We propose a novel intermittent rendezvous method that allows robots to explore an unknown environment while sharing maps at rendezvous locations through agreements. In our method, robots update the agreements to spread the rendezvous locations during the exploration and prioritize exploring unknown areas near them. To generate the agreements automatically, we reduce the MRE to instances of the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) and ensured intermittent communication through a temporal connectivity graph. We evaluate our method in simulation in various virtual urban environments and a Gazebo simulation using the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our results suggest Figure 1: Intermittent communication schematics of robots meeting at that our method can be better than using relays or maintaining rendezvous locations spread in a section of New York City. L1, L2, intermittent communication with a base station since we can and L3 are our hypothetical rendezvous locations, stars from the explore faster without additional hardware to create a relay same color are potential exploration zones near those locations, and network.

Unlocking the potential of deep learning in Peak-Hour Series Forecasting (PHSF) remains a critical yet underexplored task in various domains. While state-of-the-art deep learning models excel in regular Time Series Forecasting (TSF), they struggle to achieve comparable results in PHSF. This can be attributed to the challenges posed by the high degree of non-stationarity in peak-hour series, which makes direct forecasting more difficult than standard TSF. Additionally, manually extracting the maximum value from regular forecasting results leads to suboptimal performance due to models minimizing the mean deficit. To address these issues, this paper presents Seq2Peak, a novel framework designed specifically for PHSF tasks, bridging the performance gap observed in TSF models. Seq2Peak offers two key components: the CyclicNorm pipeline to mitigate the non-stationarity issue and a simple yet effective trainable-parameter-free peak-hour decoder with a hybrid loss function that utilizes both the original series and peak-hour series as supervised signals. Extensive experimentation on publicly available time series datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework, yielding a remarkable average relative improvement of 37.7% across four real-world datasets for both transformer- and non-transformer-based TSF models.

We investigate the problem of energy-constrained planning for a cooperative system of an Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). In scenarios where the UGV serves as a mobile base to ferry the UAV and as a charging station to recharge the UAV, we formulate a novel energy-constrained routing problem. To tackle this problem, we design an energy-aware routing algorithm, aiming to minimize the overall mission duration under the energy limitations of both vehicles. The algorithm first solves a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) to generate a guided tour. Then, it employs the Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to refine the tour and generate paths for the two vehicles. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm through extensive simulations and a proof-of-concept experiment. The results show that our algorithm consistently achieves near-optimal mission time and maintains fast running time across a wide range of problem instances.

This work examines the characteristic activation values of individual ReLU units in neural networks. We refer to the set of input locations corresponding to such characteristic activation values as the characteristic activation set of a ReLU unit. We draw an explicit connection between the characteristic activation set and learned features in ReLU networks. This connection leads to new insights into how various neural network normalization techniques used in modern deep learning architectures regularize and stabilize stochastic gradient optimization. Utilizing these insights, we propose geometric parameterization for ReLU networks to improve feature learning, which decouples the radial and angular parameters in the hyperspherical coordinate system. We empirically verify its usefulness with less carefully chosen initialization schemes and larger learning rates. We report significant improvements in optimization stability, convergence speed, and generalization performance for various models on a variety of datasets, including the ResNet-50 network on ImageNet.

5G introduced modularized network functions (NFs) to support emerging services in a more flexible and elastic manner. To mitigate the complexity in such modularized NF management, automated network operation and management are indispensable, and thus the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) has introduced a network data analytics function (NWDAF). However, a conventional NWDAF needs to conduct both inference and training tasks, and thus it is difficult to provide the analytics results to NFs in a timely manner for an increased number of analytics requests. In this article, we propose a hierarchical network data analytics framework (H-NDAF) where inference tasks are distributed to multiple leaf NWDAFs and training tasks are conducted at the root NWDAF. Extensive simulation results using open-source software (i.e., free5GC) demonstrate that H-NDAF can provide sufficiently accurate analytics and faster analytics provision time compared to the conventional NWDAF.

How do neural networks extract patterns from pixels? Feature visualizations attempt to answer this important question by visualizing highly activating patterns through optimization. Today, visualization methods form the foundation of our knowledge about the internal workings of neural networks, as a type of mechanistic interpretability. Here we ask: How reliable are feature visualizations? We start our investigation by developing network circuits that trick feature visualizations into showing arbitrary patterns that are completely disconnected from normal network behavior on natural input. We then provide evidence for a similar phenomenon occurring in standard, unmanipulated networks: feature visualizations are processed very differently from standard input, casting doubt on their ability to "explain" how neural networks process natural images. This can be used as a sanity check for feature visualizations. We underpin our empirical findings by theory proving that the set of functions that can be reliably understood by feature visualization is extremely small and does not include general black-box neural networks. Therefore, a promising way forward could be the development of networks that enforce certain structures in order to ensure more reliable feature visualizations.

With the growing demand for vision applications and deployment across edge devices, the development of hardware-friendly architectures that maintain performance during device deployment becomes crucial. Neural architecture search (NAS) techniques explore various approaches to discover efficient architectures for diverse learning tasks in a computationally efficient manner. In this paper, we present the next-generation neural architecture design for computationally efficient neural architecture distillation - DONNAv2 . Conventional NAS algorithms rely on a computationally extensive stage where an accuracy predictor is learned to estimate model performance within search space. This building of accuracy predictors helps them predict the performance of models that are not being finetuned. Here, we have developed an elegant approach to eliminate building the accuracy predictor and extend DONNA to a computationally efficient setting. The loss metric of individual blocks forming the network serves as the surrogate performance measure for the sampled models in the NAS search stage. To validate the performance of DONNAv2 we have performed extensive experiments involving a range of diverse vision tasks including classification, object detection, image denoising, super-resolution, and panoptic perception network (YOLOP). The hardware-in-the-loop experiments were carried out using the Samsung Galaxy S10 mobile platform. Notably, DONNAv2 reduces the computational cost of DONNA by 10x for the larger datasets. Furthermore, to improve the quality of NAS search space, DONNAv2 leverages a block knowledge distillation filter to remove blocks with high inference costs.

Zero-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches propose novel training-free metrics called zero-shot proxies to substantially reduce the search time compared to the traditional training-based NAS. Despite the success on image classification, the effectiveness of zero-shot proxies is rarely evaluated on complex vision tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection. Moreover, existing zero-shot proxies are shown to be biased towards certain model characteristics which restricts their broad applicability. In this paper, we empirically study the bias of state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot proxy ZiCo across multiple vision tasks and observe that ZiCo is biased towards thinner and deeper networks, leading to sub-optimal architectures. To solve the problem, we propose a novel bias correction on ZiCo, called ZiCo-BC. Our extensive experiments across various vision tasks (image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation) show that our approach can successfully search for architectures with higher accuracy and significantly lower latency on Samsung Galaxy S10 devices.

Participant selection (PS) helps to accelerate federated learning (FL) convergence, which is essential for the practical deployment of FL over mobile devices. While most existing PS approaches focus on improving training accuracy and efficiency rather than residual energy of mobile devices, which fundamentally determines whether the selected devices can participate. Meanwhile, the impacts of mobile devices' heterogeneous wireless transmission rates on PS and FL training efficiency are largely ignored. Moreover, PS causes the staleness issue. Prior research exploits isolated functions to force long-neglected devices to participate, which is decoupled from original PS designs. In this paper, we propose a residual energy and wireless aware PS design for efficient FL training over mobile devices (REWAFL). REW AFL introduces a novel PS utility function that jointly considers global FL training utilities and local energy utility, which integrates energy consumption and residual battery energy of candidate mobile devices. Under the proposed PS utility function framework, REW AFL further presents a residual energy and wireless aware local computing policy. Besides, REWAFL buries the staleness solution into its utility function and local computing policy. The experimental results show that REW AFL is effective in improving training accuracy and efficiency, while avoiding "flat battery" of mobile devices.

In this work, we tackle the problem of bandwidth estimation (BWE) for real-time communication systems; however, in contrast to previous works, we leverage the vast efforts of prior heuristic-based BWE methods and synergize these approaches with deep learning-based techniques. Our work addresses challenges in generalizing to unseen network dynamics and extracting rich representations from prior experience, two key challenges in integrating data-driven bandwidth estimators into real-time systems. To that end, we propose Merlin, the first purely offline, data-driven solution to BWE that harnesses prior heuristic-based methods to extract an expert BWE policy. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that Merlin surpasses state-of-the-art heuristic-based and deep learning-based bandwidth estimators in terms of objective quality of experience metrics while generalizing beyond the offline world to in-the-wild network deployments where Merlin achieves a 42.85% and 12.8% reduction in packet loss and delay, respectively, when compared against WebRTC in inter-continental videoconferencing calls. We hope that Merlin's offline-oriented design fosters new strategies for real-time network control.