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Entity Matching (EM) is crucial for identifying equivalent data entities across different sources, a task that becomes increasingly challenging with the growth and heterogeneity of data. Blocking techniques, which reduce the computational complexity of EM, play a vital role in making this process scalable. Despite advancements in blocking methods, the issue of fairness; where blocking may inadvertently favor certain demographic groups; has been largely overlooked. This study extends traditional blocking metrics to incorporate fairness, providing a framework for assessing bias in blocking techniques. Through experimental analysis, we evaluate the effectiveness and fairness of various blocking methods, offering insights into their potential biases. Our findings highlight the importance of considering fairness in EM, particularly in the blocking phase, to ensure equitable outcomes in data integration tasks.

Behavior cloning is a common imitation learning paradigm. Under behavior cloning the robot collects expert demonstrations, and then trains a policy to match the actions taken by the expert. This works well when the robot learner visits states where the expert has already demonstrated the correct action; but inevitably the robot will also encounter new states outside of its training dataset. If the robot learner takes the wrong action at these new states it could move farther from the training data, which in turn leads to increasingly incorrect actions and compounding errors. Existing works try to address this fundamental challenge by augmenting or enhancing the training data. By contrast, in our paper we develop the control theoretic properties of behavior cloned policies. Specifically, we consider the error dynamics between the system's current state and the states in the expert dataset. From the error dynamics we derive model-based and model-free conditions for stability: under these conditions the robot shapes its policy so that its current behavior converges towards example behaviors in the expert dataset. In practice, this results in Stable-BC, an easy to implement extension of standard behavior cloning that is provably robust to covariate shift. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in simulations with interactive, nonlinear, and visual environments. We also conduct experiments where a robot arm uses Stable-BC to play air hockey. See our website here: https://collab.me.vt.edu/Stable-BC/

Kernel orchestration is the task of mapping the computation defined in different operators of a deep neural network (DNN) to the execution of GPU kernels on modern hardware platforms. Prior approaches optimize kernel orchestration by greedily applying operator fusion, which fuses the computation of multiple operators into a single kernel, and miss a variety of optimization opportunities in kernel orchestration. This paper presents Korch, a tensor program optimizer that discovers optimal kernel orchestration strategies for tensor programs. Instead of directly fusing operators, Korch first applies operator fission to decompose tensor operators into a small set of basic tensor algebra primitives. This decomposition enables a diversity of fine-grained, inter-operator optimizations. Next, Korch optimizes kernel orchestration by formalizing it as a constrained optimization problem, leveraging an off-the-shelf binary linear programming solver to discover an optimal orchestration strategy, and generating an executable that can be directly deployed on modern GPU platforms. Evaluation on a variety of DNNs shows that Korch outperforms existing tensor program optimizers by up to 1.7x on V100 GPUs and up to 1.6x on A100 GPUs. Korch is publicly available at https://github.com/humuyan/Korch., Comment: Fix some typos in the ASPLOS version

To enhance the handover performance in fifth generation (5G) cellular systems, conditional handover (CHO) has been evolved as a promising solution. Unlike A3 based handover where handover execution is certain after receiving handover command from the serving access network, in CHO, handover execution is conditional on the RSRP measurements from both current and target access networks, as well as on mobility parameters such as preparation and execution offsets. Analytic evaluation of conditional handover performance is unprecedented in literature. In this work, handover performance of CHO has been carried out in terms of handover latency, handover packet loss and handover failure probability. A Markov model accounting the effect of different mobility parameters (e.g., execution offset, preparation offset, time-to-preparation and time-to-execution), UE velocity and channel fading characteristics; has been proposed to characterize handover failure. Results obtained from the analytic model has been validated against extensive simulation results. Our study reveal that optimal configuration of $O_{exec}$, $O_{prep}$, $T_{exec}$ and $T_{prep}$ is actually conditional on underlying UE velocity and fading characteristics. This study will be helpful for the mobile operators to choose appropriate thresholds of the mobility parameters under different channel condition and UE velocities.

This technical report details our work towards building an enhanced audio-visual sound event localization and detection (SELD) network. We build on top of the audio-only SELDnet23 model and adapt it to be audio-visual by merging both audio and video information prior to the gated recurrent unit (GRU) of the audio-only network. Our model leverages YOLO and DETIC object detectors. We also build a framework that implements audio-visual data augmentation and audio-visual synthetic data generation. We deliver an audio-visual SELDnet system that outperforms the existing audio-visual SELD baseline.

We present 3DiFACE, a novel method for personalized speech-driven 3D facial animation and editing. While existing methods deterministically predict facial animations from speech, they overlook the inherent one-to-many relationship between speech and facial expressions, i.e., there are multiple reasonable facial expression animations matching an audio input. It is especially important in content creation to be able to modify generated motion or to specify keyframes. To enable stochasticity as well as motion editing, we propose a lightweight audio-conditioned diffusion model for 3D facial motion. This diffusion model can be trained on a small 3D motion dataset, maintaining expressive lip motion output. In addition, it can be finetuned for specific subjects, requiring only a short video of the person. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and yields speech-driven animations with greater fidelity and diversity., Comment: Project page: https://balamuruganthambiraja.github.io/3DiFACE/

Weapon and gun violence have recently become a pressing issue today. The degree of these crimes and activities has risen to the point of being termed as an epidemic. This prevalent misuse of weapons calls for an automatic system that detects weapons in real-time. Real-time surveillance video is captured and recorded in almost all public forums and places. These videos contain abundant raw data which can be extracted and processed into meaningful information. This paper proposes a novel pipeline consisting of an ensemble of convolutional neural networks with distinct architectures. Each neural network is trained with a unique mini-batch with little to no overlap in the training samples. This paper will present several promising results using multiple datasets associated with comparing the proposed architecture and state-of-the-art (SoA) models. The proposed pipeline produced an average increase of 5% in accuracy, specificity, and recall compared to the SoA systems., Comment: Accepted for presentation at the IEEE 2nd International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Computer Engineering

We consider a class of non-smooth strongly convex-strongly concave saddle point problems in a decentralized setting without a central server. To solve a consensus formulation of problems in this class, we develop an inexact primal dual hybrid gradient (inexact PDHG) procedure that allows generic gradient computation oracles to update the primal and dual variables. We first investigate the performance of inexact PDHG with stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG) oracle. Our numerical study uncovers a significant phenomenon of initial conservative progress of iterates of IPDHG with SVRG oracle. To tackle this, we develop a simple and effective switching idea, where a generalized stochastic gradient (GSG) computation oracle is employed to hasten the iterates' progress to a saddle point solution during the initial phase of updates, followed by a switch to the SVRG oracle at an appropriate juncture. The proposed algorithm is named Decentralized Proximal Switching Stochastic Gradient method with Compression (C-DPSSG), and is proven to converge to an $\epsilon$-accurate saddle point solution with linear rate. Apart from delivering highly accurate solutions, our study reveals that utilizing the best convergence phases of GSG and SVRG oracles makes C-DPSSG well suited for obtaining solutions of low/medium accuracy faster, useful for certain applications. Numerical experiments on two benchmark machine learning applications show C-DPSSG's competitive performance which validate our theoretical findings. The codes used in the experiments can be found \href{https://github.com/chhavisharma123/C-DPSSG-CDC2023}{here}., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2205.14452

Analytical calculations and micromagnetic simulations are used to determine the Berry curvature and topological Hall effect (THE) due to conduction electrons in small ferromagnetic particles. Our focus is on small particles of nonellipsoidal shapes, where noncoplanar spin structures yield a nonzero topological Hall signal quantified by the skyrmion number Q. We consider two mechanisms leading to noncoplanarity in aligned nanoparticles, namely flower-state spin configurations due to stray fields near corners and edges, and curling-type magnetostatic selfinteractions. In very small particles, the reverse magnetic fields enhance Q due to the flower state until the reversal occurs, whereas for particles with a radius greater than coherence radius Rcoh the Q jumps to a larger value at the nucleation field representing the transition from the flower state to the curling state. We calculate the Skyrmion density (average Berry curvature) from these spin structures as a function of particle size and applied magnetic field. Our simulation results agree with analytical calculations for both flower state and flux closure states. We showed the presence of Berry curvature in small particles as long as the size of the particle is less than the single domain limit. Using magnetic force microscopy (MFM), we also showed that in a nanodot of Co with a suitable size, a magnetic vortex state with perpendicular (turned-up) magnetization at the core is realized which can be manifested for Berry curvature and emergent magnetic field in confined geometries for single domain state at room temperature.