing key research questions, LEACH-RLC seeks to balance control overhead reduction without compromising overall network performance. Through extensive simulations, this paper investigates the frequency and opportune moments for generating new clustering solutions. Results demonstrate the superior performance of LEACH-RLC over conventional LEACH and LEACH-C, showcasing enhanced network lifetime, reduced average energy consumption, and minimized control overhead. The proposed protocol contributes to advancing the efficiency and adaptability of WSNs, addressing critical challenges in IoT deployments.
EEG for fatigue monitoring
Physiological fatigue, a state of reduced cognitive and physical performance resulting from prolonged mental or physical exertion, poses significant challenges in various domains, including healthcare, aviation, transportation, and industrial sectors. As the understanding of fatigue's impact on human performance grows, there is a growing interest in developing effective fatigue monitoring techniques. Among these techniques, electroencephalography (EEG) has emerged as a promising tool for objectively assessing physiological fatigue due to its non-invasiveness, high temporal resolution, and sensitivity to neural activity. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the current state of the use of EEG for monitoring physiological fatigue. Keywords: EEG, fatigue, physical activity, brain-computer interface, wearable device, healthcare 1. Introduction Since 1878 the French physiologist Angelo Mosso [52] has carried out pioneering studies of the blood circulation in the brain during mental and physical work, initiating an understanding of the physiological basis of fatigue and the study of physiological fatigue, research efforts have already spanned several disciplines, including psychology, physiology, neurology, and occupational health. Over the years, scientists and researchers have made significant contributions to understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of physiological fatigue. The prediction of physiological fatigue is critical in areas where performance, safety, human well-being and especially sports are of paramount importance. By understanding and predicting fatigue levels it is possibly take proactive steps to reduce fatigue-related risks, optimize performance, and improve overall health and safety.