arXiv subjects

Shaoshan Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Shaoshan Liu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

VAP: The Vulnerability-Adaptive Protection Paradigm Toward Reliable Autonomous Machines

The next ubiquitous computing platform, following personal computers and smartphones, is poised to be inherently autonomous, encompassing technologies like drones, robots, and self-driving cars. Ensuring reliability for these autonomous machines is critical. However, current resiliency solutions make fundamental trade-offs between reliability and cost, resulting in significant overhead in performance, energy consumption, and chip area. This is due to the "one-size-fits-all" approach commonly used, where the same protection scheme is applied throughout the entire software computing stack. This paper presents the key insight that to achieve high protection coverage with minimal cost, we must leverage the inherent variations in robustness across different layers of the autonomous machine software stack. Specifically, we demonstrate that various nodes in this complex stack exhibit different levels of robustness against hardware faults. Our findings reveal that the front-end of an autonomous machine's software stack tends to be more robust, whereas the back-end is generally more vulnerable. Building on these inherent robustness differences, we propose a Vulnerability-Adaptive Protection (VAP) design paradigm. In this paradigm, the allocation of protection resources - whether spatially (e.g., through modular redundancy) or temporally (e.g., via re-execution) - is made inversely proportional to the inherent robustness of tasks or algorithms within the autonomous machine system. Experimental results show that VAP provides high protection coverage while maintaining low overhead in both autonomous vehicle and drone systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

DaDu-Corki: Algorithm-Architecture Co-Design for Embodied AI-powered Robotic Manipulation

Embodied AI robots have the potential to fundamentally improve the way human beings live and manufacture. Continued progress in the burgeoning field of using large language models to control robots depends critically on an efficient computing substrate, and this trend is strongly evident in manipulation tasks. In particular, today's computing systems for embodied AI robots for manipulation tasks are designed purely based on the interest of algorithm developers, where robot actions are divided into a discrete frame basis. Such an execution pipeline creates high latency and energy consumption. This paper proposes \textsc{Corki}\xspace, an algorithm-architecture co-design framework for real-time embodied AI-powered robotic manipulation applications. We aim to decouple LLM inference, robotic control, and data communication in the embodied AI robots' compute pipeline. Instead of predicting action for one single frame, \textsc{Corki}\xspace predicts the trajectory for the near future to reduce the frequency of LLM inference. The algorithm is coupled with a hardware that accelerates transforming trajectory into actual torque signals used to control robots and an execution pipeline that parallels data communication with computation. \textsc{Corki}\xspace largely reduces LLM inference frequency by up to $5.1\times$, resulting in up to $5.9\times$ speed up. The success rate improvement can be up to 13.9\%.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

ICE-SEARCH: A Language Model-Driven Feature Selection Approach

This study unveils the In-Context Evolutionary Search (ICE-SEARCH) method, which is among the first works that melds large language models (LLMs) with evolutionary algorithms for feature selection (FS) tasks and demonstrates its effectiveness in Medical Predictive Analytics (MPA) applications. ICE-SEARCH harnesses the crossover and mutation capabilities inherent in LLMs within an evolutionary framework, significantly improving FS through the model's comprehensive world knowledge and its adaptability to a variety of roles. Our evaluation of this methodology spans three crucial MPA tasks: stroke, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, where ICE-SEARCH outperforms traditional FS methods in pinpointing essential features for medical applications. ICE-SEARCH achieves State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance in stroke prediction and diabetes prediction; the Decision-Randomized ICE-SEARCH ranks as SOTA in cardiovascular disease prediction. The study emphasizes the critical role of incorporating domain-specific insights, illustrating ICE-SEARCH's robustness, generalizability, and convergence. This opens avenues for further research into comprehensive and intricate FS landscapes, marking a significant stride in the application of artificial intelligence in medical predictive analytics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

A Comprehensive Review and Systematic Analysis of Artificial Intelligence Regulation Policies

Due to the cultural and governance differences of countries around the world, there currently exists a wide spectrum of AI regulation policy proposals that have created a chaos in the global AI regulatory space. Properly regulating AI technologies is extremely challenging, as it requires a delicate balance between legal restrictions and technological developments. In this article, we first present a comprehensive review of AI regulation proposals from different geographical locations and cultural backgrounds. Then, drawing from historical lessons, we develop a framework to facilitate a thorough analysis of AI regulation proposals. Finally, we perform a systematic analysis of these AI regulation proposals to understand how each proposal may fail. This study, containing historical lessons and analysis methods, aims to help governing bodies untangling the AI regulatory chaos through a divide-and-conquer manner.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Autonomy 2.0: The Quest for Economies of Scale

With the advancement of robotics and AI technologies in the past decade, we have now entered the age of autonomous machines. In this new age of information technology, autonomous machines, such as service robots, autonomous drones, delivery robots, and autonomous vehicles, rather than humans, will provide services. In this article, through examining the technical challenges and economic impact of the digital economy, we argue that scalability is both highly necessary from a technical perspective and significantly advantageous from an economic perspective, thus is the key for the autonomy industry to achieve its full potential. Nonetheless, the current development paradigm, dubbed Autonomy 1.0, scales with the number of engineers, instead of with the amount of data or compute resources, hence preventing the autonomy industry to fully benefit from the economies of scale, especially the exponentially cheapening compute cost and the explosion of available data. We further analyze the key scalability blockers and explain how a new development paradigm, dubbed Autonomy 2.0, can address these problems to greatly boost the autonomy industry.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

AI Clinics on Mobile (AICOM): Universal AI Doctors for the Underserved and Hard-to-Reach

This paper introduces Artificial Intelligence Clinics on Mobile (AICOM), an open-source project devoted to answering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) on health, which represents a universal recognition that health is fundamental to human capital and social and economic development. The core motivation for the AICOM project is the fact that over 80% of the people in the least developed countries (LDCs) own a mobile phone, even though less than 40% of these people have internet access. Hence, through enabling AI-based disease diagnostics and screening capability on affordable mobile phones without connectivity will be a critical first step to addressing healthcare access problems. The technologies developed in the AICOM project achieve exactly this goal, and we have demonstrated the effectiveness of AICOM on monkeypox screening tasks. We plan to continue expanding and open-sourcing the AICOM platform, aiming for it to evolve into an universal AI doctor for the Underserved and Hard-to-Reach.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Compliance Costs of AI Technology Commercialization: A Field Deployment Perspective

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are progressing fast, compliance costs have become a huge financial burden for AI startups, which are already constrained on research & development budgets. This situation creates a compliance trap, as many AI startups are not financially prepared to cope with a broad spectrum of regulatory requirements. Particularly, the complex and varying regulatory processes across the globe subtly give advantages to well-established and resourceful technology firms over resource-constrained AI startups [1]. The continuation of this trend may phase out the majority of AI startups and lead to giant technology firms' monopolies of AI technologies. To demonstrate the reality of the compliance trap, from a field deployment perspective, we delve into the details of compliance costs of AI commercial operations.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Thales: Formulating and Estimating Architectural Vulnerability Factors for DNN Accelerators

As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are increasingly deployed in safety critical and privacy sensitive applications such as autonomous driving and biometric authentication, it is critical to understand the fault-tolerance nature of DNNs. Prior work primarily focuses on metrics such as Failures In Time (FIT) rate and the Silent Data Corruption (SDC) rate, which quantify how often a device fails. Instead, this paper focuses on quantifying the DNN accuracy given that a transient error has occurred, which tells us how well a network behaves when a transient error occurs. We call this metric Resiliency Accuracy (RA). We show that existing RA formulation is fundamentally inaccurate, because it incorrectly assumes that software variables (model weights/activations) have equal faulty probability under hardware transient faults. We present an algorithm that captures the faulty probabilities of DNN variables under transient faults and, thus, provides correct RA estimations validated by hardware. To accelerate RA estimation, we reformulate RA calculation as a Monte Carlo integration problem, and solve it using importance sampling driven by DNN specific heuristics. Using our lightweight RA estimation method, we show that transient faults lead to far greater accuracy degradation than what todays DNN resiliency tools estimate. We show how our RA estimation tool can help design more resilient DNNs by integrating it with a Network Architecture Search framework.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2022

AICOM-MP: an AI-based Monkeypox Detector for Resource-Constrained Environments

Under the Autonomous Mobile Clinics (AMCs) initiative, we are developing, open sourcing, and standardizing health AI technologies to enable healthcare access in least developed countries (LDCs). We deem AMCs as the next generation of health care delivery platforms, whereas health AI engines are applications on these platforms, similar to how various applications expand the usage scenarios of smart phones. Facing the recent global monkeypox outbreak, in this article, we introduce AICOM-MP, an AI-based monkeypox detector specially aiming for handling images taken from resource-constrained devices. Compared to existing AI-based monkeypox detectors, AICOM-MP has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. We have hosted AICOM-MP as a web service to allow universal access to monkeypox screening technology. We have also open sourced both the source code and the dataset of AICOM-MP to allow health AI professionals to integrate AICOM-MP into their services. Also, through the AICOM-MP project, we have generalized a methodology of developing health AI technologies for AMCs to allow universal access even in resource-constrained environments.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2022

INTERNEURON: A Middleware with Multi-Network Communication Reliability for Infrastructure Vehicle Cooperative Autonomous Driving

Infrastructure-Vehicle Cooperative Autonomous Driving (IVCAD) is a new paradigm of autonomous driving, which relies on the cooperation between intelligent roads and autonomous vehicles. This paradigm has been shown to be safer and more efficient compared to the on-vehicle-only autonomous driving paradigm. Our real-world deployment data indicates that the effectiveness of IVCAD is constrained by reliability and performance of commercial communication networks. This paper targets this exact problem, and proposes INTERNEURON, a middleware to achieve high communication reliability between intelligent roads and autonomous vehicles, in the context of IVCAD. Specifically, INTERNEURON dynamically matches IVCAD applications and the underlying communication technologies based on varying communication performance and quality needs. Evaluation results confirm that INTERNEURON reduces deadline violations by more than 95\%, significantly improving the reliability of IVCAD systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Programming Autonomous Machines

One key technical challenge in the age of autonomous machines is the programming of autonomous machines, which demands the synergy across multiple domains, including fundamental computer science, computer architecture, and robotics, and requires expertise from both academia and industry. This paper discusses the programming theory and practices tied to producing real-life autonomous machines, and covers aspects from high-level concepts down to low-level code generation in the context of specific functional requirements, performance expectation, and implementation constraints of autonomous machines.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Factor Graph Accelerator for LiDAR-Inertial Odometry

Factor graph is a graph representing the factorization of a probability distribution function, and has been utilized in many autonomous machine computing tasks, such as localization, tracking, planning and control etc. We are developing an architecture with the goal of using factor graph as a common abstraction for most, if not, all autonomous machine computing tasks. If successful, the architecture would provide a very simple interface of mapping autonomous machine functions to the underlying compute hardware. As a first step of such an attempt, this paper presents our most recent work of developing a factor graph accelerator for LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO), an essential task in many autonomous machines, such as autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. By modeling LIO as a factor graph, the proposed accelerator not only supports multi-sensor fusion such as LiDAR, inertial measurement unit (IMU), GPS, etc., but solves the global optimization problem of robot navigation in batch or incremental modes. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed design significantly improves the real-time performance and energy efficiency of autonomous machine navigation systems. The initial success suggests the potential of generalizing the factor graph architecture as a common abstraction for autonomous machine computing, including tracking, planning, and control etc.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Brief Industry Paper: The Necessity of Adaptive Data Fusion in Infrastructure-Augmented Autonomous Driving System

This paper is the first to provide a thorough system design overview along with the fusion methods selection criteria of a real-world cooperative autonomous driving system, named Infrastructure-Augmented Autonomous Driving or IAAD. We present an in-depth introduction of the IAAD hardware and software on both road-side and vehicle-side computing and communication platforms. We extensively characterize the IAAD system in the context of real-world deployment scenarios and observe that the network condition that fluctuates along the road is currently the main technical roadblock for cooperative autonomous driving. To address this challenge, we propose new fusion methods, dubbed "inter-frame fusion" and "planning fusion" to complement the current state-of-the-art "intra-frame fusion". We demonstrate that each fusion method has its own benefit and constraint.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Robotic Computing on FPGAs: Current Progress, Research Challenges, and Opportunities

Robotic computing has reached a tipping point, with a myriad of robots (e.g., drones, self-driving cars, logistic robots) being widely applied in diverse scenarios. The continuous proliferation of robotics, however, critically depends on efficient computing substrates, driven by real-time requirements, robotic size-weight-and-power constraints, cybersecurity considerations, and dynamically changing scenarios. Within all platforms, FPGA is able to deliver both software and hardware solutions with low power, high performance, reconfigurability, reliability, and adaptivity characteristics, serving as the promising computing substrate for robotic applications. This paper highlights the current progress, design techniques, challenges, and open research challenges in the domain of robotic computing on FPGAs.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Autonomous Mobile Clinics: Empowering Affordable Anywhere Anytime Healthcare Access

We are facing a global healthcare crisis today as the healthcare cost is ever climbing, but with the aging population, government fiscal revenue is ever dropping. To create a more efficient and effective healthcare system, three technical challenges immediately present themselves: healthcare access, healthcare equity, and healthcare efficiency. An autonomous mobile clinic solves the healthcare access problem by bringing healthcare services to the patient by the order of the patient's fingertips. Nevertheless, to enable a universal autonomous mobile clinic network, a three-stage technical roadmap needs to be achieved: In stage one, we focus on solving the inequity challenge in the existing healthcare system by combining autonomous mobility and telemedicine. In stage two, we develop an AI doctor for primary care, which we foster from infancy to adulthood with clean healthcare data. With the AI doctor, we can solve the inefficiency problem. In stage three, after we have proven that the autonomous mobile clinic network can truly solve the target clinical use cases, we shall open up the platform for all medical verticals, thus enabling universal healthcare through this whole new system.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

An Energy-Efficient and Runtime-Reconfigurable FPGA-Based Accelerator for Robotic Localization Systems

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) estimates agents' trajectories and constructs maps, and localization is a fundamental kernel in autonomous machines at all computing scales, from drones, AR, VR to self-driving cars. In this work, we present an energy-efficient and runtime-reconfigurable FPGA-based accelerator for robotic localization. We exploit SLAM-specific data locality, sparsity, reuse, and parallelism, and achieve >5x performance improvement over the state-of-the-art. Especially, our design is reconfigurable at runtime according to the environment to save power while sustaining accuracy and performance.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2021

Dilemma of the Artificial Intelligence Regulatory Landscape

As a startup company in the autonomous driving space, we have undergone four years of painful experiences dealing with a broad spectrum of regulatory requirements. Compared to the software industry norm, which spends 13% of their overall budget on compliances, we were forced to spend 42% of our budget on compliances. Our situation is not alone and, in a way, reflects the dilemma of the artificial intelligence (AI) regulatory landscape. The root cause is the lack of AI expertise in the legislative and executive branches, leading to a lack of standardization for the industry to follow. In this article, we share our first-hand experiences and advocate for the establishment of an FDA-like agency to regulate AI properly.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Enabling Level-4 Autonomous Driving on a Single $1k Off-the-Shelf Card

Autonomous driving is of great interest in both research and industry. The high cost has been one of the major roadblocks that slow down the development and adoption of autonomous driving in practice. This paper, for the first-time, shows that it is possible to run level-4 (i.e., fully autonomous driving) software on a single off-the-shelf card (Jetson AGX Xavier) for less than $1k, an order of magnitude less than the state-of-the-art systems, while meeting all the requirements of latency. The success comes from the resolution of some important issues shared by existing practices through a series of measures and innovations. The study overturns the common perceptions of the computing resources required by level-4 autonomous driving, points out a promising path for the industry to lower the cost, and suggests a number of research opportunities for rethinking the architecture, software design, and optimizations of autonomous driving.

cs.RO↗