arXiv subjects

Simon Chu

Publications and source records attributed to Simon Chu.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Leveling the Playing Field: Temporal Video Segmentation for Individuals with ADHD in Computing Education

Individuals with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often face significant barriers in computing education. In asynchronous learning environments, instructional videos can impose high extraneous cognitive load, often relying on assumptions about sustained attention and working memory that do not align with ADHD neurocognitive profiles. In this work, we evaluate a post-hoc video processing intervention that segments instructional content into single-instruction chunks followed by fixed-length pauses to reduce cognitive load. In a within-participants controlled study with 17 individuals with ADHD and 10 without, we find that the intervention has an equalizing effect. Although it improved performance for all participants, gains were larger for those with ADHD, reducing their errors and hesitations to levels comparable to those of participants without ADHD under the same intervention. These results align with the goals of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), by showing that cognitively-aligned, post-hoc instructional video modifications can reduce performance disparities across diverse neurocognitive profiles.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Fold-CP: A Context Parallelism Framework for Biomolecular Modeling

Understanding cellular machinery requires atomic-scale reconstruction of large biomolecular assemblies. However, predicting the structures of these systems has been constrained by hardware memory requirements of models like AlphaFold 3, imposing a practical ceiling of a few thousand residues that can be processed on a single GPU. Here we present NVIDIA BioNeMo Fold-CP, a context parallelism framework that overcomes this barrier by distributing the inference and training pipelines of co-folding models across multiple GPUs. We use the Boltz models as open source reference architectures and implement custom multidimensional primitives that efficiently parallelize both the dense triangular updates and the irregular, data-dependent pattern of window-batched local attention. Our approach achieves efficient memory scaling; for an N-token input distributed across P GPUs, per-device memory scales as $O(N^2/P)$, enabling the structure prediction of assemblies exceeding 30,000 residues on 64 NVIDIA B300 GPUs. We demonstrate the scientific utility of this approach through successful developer use cases: Fold-CP enabled the scoring of over 90% of Comprehensive Resource of Mammalian protein complexes (CORUM) database, as well as folding of disease-relevant PI4KA lipid kinase complex bound to an intrinsically disordered region without cropping. By providing a scalable pathway for modeling massive systems with full global context, Fold-CP represents a significant step toward the realization of a virtual cell.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2024

BioNeMo Framework: a modular, high-performance library for AI model development in drug discovery

Artificial Intelligence models encoding biology and chemistry are opening new routes to high-throughput and high-quality in-silico drug development. However, their training increasingly relies on computational scale, with recent protein language models (pLM) training on hundreds of graphical processing units (GPUs). We introduce the BioNeMo Framework to facilitate the training of computational biology and chemistry AI models across hundreds of GPUs. Its modular design allows the integration of individual components, such as data loaders, into existing workflows and is open to community contributions. We detail technical features of the BioNeMo Framework through use cases such as pLM pre-training and fine-tuning. On 256 NVIDIA A100s, BioNeMo Framework trains a three billion parameter BERT-based pLM on over one trillion tokens in 4.2 days. The BioNeMo Framework is open-source and free for everyone to use.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Memory-Maze: Scenario Driven Visual Language Navigation Benchmark for Guiding Blind People

Visual Language Navigation (VLN) powered robots have the potential to guide blind people by understanding route instructions provided by sighted passersby. This capability allows robots to operate in environments often unknown a prior. Existing VLN models are insufficient for the scenario of navigation guidance for blind people, as they need to understand routes described from human memory, which frequently contains stutters, errors, and omissions of details, as opposed to those obtained by thinking out loud, such as in the R2R dataset. However, existing benchmarks do not contain instructions obtained from human memory in natural environments. To this end, we present our benchmark, Memory-Maze, which simulates the scenario of seeking route instructions for guiding blind people. Our benchmark contains a maze-like structured virtual environment and novel route instruction data from human memory. Our analysis demonstrates that instruction data collected from memory was longer and contained more varied wording. We further demonstrate that addressing errors and ambiguities from memory-based instructions is challenging, by evaluating state-of-the-art models alongside our baseline model with modularized perception and controls.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Integrating Graceful Degradation and Recovery through Requirement-driven Adaptation

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are subject to environmental uncertainties such as adverse operating conditions, malicious attacks, and hardware degradation. These uncertainties may lead to failures that put the system in a sub-optimal or unsafe state. Systems that are resilient to such uncertainties rely on two types of operations: (1) graceful degradation, to ensure that the system maintains an acceptable level of safety during unexpected environmental conditions and (2) recovery, to facilitate the resumption of normal system functions. Typically, mechanisms for degradation and recovery are developed independently from each other, and later integrated into a system, requiring the designer to develop an additional, ad-hoc logic for activating and coordinating between the two operations. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptation approach for improving system resiliency through automated triggering and coordination of graceful degradation and recovery. The key idea behind our approach is to treat degradation and recovery as requirement-driven adaptation tasks: Degradation can be thought of as temporarily weakening original (i.e., ideal) system requirements to be achieved by the system, and recovery as strengthening the weakened requirements when the environment returns within an expected operating boundary. Furthermore, by treating weakening and strengthening as dual operations, we argue that a single requirement-based adaptation method is sufficient to enable coordination between degradation and recovery. Given system requirements specified in signal temporal logic (STL), we propose a run-time adaptation framework that performs degradation and recovery in response to environmental changes. We describe a prototype implementation of our framework and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach using a case study in unmanned underwater vehicles.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

"Do it my way!": Impact of Customizations on Trust perceptions in Human-Robot Collaboration

Trust has been shown to be a key factor in effective human-robot collaboration. In the context of assistive robotics, the effect of trust factors on human experience is further pronounced. Personalization of assistive robots is an orthogonal factor positively correlated with robot adoption and user perceptions. In this work, we investigate the relationship between these factors through a within-subjects study (N=17). We provide different levels of customization possibilities over baseline autonomous robot behavior and investigate its impact on trust. Our findings indicate that increased levels of customization was associated with higher trust and comfort perceptions. The assistive robot design process can benefit significantly from our insights for designing trustworthy and customized robots.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Runtime Resolution of Feature Interactions through Adaptive Requirement Weakening

The feature interaction problem occurs when two or more independently developed components interact with each other in unanticipated ways, resulting in undesirable system behaviors. Feature interaction problems remain a challenge for emerging domains in cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as the Internet of Things and autonomous drones. Existing techniques for resolving feature interactions take a "winner-takes-all" approach, where one out of the conflicting features is selected as the most desirable one, and the rest are disabled. However, when multiple of the conflicting features fulfill important system requirements, being forced to select one of them can result in an undesirable system outcome. In this paper, we propose a new resolution approach that allows all of the conflicting features to continue to partially fulfill their requirements during the resolution process. In particular, our approach leverages the idea of adaptive requirement weakening, which involves one or more features temporarily weakening their level of performance in order to co-exist with the other features in a consistent manner. Given feature requirements specified in Signal Temporal Logic (STL), we propose an automated method and a runtime architecture for automatically weakening the requirements to resolve a conflict. We demonstrate our approach through case studies on feature interactions in autonomous drones.

cs.SE↗