Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) are crucial ways to avoid unnecessary maintenance for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and improve system reliability. Predicting the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is one of the most challenging tasks for PHM. Existing methods require prior knowledge about the system, contrived assumptions, or temporal mining to model the life cycles of machine equipment/devices, resulting in diminished accuracy and limited applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a Bi-directional Adversarial network with Covariate Encoding for machine Remaining Useful Life (BACE-RUL) prediction, which only adopts sensor measurements from the current life cycle to predict RUL rather than relying on previous consecutive cycle recordings. The current sensor measurements of mechanical devices are encoded to a conditional space to better understand the implicit inner mechanical status. The predictor is trained as a conditional generative network with the encoded sensor measurements as its conditions. Various experiments on several real-world datasets, including the turbofan aircraft engine dataset and the dataset collected from degradation experiments of Li-Ion battery cells, show that the proposed model is a general framework and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities across various domains. Accompanying the evolving capabilities and expanding deployment scenarios of LLMs, their deployment challenges escalate due to their sheer scale and the advanced yet complex activation designs prevalent in notable model series, such as Llama, Gemma, and Mistral. These challenges have become particularly pronounced in resource-constrained deployment scenarios, where mitigating inference efficiency bottlenecks is imperative. Among various recent efforts, activation approximation has emerged as a promising avenue for pursuing inference efficiency, sometimes considered indispensable in applications such as private inference. Despite achieving substantial speedups with minimal impact on utility, even appearing sound and practical for real-world deployment, the safety implications of activation approximations remain unclear. In this work, we fill this critical gap in LLM safety by conducting the first systematic safety evaluation of activation approximations. Our safety vetting spans seven sota techniques across three popular categories, revealing consistent safety degradation across ten safety-aligned LLMs.

Dataset license compliance is a critical yet complex aspect of developing commercial AI products, particularly with the increasing use of publicly available datasets. Ambiguities in dataset licenses pose significant legal risks, making it challenging even for software IP lawyers to accurately interpret rights and obligations. In this paper, we introduce LicenseGPT, a fine-tuned foundation model (FM) specifically designed for dataset license compliance analysis. We first evaluate existing legal FMs (i.e., FMs specialized in understanding and processing legal texts) and find that the best-performing model achieves a Prediction Agreement (PA) of only 43.75%. LicenseGPT, fine-tuned on a curated dataset of 500 licenses annotated by legal experts, significantly improves PA to 64.30%, outperforming both legal and general-purpose FMs. Through an A/B test and user study with software IP lawyers, we demonstrate that LicenseGPT reduces analysis time by 94.44%, from 108 seconds to 6 seconds per license, without compromising accuracy. Software IP lawyers perceive LicenseGPT as a valuable supplementary tool that enhances efficiency while acknowledging the need for human oversight in complex cases. Our work underscores the potential of specialized AI tools in legal practice and offers a publicly available resource for practitioners and researchers.

Large language models (LLMs) are effective at capturing complex, valuable conceptual representations from textual data for a wide range of real-world applications. However, in fields like Intelligent Fault Diagnosis (IFD), incorporating additional sensor data-such as vibration signals, temperature readings, and operational metrics-is essential but it is challenging to capture such sensor data information within traditional text corpora. This study introduces a novel IFD approach by effectively adapting LLMs to numerical data inputs for identifying various machine faults from time-series sensor data. We propose FD-LLM, an LLM framework specifically designed for fault diagnosis by formulating the training of the LLM as a multi-class classification problem. We explore two methods for encoding vibration signals: the first method uses a string-based tokenization technique to encode vibration signals into text representations, while the second extracts statistical features from both the time and frequency domains as statistical summaries of each signal. We assess the fault diagnosis capabilities of four open-sourced LLMs based on the FD-LLM framework, and evaluate the models' adaptability and generalizability under various operational conditions and machine components, namely for traditional fault diagnosis, cross-operational conditions, and cross-machine component settings. Our results show that LLMs such as Llama3 and Llama3-instruct demonstrate strong fault detection capabilities and significant adaptability across different operational conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) approaches in many cases.

Multimodal learning has been a popular area of research, yet integrating electroencephalogram (EEG) data poses unique challenges due to its inherent variability and limited availability. In this paper, we introduce a novel multimodal framework that accommodates not only conventional modalities such as video, images, and audio, but also incorporates EEG data. Our framework is designed to flexibly handle varying input sizes, while dynamically adjusting attention to account for feature importance across modalities. We evaluate our approach on a recently introduced emotion recognition dataset that combines data from three modalities, making it an ideal testbed for multimodal learning. The experimental results provide a benchmark for the dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. This work highlights the potential of integrating EEG into multimodal systems, paving the way for more robust and comprehensive applications in emotion recognition and beyond.

Unlike images and natural language tokens, time series data is highly semantically sparse, resulting in labor-intensive label annotations. Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation (UDA and SSDA) have demonstrated efficiency in addressing this issue by utilizing pre-labeled source data to train on unlabeled or partially labeled target data. However, in domain adaptation methods designed for downstream classification tasks, directly adapting labeled source samples with unlabelled target samples often results in similar distributions across various classes, thereby compromising the performance of the target classification task. To tackle this challenge, we proposed a Global-Local Alignment Domain Adaptation (GLA-DA) method for multivariate time series data. Data from two domains were initially encoded to align in an intermediate feature space adversarially, achieving Global Feature Alignment (GFA). Subsequently, GLA-DA leveraged the consistency between similarity-based and deep learning-based models to assign pseudo labels to unlabeled target data. This process aims to preserve differences among data with distinct labels by aligning the samples with the same class labels together, achieving Local Class Alignment (LCA). We implemented GLA-DA in both UDA and SSDA scenarios, showcasing its superiority over state-of-the-art methods through extensive experiments on various public datasets. Ablation experiments underscored the significance of key components within GLA-DA.

In Greek mythology, Pistis symbolized good faith, trust, and reliability. Drawing inspiration from these principles, Pistis-RAG is a scalable multi-stage framework designed to address the challenges of large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. This framework consists of distinct stages: matching, pre-ranking, ranking, reasoning, and aggregating. Each stage contributes to narrowing the search space, prioritizing semantically relevant documents, aligning with the large language model's (LLM) preferences, supporting complex chain-of-thought (CoT) methods, and combining information from multiple sources. Our ranking stage introduces a significant innovation by recognizing that semantic relevance alone may not lead to improved generation quality, due to the sensitivity of the few-shot prompt order, as noted in previous research. This critical aspect is often overlooked in current RAG frameworks. We argue that the alignment issue between LLMs and external knowledge ranking methods is tied to the model-centric paradigm dominant in RAG systems. We propose a content-centric approach, emphasizing seamless integration between LLMs and external information sources to optimize content transformation for specific tasks. Our novel ranking stage is designed specifically for RAG systems, incorporating principles of information retrieval while considering the unique business scenarios reflected in LLM preferences and user feedback. We simulated feedback signals on the MMLU benchmark, resulting in a 9.3% performance improvement. Our model and code will be open-sourced on GitHub. Additionally, experiments on real-world, large-scale data validate the scalability of our framework.

Limited by the scale and diversity of time series data, the neural networks trained on time series data often overfit and show unsatisfacotry performances. In comparison, large language models (LLMs) recently exhibit impressive generalization in diverse fields. Although massive LLM based approaches are proposed for time series tasks, these methods require to load the whole LLM in both training and reference. This high computational demands limit practical applications in resource-constrained settings, like edge-computing and IoT devices. To address this issue, we propose Knowledge Pruning (KP), a novel paradigm for time series learning in this paper. For a specific downstream task, we argue that the world knowledge learned by LLMs is much redundant and only the related knowledge termed as "pertinent knowledge" is useful. Unlike other methods, our KP targets to prune the redundant knowledge and only distill the pertinent knowledge into the target model. This reduces model size and computational costs significantly. Additionally, different from existing LLM based approaches, our KP does not require to load the LLM in the process of training and testing, further easing computational burdens. With our proposed KP, a lightweight network can effectively learn the pertinent knowledge, achieving satisfactory performances with a low computation cost. To verify the effectiveness of our KP, two fundamental tasks on edge-computing devices are investigated in our experiments, where eight diverse environments or benchmarks with different networks are used to verify the generalization of our KP. Through experiments, our KP demonstrates effective learning of pertinent knowledge, achieving notable performance improvements in regression (19.7% on average) and classification (up to 13.7%) tasks, showcasing state-of-the-art results.

Blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have emerged as transformative forces in their respective domains. This paper explores synergies and challenges between these two technologies. Our research analyses the biggest projects combining blockchain and AI, based on market capitalization, and derives a novel framework to categorize contemporary and future use cases. Despite the theoretical compatibility, current real-world applications combining blockchain and AI remain in their infancy.

Configurable software systems are prone to configuration errors, resulting in significant losses to companies. However, diagnosing these errors is challenging due to the vast and complex configuration space. These errors pose significant challenges for both experienced maintainers and new end-users, particularly those without access to the source code of the software systems. Given that logs are easily accessible to most end-users, we conduct a preliminary study to outline the challenges and opportunities of utilizing logs in localizing configuration errors. Based on the insights gained from the preliminary study, we propose an LLM-based two-stage strategy for end-users to localize the root-cause configuration properties based on logs. We further implement a tool, LogConfigLocalizer, aligned with the design of the aforementioned strategy, hoping to assist end-users in coping with configuration errors through log analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to localize the root-cause configuration properties for end-users based on Large Language Models~(LLMs) and logs. We evaluate the proposed strategy on Hadoop by LogConfigLocalizer and prove its efficiency with an average accuracy as high as 99.91%. Additionally, we also demonstrate the effectiveness and necessity of different phases of the methodology by comparing it with two other variants and a baseline tool. Moreover, we validate the proposed methodology through a practical case study to demonstrate its effectiveness and feasibility.