Due to the rising privacy concerns on sensitive client data and trained models like Transformers, secure multi-party computation (MPC) techniques are employed to enable secure inference despite attendant overhead. Existing works attempt to reduce the overhead using more MPC-friendly non-linear function approximations. However, the integration of quantization widely used in plaintext inference into the MPC domain remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we propose the framework named Ditto to enable more efficient quantization-aware secure Transformer inference. Concretely, we first incorporate an MPC-friendly quantization into Transformer inference and employ a quantization-aware distillation procedure to maintain the model utility. Then, we propose novel MPC primitives to support the type conversions that are essential in quantization and implement the quantization-aware MPC execution of secure quantized inference. This approach significantly decreases both computation and communication overhead, leading to improvements in overall efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on Bert and GPT2 models to evaluate the performance of Ditto. The results demonstrate that Ditto is about $3.14\sim 4.40\times$ faster than MPCFormer (ICLR 2023) and $1.44\sim 2.35\times$ faster than the state-of-the-art work PUMA with negligible utility degradation.

Numerous applications in biology, statistics, science, and engineering require generating samples from high-dimensional probability distributions. In recent years, the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method has emerged as a state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, exploiting the shape of such high-dimensional target distributions to efficiently generate samples. Despite its impressive empirical success and increasing popularity, its wide-scale adoption remains limited due to the high computational cost of gradient calculation. Moreover, applying this method is impossible when the gradient of the posterior cannot be computed (for example, with black-box simulators). To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm with a surrogate model. In this multi-fidelity algorithm, the acceptance probability is computed in the first stage via a standard HMC proposal using an inexpensive differentiable surrogate model, and if the proposal is accepted, the posterior is evaluated in the second stage using the high-fidelity (HF) numerical solver. Splitting the standard HMC algorithm into these two stages allows for approximating the gradient of the posterior efficiently, while producing accurate posterior samples by using HF numerical solvers in the second stage. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm for a range of problems, including linear and nonlinear Bayesian inverse problems with in-silico data and experimental data. The proposed algorithm is shown to seamlessly integrate with various low-fidelity and HF models, priors, and datasets. Remarkably, our proposed method outperforms the traditional HMC algorithm in both computational and statistical efficiency by several orders of magnitude, all while retaining or improving the accuracy in computed posterior statistics.

Prompts to large language models (LLMs) have evolved beyond simple user questions. For LLMs to solve complex problems, today's practices include domain-specific instructions, illustration of tool usages, and long context, such as textbook chapters in prompts. As such, many parts of prompts are repetitive across requests, and their attention computation results can be reused. However, today's LLM serving systems treat every request in isolation, missing the opportunity of computation reuse. This paper proposes Preble, the first distributed LLM serving platform that targets and optimizes for prompt sharing. We perform a study on five popular LLM workloads. Based on our study results, we designed a distributed scheduling system that co-optimizes computation reuse and load balancing. Our evaluation of Preble on two to 8 GPUs with real workloads and request arrival patterns on two open-source LLM models shows that Preble outperforms the state-of-the-art average latency by 1.5X to 14.5X and p99 by 2X to 10X.

In this study, we propose a safety-critical compliant control strategy designed to strictly enforce interaction force constraints during the physical interaction of robots with unknown environments. The interaction force constraint is interpreted as a new force-constrained control barrier function (FC-CBF) by exploiting the generalized contact model and the prior information of the environment, i.e., the prior stiffness and rest position, for robot kinematics. The difference between the real environment and the generalized contact model is approximated by constructing a tracking differentiator, and its estimation error is quantified based on Lyapunov theory. By interpreting strict interaction safety specification as a dynamic constraint, restricting the desired joint angular rates in kinematics, the proposed approach modifies nominal compliant controllers using quadratic programming, ensuring adherence to interaction force constraints in unknown environments. The strict force constraint and the stability of the closed-loop system are rigorously analyzed. Experimental tests using a UR3e industrial robot with different environments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving the force constraints in unknown environments.

Accurately estimating a Health Index (HI) from condition monitoring data (CM) is essential for reliable and interpretable prognostics and health management (PHM) in complex systems. In most scenarios, complex systems operate under varying operating conditions and can exhibit different fault modes, making unsupervised inference of an HI from CM data a significant challenge. Hybrid models combining prior knowledge about degradation with deep learning models have been proposed to overcome this challenge. However, previously suggested hybrid models for HI estimation usually rely heavily on system-specific information, limiting their transferability to other systems. In this work, we propose an unsupervised hybrid method for HI estimation that integrates general knowledge about degradation into the convolutional autoencoder's model architecture and learning algorithm, enhancing its applicability across various systems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in two case studies from different domains: turbofan engines and lithium batteries. The results show that the proposed method outperforms other competitive alternatives, including residual-based methods, in terms of HI quality and their utility for Remaining Useful Life (RUL) predictions. The case studies also highlight the comparable performance of our proposed method with a supervised model trained with HI labels.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for 3D scene representation, offering high-fidelity renderings and reconstructions from a set of sparse and unstructured sensor data. In the context of autonomous robotics, where perception and understanding of the environment are pivotal, NeRF holds immense promise for improving performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and analysis of the state-of-the-art techniques for utilizing NeRF to enhance the capabilities of autonomous robots. We especially focus on the perception, localization and navigation, and decision-making modules of autonomous robots and delve into tasks crucial for autonomous operation, including 3D reconstruction, segmentation, pose estimation, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), navigation and planning, and interaction. Our survey meticulously benchmarks existing NeRF-based methods, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Moreover, we explore promising avenues for future research and development in this domain. Notably, we discuss the integration of advanced techniques such as 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), large language models (LLM), and generative AIs, envisioning enhanced reconstruction efficiency, scene understanding, decision-making capabilities. This survey serves as a roadmap for researchers seeking to leverage NeRFs to empower autonomous robots, paving the way for innovative solutions that can navigate and interact seamlessly in complex environments.

Satellite imagery has played an increasingly important role in post-disaster building damage assessment. Unfortunately, current methods still rely on manual visual interpretation, which is often time-consuming and can cause very low accuracy. To address the limitations of manual interpretation, there has been a significant increase in efforts to automate the process. We present a solution that performs the two most important tasks in building damage assessment, segmentation and classification, through deep-learning models. We show our results submitted as part of the xView2 Challenge, a competition to design better models for identifying buildings and their damage level after exposure to multiple kinds of natural disasters. Our best model couples a building identification semantic segmentation convolutional neural network (CNN) to a building damage classification CNN, with a combined F1 score of 0.66, surpassing the xView2 challenge baseline F1 score of 0.28. We find that though our model was able to identify buildings with relatively high accuracy, building damage classification across various disaster types is a difficult task due to the visual similarity between different damage levels and different damage distribution between disaster types, highlighting the fact that it may be important to have a probabilistic prior estimate regarding disaster damage in order to obtain accurate predictions.

Abstract-- Passive tumbling uses natural forces like gravity for efficient travel. But without an active means of control, passive tumblers must rely entirely on external forces. Northeastern University's COBRA is a snake robot that can morph into a ring, which employs passive tumbling to traverse down slopes. However, due to its articulated joints, it is also capable of dynamically altering its posture to manipulate the dynamics of the tumbling locomotion for active steering. This paper presents a modelling and control strategy based on collocation optimization for real-time steering of COBRA's tumbling locomotion.

Aerial Manipulator Systems (AMS) have garnered significant interest for their utility in aerial operations. Nonetheless, challenges related to the manipulator's limited stiffness and the coupling disturbance with manipulator movement persist. This paper introduces the Aerial Tendon-Driven Manipulator (ATDM), an innovative AMS that integrates a hexrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with a 4-degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) anthropomorphic tendon-driven manipulator. The design of the manipulator is anatomically inspired, emulating the human arm anatomy from the shoulder joint downward. To enhance the structural integrity and performance, finite element topology optimization and lattice optimization are employed on the links to replicate the radially graded structure characteristic of bone, this approach effectively reduces weight and inertia while simultaneously maximizing stiffness. A novel tensioning mechanism with adjustable tension is introduced to address cable relaxation, and a Tension-amplification tendon mechanism is implemented to increase the manipulator's overall stiffness and output. The paper presents a kinematic model based on virtual coupled joints, a comprehensive workspace analysis, and detailed calculations of output torques and stiffness for individual arm joints. The prototype arm has a total weight of 2.7 kg, with the end effector contributing only 0.818 kg. By positioning all actuators at the base, coupling disturbance are minimized. The paper includes a detailed mechanical design and validates the system's performance through semi-physical multi-body dynamics simulations, confirming the efficacy of the proposed design.

To accelerate the process of materials design, materials science has increasingly used data driven techniques to extract information from collected data. Specially, machine learning (ML) algorithms, which span the ML discipline, have demonstrated ability to predict various properties of materials with the level of accuracy similar to explicit calculation of quantum mechanical theories, but with significantly reduced run time and computational resources. Within ML, graph neural networks have emerged as an important algorithm within the field of machine learning, since they are capable of predicting accurately a wide range of important physical, chemical and electronic properties due to their higher learning ability based on the graph representation of material and molecular descriptors through the aggregation of information embedded within the graph. In parallel with the development of state of the art classical machine learning applications, the fusion of quantum computing and machine learning have created a new paradigm where classical machine learning model can be augmented with quantum layers which are able to encode high dimensional data more efficiently. Leveraging the structure of existing algorithms, we developed a unique and novel gradient free hybrid quantum classical convoluted graph neural network (HyQCGNN) to predict formation energies of perovskite materials. The performance of our hybrid statistical model is competitive with the results obtained purely from a classical convoluted graph neural network, and other classical machine learning algorithms, such as XGBoost. Consequently, our study suggests a new pathway to explore how quantum feature encoding and parametric quantum circuits can yield drastic improvements of complex ML algorithm like graph neural network.