Energy
Geometrically predictable micro fabricated continuum robot
Su, Xiaoyu, Wang, Lei, Chen, Zhuoran
Compared to the micro continuum robots that use traditional manufacturing technology, the micro fabricated continuum robots are different in terms of the application of smart materials, additive manufacturing process, and physical field control. However, the existing geometrical prediction models of the micro continuum robots still follow the model frameworks designed for their larger counterparts, which is inconsistent with the real geometrical transformation principle of micro fabricated continuum robots. In this paper, we present a universal geometrical prediction method for the geometry transformation of the micro fabricated continuum robots based on their material properties and the displacement of the stress points. By discretizing of the micro fabricated continuum structure and applying force constraints between adjacent points to simulate material properties, formulations and simulations are demonstrated to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Three micro fabricated continuum robots driven through different external field forces are investigated to show two superiorities: the geometrical deformation of a micro fabricated continuum robot under external disturbances can be predicted, and a targeted geometry can be shaped by predicting the sequence and directions of external forces. This pioneer research has contributed to promote understanding and operation of micro fabricated continuum robots and their deformation both from theoretical aspect and real experimental operations.
Conjugate Bayesian Two-step Change Point Detection for Hawkes Process
Zhang, Zeyue, Lu, Xiaoling, Zhou, Feng
The Bayesian two-step change point detection method is popular for the Hawkes process due to its simplicity and intuitiveness. However, the non-conjugacy between the point process likelihood and the prior requires most existing Bayesian two-step change point detection methods to rely on non-conjugate inference methods. These methods lack analytical expressions, leading to low computational efficiency and impeding timely change point detection. To address this issue, this work employs data augmentation to propose a conjugate Bayesian two-step change point detection method for the Hawkes process, which proves to be more accurate and efficient. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared to baseline methods. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to explore the robustness of our method concerning various hyperparameters.
MLPerf Power: Benchmarking the Energy Efficiency of Machine Learning Systems from Microwatts to Megawatts for Sustainable AI
Tschand, Arya, Rajan, Arun Tejusve Raghunath, Idgunji, Sachin, Ghosh, Anirban, Holleman, Jeremy, Kiraly, Csaba, Ambalkar, Pawan, Borkar, Ritika, Chukka, Ramesh, Cockrell, Trevor, Curtis, Oliver, Fursin, Grigori, Hodak, Miro, Kassa, Hiwot, Lokhmotov, Anton, Miskovic, Dejan, Pan, Yuechao, Manmathan, Manu Prasad, Raymond, Liz, John, Tom St., Suresh, Arjun, Taubitz, Rowan, Zhan, Sean, Wasson, Scott, Kanter, David, Reddi, Vijay Janapa
Rapid adoption of machine learning (ML) technologies has led to a surge in power consumption across diverse systems, from tiny IoT devices to massive datacenter clusters. Benchmarking the energy efficiency of these systems is crucial for optimization, but presents novel challenges due to the variety of hardware platforms, workload characteristics, and system-level interactions. This paper introduces MLPerf Power, a comprehensive benchmarking methodology with capabilities to evaluate the energy efficiency of ML systems at power levels ranging from microwatts to megawatts. Developed by a consortium of industry professionals from more than 20 organizations, MLPerf Power establishes rules and best practices to ensure comparability across diverse architectures. We use representative workloads from the MLPerf benchmark suite to collect 1,841 reproducible measurements from 60 systems across the entire range of ML deployment scales. Our analysis reveals trade-offs between performance, complexity, and energy efficiency across this wide range of systems, providing actionable insights for designing optimized ML solutions from the smallest edge devices to the largest cloud infrastructures. This work emphasizes the importance of energy efficiency as a key metric in the evaluation and comparison of the ML system, laying the foundation for future research in this critical area. We discuss the implications for developing sustainable AI solutions and standardizing energy efficiency benchmarking for ML systems.
A Phenomenological AI Foundation Model for Physical Signals
Lien, Jaime, Olascoaga, Laura I. Galindez, Dogan, Hasan, Gillian, Nicholas, Barbello, Brandon, Giusti, Leonardo, Poupyrev, Ivan
We explore the development of an AI foundation model that can be universally applied to physical processes of any nature. Our approach is based on a phenomenological framework, meaning that no prior physical knowledge or inductive bias is introduced. The aim is to construct a single, versatile AI foundation model capable of generalizing across diverse physical phenomena, domains, applications, and sensing apparatuses. This work is inspired by recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), where generative models based on transformer architectures, such as GPT-4, have demonstrated that a single model trained on a vast corpus of text in self-supervised manner can perform as well as or better than specialized models across a range of tasks [8, 19]. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a physical AI foundation model, trained on 0.59 billion physical measurements covering a diverse range of real-world processes.
Communication-Control Codesign for Large-Scale Wireless Networked Control Systems
Pang, Gaoyang, Liu, Wanchun, Niyato, Dusit, Vucetic, Branka, Li, Yonghui
Wireless Networked Control Systems (WNCSs) are essential to Industry 4.0, enabling flexible control in applications, such as drone swarms and autonomous robots. The interdependence between communication and control requires integrated design, but traditional methods treat them separately, leading to inefficiencies. Current codesign approaches often rely on simplified models, focusing on single-loop or independent multi-loop systems. However, large-scale WNCSs face unique challenges, including coupled control loops, time-correlated wireless channels, trade-offs between sensing and control transmissions, and significant computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a practical WNCS model that captures correlated dynamics among multiple control loops with spatially distributed sensors and actuators sharing limited wireless resources over multi-state Markov block-fading channels. We formulate the codesign problem as a sequential decision-making task that jointly optimizes scheduling and control inputs across estimation, control, and communication domains. To solve this problem, we develop a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm that efficiently handles the hybrid action space, captures communication-control correlations, and ensures robust training despite sparse cross-domain variables and floating control inputs. Extensive simulations show that the proposed DRL approach outperforms benchmarks and solves the large-scale WNCS codesign problem, providing a scalable solution for industrial automation.
CVCP-Fusion: On Implicit Depth Estimation for 3D Bounding Box Prediction
Gupta, Pranav, Rengarajan, Rishabh, Bankapur, Viren, Mannem, Vedansh, Ahuja, Lakshit, Vijay, Surya, Wang, Kevin
Combining LiDAR and Camera-view data has become a common approach for 3D Object Detection. However, previous approaches combine the two input streams at a point-level, throwing away semantic information derived from camera features. In this paper we propose Cross-View Center Point-Fusion, a state-of-the-art model to perform 3D object detection by combining camera and LiDAR-derived features in the BEV space to preserve semantic density from the camera stream while incorporating spacial data from the LiDAR stream. Our architecture utilizes aspects from previously established algorithms--Cross-View Transformers and CenterPoint--and runs their backbones in parallel, allowing efficient computation for real-time processing and application. In this paper we find that while an implicitly calculated depth-estimate may be sufficiently accurate in a 2D map-view representation, explicitly calculated geometric and spacial information is needed for precise bounding box prediction in the 3D world-view space. Code to reproduce our results is available at https: // github.
A Novel Twisted-Winching String Actuator for Robotic Applications: Design and Validation
Poon, Ryan, Padia, Vineet, Hunter, Ian W.
This paper presents a novel actuator system combining a twisted string actuator (TSA) with a winch mechanism. Relative to traditional hydraulic and pneumatic systems in robotics, TSAs are compact and lightweight but face limitations in stroke length and force-transmission ratios. Our integrated TSA-winch system overcomes these constraints by providing variable transmission ratios through dynamic adjustment. It increases actuator stroke by winching instead of overtwisting, and it improves force output by twisting. The design features a rotating turret that houses a winch, which is mounted on a bevel gear assembly driven by a through-hole drive shaft. Mathematical models are developed for the combined displacement and velocity control of this system. Experimental validation demonstrates the actuator's ability to achieve a wide range of transmission ratios and precise movement control. We present performance data on movement precision and generated forces, discussing the results in the context of existing literature. This research contributes to the development of more versatile and efficient actuation systems for advanced robotic applications and improved automation solutions.
LLM-Mixer: Multiscale Mixing in LLMs for Time Series Forecasting
Kowsher, Md, Sobuj, Md. Shohanur Islam, Prottasha, Nusrat Jahan, Alanis, E. Alejandro, Garibay, Ozlem Ozmen, Yousefi, Niloofar
Time series forecasting remains a challenging task, particularly in the context of complex multiscale temporal patterns. This study presents LLM-Mixer, a framework that improves forecasting accuracy through the combination of multiscale time-series decomposition with pre-trained LLMs (Large Language Models). LLM-Mixer captures both short-term fluctuations and long-term trends by decomposing the data into multiple temporal resolutions and processing them with a frozen LLM, guided by a textual prompt specifically designed for time-series data. Extensive experiments conducted on multivariate and univariate datasets demonstrate that LLM-Mixer achieves competitive performance, outperforming recent state-of-the-art models across various forecasting horizons. This work highlights the potential of combining multiscale analysis and LLMs for effective and scalable time-series forecasting.
Deciphering the Chaos: Enhancing Jailbreak Attacks via Adversarial Prompt Translation
Li, Qizhang, Yang, Xiaochen, Zuo, Wangmeng, Guo, Yiwen
Automatic adversarial prompt generation provides remarkable success in jailbreaking safely-aligned large language models (LLMs). Existing gradient-based attacks, while demonstrating outstanding performance in jailbreaking white-box LLMs, often generate garbled adversarial prompts with chaotic appearance. These adversarial prompts are difficult to transfer to other LLMs, hindering their performance in attacking unknown victim models. In this paper, for the first time, we delve into the semantic meaning embedded in garbled adversarial prompts and propose a novel method that "translates" them into coherent and human-readable natural language adversarial prompts. In this way, we can effectively uncover the semantic information that triggers vulnerabilities of the model and unambiguously transfer it to the victim model, without overlooking the adversarial information hidden in the garbled text, to enhance jailbreak attacks. It also offers a new approach to discovering effective designs for jailbreak prompts, advancing the understanding of jailbreak attacks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the success rate of jailbreak attacks against various safety-aligned LLMs and outperforms state-of-the-arts by large margins. With at most 10 queries, our method achieves an average attack success rate of 81.8% in attacking 7 commercial closed-source LLMs, including GPT and Claude-3 series, on HarmBench. Our method also achieves over 90% attack success rates against Llama-2-Chat models on AdvBench, despite their outstanding resistance to jailbreak attacks. Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in understanding and generating human-like text. To mitigate the risk of producing illegal or unethical content, many fine-tuning methods have been proposed to obtain safety-aligned LLMs which encourage the LLMs to refuse response to potentially harmful requests (Ouyang et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2022; Korbak et al., 2023; Glaese et al., 2022). Nevertheless, some work (Shen et al., 2023; Zou et al., 2023; Perez et al., 2022; Chao et al., 2023; Liu et al., 2023; Wei et al., 2024) indicates that these models have not yet achieved perfect safety alignment. Instead, safety-aligned LLMs can be induced to respond to harmful requests through carefully designed prompts, referred to as "jailbreaking" (Wei et al., 2024). Many automatic adversarial prompt generation methods have been proposed to improve the performance of jailbreak attacks. Among them, methods appending adversarial suffix obtained by gradientbased optimization to original harmful requests, e.g., Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) (Zou et al., 2023) and its variants (Sitawarin et al., 2024; Li et al., 2024), have demonstrated remarkable success in jailbreaking white-box LLMs (Mazeika et al., 2024). However, these methods often lead to garbled adversarial prompts with chaotic appearance, that can be composed of incoherent words and symbols.
LoRD: Adapting Differentiable Driving Policies to Distribution Shifts
Diehl, Christopher, Karkus, Peter, Veer, Sushant, Pavone, Marco, Bertram, Torsten
Distribution shifts between operational domains can severely affect the performance of learned models in self-driving vehicles (SDVs). While this is a well-established problem, prior work has mostly explored naive solutions such as fine-tuning, focusing on the motion prediction task. In this work, we explore novel adaptation strategies for differentiable autonomy stacks consisting of prediction, planning, and control, perform evaluation in closed-loop, and investigate the often-overlooked issue of catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, we introduce two simple yet effective techniques: a low-rank residual decoder (LoRD) and multi-task fine-tuning. Through experiments across three models conducted on two real-world autonomous driving datasets (nuPlan, exiD), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods and highlight a significant performance gap between open-loop and closed-loop evaluation in prior approaches. Our approach improves forgetting by up to 23.33% and the closed-loop OOD driving score by 8.83% in comparison to standard fine-tuning.