Because of the increased popularity of Machine Learning (ML) workloads, there is a rising demand for I/O systems that can effectively accommodate their distinct I/O access patterns. Write operation bursts commonly dominate traditional workloads; however, ML workloads are usually read-intensive and use many small files [99]. Due to the absence of a well-established consensus on the preferred I/O stack for ML workloads, numerous developers resort to crafting their own ad-hoc algorithms and storage systems to cater to the specific requirements of their applications [50]. This can result in sub-optimal application performance due to the under-utilization of the storage system, prompting the necessity for novel I/O optimization methods tailored to the demands of ML workloads. In Figure 1, we show the evolving I/O stack used for running ML workloads (on the right side) in comparison with the traditional HPC I/O stack (on the left side). Traditional HPC I/O stack has been developed to support massive parallelism. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

The rapid growth of machine learning (ML) has led to an increased demand for computational power, resulting in larger data centers (DCs) and higher energy consumption. To address this issue and reduce carbon emissions, intelligent design and control of DC components such as IT servers, cabinets, HVAC cooling, flexible load shifting, and battery energy storage are essential. However, the complexity of designing and controlling them in tandem presents a significant challenge. While some individual components like CFD-based design and Reinforcement Learning (RL) based HVAC control have been researched, there's a gap in the holistic design and optimization covering all elements simultaneously. To tackle this, we've developed DCRL-Green, a multi-agent RL environment that empowers the ML community to design data centers and research, develop, and refine RL controllers for carbon footprint reduction in DCs. It is a flexible, modular, scalable, and configurable platform that can handle large High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. Furthermore, in its default setup, DCRL-Green provides a benchmark for evaluating single as well as multi-agent RL algorithms. It easily allows users to subclass the default implementations and design their own control approaches, encouraging community development for sustainable data centers. Open Source Link: https://github.com/HewlettPackard/dc-rl

X-ray and electron diffraction-based microscopy use bragg peak detection and ptychography to perform 3-D imaging at an atomic resolution. Typically, these techniques are implemented using computationally complex tasks such as a Psuedo-Voigt function or solving a complex inverse problem. Recently, the use of deep neural networks has improved the existing state-of-the-art approaches. However, the design and development of the neural network models depends on time and labor intensive tuning of the model by application experts. To that end, we propose a hyperparameter (HPS) and neural architecture search (NAS) approach to automate the design and optimization of the neural network models for model size, energy consumption and throughput. We demonstrate the improved performance of the auto-tuned models when compared to the manually tuned BraggNN and PtychoNN benchmark. We study and demonstrate the importance of the exploring the search space of tunable hyperparameters in enhancing the performance of bragg peak detection and ptychographic reconstruction. Our NAS and HPS of (1) BraggNN achieves a 31.03\% improvement in bragg peak detection accuracy with a 87.57\% reduction in model size, and (2) PtychoNN achieves a 16.77\% improvement in model accuracy and a 12.82\% reduction in model size when compared to the baseline PtychoNN model. When inferred on the Orin-AGX platform, the optimized Braggnn and Ptychonn models demonstrate a 10.51\% and 9.47\% reduction in inference latency and a 44.18\% and 15.34\% reduction in energy consumption when compared to their respective baselines, when inferred in the Orin-AGX edge platform.

Despite being trained specifically to follow user instructions, today's language models perform poorly when instructed to produce random outputs. For example, when prompted to pick a number uniformly between one and ten Llama-2-13B-chat disproportionately favors the number five, and when tasked with picking a first name at random, Mistral-7B-Instruct chooses Avery 40 times more often than we would expect based on the U.S. population. When these language models are used for real-world tasks where diversity of outputs is crucial, such as language model assisted dataset construction, their inability to produce diffuse distributions over valid choices is a major hurdle. In this work, we propose a fine-tuning method that encourages language models to output distributions that are diffuse over valid outcomes. The methods we introduce generalize across a variety of tasks and distributions and make large language models practical for synthetic dataset generation with little human intervention.

The volume of remote sensing data is experiencing rapid growth, primarily due to the plethora of space and air platforms equipped with an array of sensors. Due to limited hardware and battery constraints the data is transmitted back to Earth for processing. The large amounts of data along with security concerns call for new compression and encryption techniques capable of preserving reconstruction quality while minimizing the transmission cost of this data back to Earth. This study investigates image compression based on convolutional variational autoencoders (CVAE), which are capable of substantially reducing the volume of transmitted data while guaranteeing secure lossy image reconstruction. CVAEs have been demonstrated to outperform conventional compression methods such as JPEG2000 by a substantial margin on compression benchmark datasets. The proposed model draws on the strength of the CVAE's capability to abstract data into highly insightful latent spaces, and combining it with the utilization of an entropy bottleneck is capable of finding an optimal balance between compressibility and reconstruction quality. The balance is reached by optimizing over a composite loss function that represents the rate-distortion curve.

The industrial multi-generator Wave Energy Converters (WEC) must handle multiple simultaneous waves coming from different directions called spread waves. These complex devices in challenging circumstances need controllers with multiple objectives of energy capture efficiency, reduction of structural stress to limit maintenance, and proactive protection against high waves. The Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) controller trained with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm can handle these complexities. In this paper, we explore different function approximations for the policy and critic networks in modeling the sequential nature of the system dynamics and find that they are key to better performance. We investigated the performance of a fully connected neural network (FCN), LSTM, and Transformer model variants with varying depths and gated residual connections. Our results show that the transformer model of moderate depth with gated residual connections around the multi-head attention, multi-layer perceptron, and the transformer block (STrXL) proposed in this paper is optimal and boosts energy efficiency by an average of 22.1% for these complex spread waves over the existing spring damper (SD) controller. Furthermore, unlike the default SD controller, the transformer controller almost eliminated the mechanical stress from the rotational yaw motion for angled waves. Demo: https://tinyurl.com/yueda3jh

In the context of increasing demands for long-term multi-energy load forecasting in real-world applications, this paper introduces Patchformer, a novel model that integrates patch embedding with encoder-decoder Transformer-based architectures. To address the limitation in existing Transformer-based models, which struggle with intricate temporal patterns in long-term forecasting, Patchformer employs patch embedding, which predicts multivariate time-series data by separating it into multiple univariate data and segmenting each of them into multiple patches. This method effectively enhances the model's ability to capture local and global semantic dependencies. The numerical analysis shows that the Patchformer obtains overall better prediction accuracy in both multivariate and univariate long-term forecasting on the novel Multi-Energy dataset and other benchmark datasets. In addition, the positive effect of the interdependence among energy-related products on the performance of long-term time-series forecasting across Patchformer and other compared models is discovered, and the superiority of the Patchformer against other models is also demonstrated, which presents a significant advancement in handling the interdependence and complexities of long-term multi-energy forecasting. Lastly, Patchformer is illustrated as the only model that follows the positive correlation between model performance and the length of the past sequence, which states its ability to capture long-range past local semantic information.

Transformer-based methods have made significant progress in time series forecasting (TSF). They primarily handle two types of tokens, i.e., temporal tokens that contain all variables of the same timestamp, and variable tokens that contain all input time points for a specific variable. Transformer-based methods rely on positional encoding (PE) to mark tokens' positions, facilitating the model to perceive the correlation between tokens. However, in TSF, research on PE remains insufficient. To address this gap, we conduct experiments and uncover intriguing properties of existing PEs in TSF: (i) The positional information injected by PEs diminishes as the network depth increases; (ii) Enhancing positional information in deep networks is advantageous for improving the model's performance; (iii) PE based on the similarity between tokens can improve the model's performance. Motivated by these findings, we introduce two new PEs: Temporal Position Encoding (T-PE) for temporal tokens and Variable Positional Encoding (V-PE) for variable tokens. Both T-PE and V-PE incorporate geometric PE based on tokens' positions and semantic PE based on the similarity between tokens but using different calculations. To leverage both the PEs, we design a Transformer-based dual-branch framework named T2B-PE. It first calculates temporal tokens' correlation and variable tokens' correlation respectively and then fuses the dual-branch features through the gated unit. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior robustness and effectiveness of T2B-PE. The code is available at: \href{https://github.com/jlu-phyComputer/T2B-PE}{https://github.com/jlu-phyComputer/T2B-PE}.

Few-shot segmentation is a task to segment objects or regions of novel classes within an image given only a few annotated examples. In the generalized setting, the task extends to segment both the base and the novel classes. The main challenge is how to train the model such that the addition of novel classes does not hurt the base classes performance, also known as catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate this issue, we use SegGPT as our base model and train it on the base classes. Then, we use separate learnable prompts to handle predictions for each novel class. To handle various object sizes which typically present in remote sensing domain, we perform patch-based prediction. To address the discontinuities along patch boundaries, we propose a patch-and-stitch technique by re-framing the problem as an image inpainting task. During inference, we also utilize image similarity search over image embeddings for prompt selection and novel class filtering to reduce false positive predictions. Based on our experiments, our proposed method boosts the weighted mIoU of a simple fine-tuned SegGPT from 15.96 to 35.08 on the validation set of few-shot OpenEarthMap dataset given in the challenge.

Intelligent communications have played a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of 6G networks. Native artificial intelligence (AI) within green communication systems must meet stringent real-time requirements. To achieve this, deploying lightweight and resource-efficient AI models is necessary. However, as wireless networks generate a multitude of data fields and indicators during operation, only a fraction of them imposes significant impact on the network AI models. Therefore, real-time intelligence of communication systems heavily relies on a small but critical set of the data that profoundly influences the performance of network AI models. These challenges underscore the need for innovative architectures and solutions. In this paper, we propose a solution, termed the pervasive multi-level (PML) native AI architecture, which integrates the concept of knowledge graph (KG) into the intelligent operational manipulations of mobile networks, resulting in the establishment of a wireless data KG. Leveraging the wireless data KG, we characterize the massive and complex data collected from wireless communication networks and analyze the relationships among various data fields. The obtained graph of data field relations enables the on-demand generation of minimal and effective datasets, referred to as feature datasets, tailored to specific application requirements. Consequently, this architecture not only enhances AI training, inference, and validation processes but also significantly reduces resource wastage and overhead for communication networks. To implement this architecture, we have developed a specific solution comprising a spatio-temporal heterogeneous graph attention neural network model (STREAM) as well as a feature dataset generation algorithm. Experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.