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The increasing complexity of deep learning models used for calculating user representations presents significant challenges, particularly with limited computational resources and strict service-level agreements (SLAs). Previous research efforts have focused on optimizing model inference but have overlooked a critical question: is it necessary to perform user model inference for every ad request in large-scale social networks? To address this question and these challenges, we first analyze user access patterns at Meta and find that most user model inferences occur within a short timeframe. T his observation reveals a triangular relationship among model complexity, embedding freshness, and service SLAs. Building on this insight, we designed, implemented, and evaluated ERCache, an efficient and robust caching framework for large-scale user representations in ads recommendation systems on social networks. ERCache categorizes cache into direct and failover types and applies customized settings and eviction policies for each model, effectively balancing model complexity, embedding freshness, and service SLAs, even considering the staleness introduced by caching. ERCache has been deployed at Meta for over six months, supporting more than 30 ranking models while efficiently conserving computational resources and complying with service SLA requirements.

Building on the advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs), recent research has introduced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models as an integrated solution for robotic manipulation tasks. These models take camera images and natural language task instructions as input and directly generate control actions for robots to perform specified tasks, greatly improving both decision-making capabilities and interaction with human users. However, the data-driven nature of VLA models, combined with their lack of interpretability, makes the assurance of their effectiveness and robustness a challenging task. This highlights the need for a reliable testing and evaluation platform. For this purpose, in this work, we propose LADEV, a comprehensive and efficient platform specifically designed for evaluating VLA models. We first present a language-driven approach that automatically generates simulation environments from natural language inputs, mitigating the need for manual adjustments and significantly improving testing efficiency. Then, to further assess the influence of language input on the VLA models, we implement a paraphrase mechanism that produces diverse natural language task instructions for testing. Finally, to expedite the evaluation process, we introduce a batch-style method for conducting large-scale testing of VLA models. Using LADEV, we conducted experiments on several state-of-the-art VLA models, demonstrating its effectiveness as a tool for evaluating these models. Our results showed that LADEV not only enhances testing efficiency but also establishes a solid baseline for evaluating VLA models, paving the way for the development of more intelligent and advanced robotic systems., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Multi-modal foundation models and generative AI have demonstrated promising capabilities in applications across various domains. Recently, Vision-language-action (VLA) models have attracted much attention regarding their potential to advance robotic manipulation. Despite the end-to-end perception-control loop offered by the VLA models, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of such models and an automated testing platform to reveal their robustness and reliability across different robotic manipulation scenarios. To address these challenges, in this work, we present VLATest, a testing framework that automatically generates diverse robotic manipulation scenes to assess the performance of VLA models from various perspectives. Large-scale experiments are considered, including eight VLA models, four types of manipulation tasks, and over 18,604 testing scenes. The experimental results show that existing VAL models still lack imperative robustness for practical applications. Specifically, the performance of VLA models can be significantly affected by several factors from the operation environments, such as camera poses, lighting conditions, and unseen objects. Our framework and the insights derived from the study are expected to pave the way for more advanced and reliable VLA-enabled robotic manipulation systems in practice., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures

Oracle bone inscriptions(OBI) is the earliest developed writing system in China, bearing invaluable written exemplifications of early Shang history and paleography. However, the task of deciphering OBI, in the current climate of the scholarship, can prove extremely challenging. Out of the 4,500 oracle bone characters excavated, only a third have been successfully identified. Therefore, leveraging the advantages of advanced AI technology to assist in the decipherment of OBI is a highly essential research topic. However, fully utilizing AI's capabilities in these matters is reliant on having a comprehensive and high-quality annotated OBI dataset at hand whereas most existing datasets are only annotated in just a single or a few dimensions, limiting the value of their potential application. For instance, the Oracle-MNIST dataset only offers 30k images classified into 10 categories. Therefore, this paper proposes an Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset(OBIMD), which includes annotation information for 10,077 pieces of oracle bones. Each piece has two modalities: pixel-level aligned rubbings and facsimiles. The dataset annotates the detection boxes, character categories, transcriptions, corresponding inscription groups, and reading sequences in the groups of each oracle bone character, providing a comprehensive and high-quality level of annotations. This dataset can be used for a variety of AI-related research tasks relevant to the field of OBI, such as OBI Character Detection and Recognition, Rubbing Denoising, Character Matching, Character Generation, Reading Sequence Prediction, Missing Characters Completion task and so on. We believe that the creation and publication of a dataset like this will help significantly advance the application of AI algorithms in the field of OBI research.

Although deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated impressive achievements in controlling various autonomous systems, e.g., autonomous vehicles or humanoid robots, its inherent reliance on random exploration raises safety concerns in their real-world applications. To improve system safety during the learning process, a variety of Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) algorithms have been proposed, which usually incorporate safety constraints within the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) framework. However, the efficacy of these SRL algorithms often relies on accurate function approximations, a task that is notably challenging to accomplish in the early learning stages due to data insufficiency. To address this problem, we introduce a Genralizable Safety enhancer (GenSafe) in this work. Leveraging model order reduction techniques, we first construct a Reduced Order Markov Decision Process (ROMDP) as a low-dimensional proxy for the original cost function in CMDP. Then, by solving ROMDP-based constraints that are reformulated from the original cost constraints, the proposed GenSafe refines the actions taken by the agent to enhance the possibility of constraint satisfaction. Essentially, GenSafe acts as an additional safety layer for SRL algorithms, offering broad compatibility across diverse SRL approaches. The performance of GenSafe is examined on multiple SRL benchmark problems. The results show that, it is not only able to improve the safety performance, especially in the early learning phases, but also to maintain the task performance at a satisfactory level.

Traffic dynamics is universally crucial in analyzing and designing almost any network. This article introduces a novel theoretical approach to analyzing network traffic dynamics. This theory's machinery is based on the notion of traffic divergence, which captures the flow (im)balance of network nodes and links. It features various analytical probes to investigate both spatial and temporal traffic dynamics. In particular, the maximal traffic distribution in a network can be characterized by spatial traffic divergence rate, which reveals the relative difference among node traffic divergence. To illustrate the usefulness, we apply the theory to two network-driven problems: throughput estimation of data center networks and power-optimized communication planning for robot networks, and show the merits of the proposed theory through simulations.

Effective user representations are pivotal in personalized advertising. However, stringent constraints on training throughput, serving latency, and memory, often limit the complexity and input feature set of online ads ranking models. This challenge is magnified in extensive systems like Meta's, which encompass hundreds of models with diverse specifications, rendering the tailoring of user representation learning for each model impractical. To address these challenges, we present Scaling User Modeling (SUM), a framework widely deployed in Meta's ads ranking system, designed to facilitate efficient and scalable sharing of online user representation across hundreds of ads models. SUM leverages a few designated upstream user models to synthesize user embeddings from massive amounts of user features with advanced modeling techniques. These embeddings then serve as inputs to downstream online ads ranking models, promoting efficient representation sharing. To adapt to the dynamic nature of user features and ensure embedding freshness, we designed SUM Online Asynchronous Platform (SOAP), a latency free online serving system complemented with model freshness and embedding stabilization, which enables frequent user model updates and online inference of user embeddings upon each user request. We share our hands-on deployment experiences for the SUM framework and validate its superiority through comprehensive experiments. To date, SUM has been launched to hundreds of ads ranking models in Meta, processing hundreds of billions of user requests daily, yielding significant online metric gains and improved infrastructure efficiency., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

Faults occurring in ad-hoc robot networks may fatally perturb their topologies leading to disconnection of subsets of those networks. Optimal topology synthesis is generally resource-intensive and time-consuming to be done in real time for large ad-hoc robot networks. One should only perform topology re-computations if the probability of topology recoverability after the occurrence of any fault surpasses that of its irrecoverability. We formulate this problem as a binary classification problem. Then, we develop a two-pathway data-driven model based on Bayesian Gaussian mixture models that predicts the solution to a typical problem by two different pre-fault and post-fault prediction pathways. The results, obtained by the integration of the predictions of those pathways, clearly indicate the success of our model in solving the topology (ir)recoverability prediction problem compared to the best of current strategies found in the literature.

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved notable success in numerous robotic applications, designing a high-performing reward function remains a challenging task that often requires substantial manual input. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively adopted to address tasks demanding in-depth common-sense knowledge, such as reasoning and planning. Recognizing that reward function design is also inherently linked to such knowledge, LLM offers a promising potential in this context. Motivated by this, we propose in this work a novel LLM framework with a self-refinement mechanism for automated reward function design. The framework commences with the LLM formulating an initial reward function based on natural language inputs. Then, the performance of the reward function is assessed, and the results are presented back to the LLM for guiding its self-refinement process. We examine the performance of our proposed framework through a variety of continuous robotic control tasks across three diverse robotic systems. The results indicate that our LLM-designed reward functions are able to rival or even surpass manually designed reward functions, highlighting the efficacy and applicability of our approach.

Motivated by the substantial achievements observed in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of natural language processing, recent research has commenced investigations into the application of LLMs for complex, long-horizon sequential task planning challenges in robotics. LLMs are advantageous in offering the potential to enhance the generalizability as task-agnostic planners and facilitate flexible interaction between human instructors and planning systems. However, task plans generated by LLMs often lack feasibility and correctness. To address this challenge, we introduce ISR-LLM, a novel framework that improves LLM-based planning through an iterative self-refinement process. The framework operates through three sequential steps: preprocessing, planning, and iterative self-refinement. During preprocessing, an LLM translator is employed to convert natural language input into a Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) formulation. In the planning phase, an LLM planner formulates an initial plan, which is then assessed and refined in the iterative self-refinement step by using a validator. We examine the performance of ISR-LLM across three distinct planning domains. The results show that ISR-LLM is able to achieve markedly higher success rates in task accomplishments compared to state-of-the-art LLM-based planners. Moreover, it also preserves the broad applicability and generalizability of working with natural language instructions.

As a representative cyber-physical system (CPS), robotic manipulator has been widely adopted in various academic research and industrial processes, indicating its potential to act as a universal interface between the cyber and the physical worlds. Recent studies in robotics manipulation have started employing artificial intelligence (AI) approaches as controllers to achieve better adaptability and performance. However, the inherent challenge of explaining AI components introduces uncertainty and unreliability to these AI-enabled robotics systems, necessitating a reliable development platform for system design and performance assessment. As a foundational step towards building reliable AI-enabled robotics systems, we propose a public industrial benchmark for robotics manipulation in this paper. It leverages NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac Sim as the simulation platform, encompassing eight representative manipulation tasks and multiple AI software controllers. An extensive evaluation is conducted to analyze the performance of AI controllers in solving robotics manipulation tasks, enabling a thorough understanding of their effectiveness. To further demonstrate the applicability of our benchmark, we develop a falsification framework that is compatible with physical simulators and OpenAI Gym environments. This framework bridges the gap between traditional testing methods and modern physics engine-based simulations. The effectiveness of different optimization methods in falsifying AI-enabled robotics manipulation with physical simulators is examined via a falsification test. Our work not only establishes a foundation for the design and development of AI-enabled robotics systems but also provides practical experience and guidance to practitioners in this field, promoting further research in this critical academic and industrial domain.

This paper studies the leader-following consensuses of uncertain and nonlinear multi-agent systems against composite attacks (CAs), including Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and actuation attacks (AAs). A double-layer control framework is formulated, where a digital twin layer (TL) is added beside the traditional cyber-physical layer (CPL), inspired by the recent Digital Twin technology. Consequently, the resilient control task against CAs can be divided into two parts: One is distributed estimation against DoS attacks on the TL and the other is resilient decentralized tracking control against actuation attacks on the CPL. %The data-driven scheme is used to deal with both model non-linearity and model uncertainty, in which only the input and output data of the system are employed throughout the whole control process. First, a distributed observer based on switching estimation law against DoS is designed on TL. Second, a distributed model free adaptive control (DMFAC) protocol based on attack compensation against AAs is designed on CPL. Moreover, the uniformly ultimately bounded convergence of consensus error of the proposed double-layer DMFAC algorithm is strictly proved. Finally, the simulation verifies the effectiveness of the resilient double-layer control scheme.

In this paper, we synthesize a data-driven method to predict the optimal topology of an ad-hoc robot network. This problem is technically a multi-task classification problem. However, we divide it into a class of multi-class classification problems that can be more efficiently solved. For this purpose, we first compose an algorithm to create ground-truth optimal topologies associated with various configurations of a robot network. This algorithm incorporates a complex collection of optimality criteria that our learning model successfully manages to learn. This model is an stacked ensemble whose output is the topology prediction for a particular robot. Each stacked ensemble instance constitutes three low-level estimators whose outputs will be aggregated by a high-level boosting blender. Applying our model to a network of 10 robots displays over 80% accuracy in the prediction of optimal topologies corresponding to various configurations of the cited network., Comment: This version is the one published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

In this paper, we develop a safe decision-making method for self-driving cars in a multi-lane, single-agent setting. The proposed approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve a high-level policy for safe tactical decision-making. We address two major challenges that arise solely in autonomous navigation. First, the proposed algorithm ensures that collisions never happen, and therefore accelerate the learning process. Second, the proposed algorithm takes into account the unobservable states in the environment. These states appear mainly due to the unpredictable behavior of other agents, such as cars, and pedestrians, and make the Markov Decision Process (MDP) problematic when dealing with autonomous navigation. Simulations from a well-known self-driving car simulator demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method

For an autonomous linear time-invariant (LTI) system, a distributed observer with time-triggered periodic observations and event-triggered communication is proposed to estimate the state of the system. It is shown that the sampling period is critical for the existence of desirable observers. A necessary and sufficient condition is established to give all feasible sampling periods that lead to convergent error dynamics and characterize delicate relationships among sampling periods, topologies, and system matrices. An event-triggering mechanism based on locally sampled data is designed to regulate the communication among agents, and the convergence of the estimation errors under the mechanism holds for a class of positive and convergent triggering functions, which include the commonly used exponential function as a special case. The mixed time- and event-triggered architecture naturally excludes the existence of Zeno behavior as the system updates at discrete instants. When the triggering function is bounded by exponential functions, analytical characterization of the relationship among sampling, event triggering, and inter-event behaviour is established. Finally, several examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness and merits of the theoretical results., Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures

Recommendation systems rely heavily on users behavioural and preferential data (e.g. ratings, likes) to produce accurate recommendations. However, users experience privacy concerns due to unethical data aggregation and analytical practices carried out by the Service Providers (SP). Local differential privacy (LDP) based perturbation mechanisms add noise to users data at user side before sending it to the SP. The SP then uses the perturbed data to perform recommendations. Although LDP protects the privacy of users from SP, it causes a substantial decline in predictive accuracy. To address this issue, we propose an LDP-based Matrix Factorization (MF) with a Gaussian Mixture Model (MoG). The LDP perturbation mechanism, Bounded Laplace (BLP), regulates the effect of noise by confining the perturbed ratings to a predetermined domain. We derive a sufficient condition of the scale parameter for BLP to satisfy $\epsilon$ LDP. At the SP, The MoG model estimates the noise added to perturbed ratings and the MF algorithm predicts missing ratings. Our proposed LDP based recommendation system improves the recommendation accuracy without violating LDP principles. The empirical evaluations carried out on three real world datasets, i.e., Movielens, Libimseti and Jester, demonstrate that our method offers a substantial increase in predictive accuracy under strong privacy guarantee., Comment: 12 pages

This paper investigates the optimal control problem for a class of discrete-time stochastic systems subject to additive and multiplicative noises. A stochastic Lyapunov equation and a stochastic algebra Riccati equation are established for the existence of the optimal admissible control policy. A model-free reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed to learn the optimal admissible control policy using the data of the system states and inputs without requiring any knowledge of the system matrices. It is proven that the learning algorithm converges to the optimal admissible control policy. The implementation of the model-free algorithm is based on batch least squares and numerical average. The proposed algorithm is illustrated through a numerical example, which shows our algorithm outperforms other policy iteration algorithms., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures