Daily Papers

As large language models gain widespread adoption, running them efficiently becomes crucial. Recent works on LLM inference use speculative decoding to achieve extreme speedups. However, most of these works implicitly design their algorithms for high-end datacenter hardware. In this work, we ask the opposite question: how fast can we run LLMs on consumer machines? Consumer GPUs can no longer fit the largest available models (50B+ parameters) and must offload them to RAM or SSD. When running with offloaded parameters, the inference engine can process batches of hundreds or thousands of tokens at the same time as just one token, making it a natural fit for speculative decoding. We propose SpecExec (Speculative Execution), a simple parallel decoding method that can generate up to 20 tokens per target model iteration for popular LLM families. It utilizes the high spikiness of the token probabilities distribution in modern LLMs and a high degree of alignment between model output probabilities. SpecExec takes the most probable tokens continuation from the draft model to build a "cache" tree for the target model, which then gets validated in a single pass. Using SpecExec, we demonstrate inference of 50B+ parameter LLMs on consumer GPUs with RAM offloading at 4-6 tokens per second with 4-bit quantization or 2-3 tokens per second with 16-bit weights.

Super-resolution (SR) techniques have recently been proposed to upscale the outputs of neural radiance fields (NeRF) and generate high-quality images with enhanced inference speeds. However, existing NeRF+SR methods increase training overhead by using extra input features, loss functions, and/or expensive training procedures such as knowledge distillation. In this paper, we aim to leverage SR for efficiency gains without costly training or architectural changes. Specifically, we build a simple NeRF+SR pipeline that directly combines existing modules, and we propose a lightweight augmentation technique, random patch sampling, for training. Compared to existing NeRF+SR methods, our pipeline mitigates the SR computing overhead and can be trained up to 23x faster, making it feasible to run on consumer devices such as the Apple MacBook. Experiments show our pipeline can upscale NeRF outputs by 2-4x while maintaining high quality, increasing inference speeds by up to 18x on an NVIDIA V100 GPU and 12.8x on an M1 Pro chip. We conclude that SR can be a simple but effective technique for improving the efficiency of NeRF models for consumer devices.

With the rapid growth of User-Generated Content (UGC) exchanged between users and sharing platforms, the need for video quality assessment in the wild is increasingly evident. UGC is typically acquired using consumer devices and undergoes multiple rounds of compression (transcoding) before reaching the end user. Therefore, traditional quality metrics that employ the original content as a reference are not suitable. In this paper, we propose ReLaX-VQA, a novel No-Reference Video Quality Assessment (NR-VQA) model that aims to address the challenges of evaluating the quality of diverse video content without reference to the original uncompressed videos. ReLaX-VQA uses frame differences to select spatio-temporal fragments intelligently together with different expressions of spatial features associated with the sampled frames. These are then used to better capture spatial and temporal variabilities in the quality of neighbouring frames. Furthermore, the model enhances abstraction by employing layer-stacking techniques in deep neural network features from Residual Networks and Vision Transformers. Extensive testing across four UGC datasets demonstrates that ReLaX-VQA consistently outperforms existing NR-VQA methods, achieving an average SRCC of 0.8658 and PLCC of 0.8873. Open-source code and trained models that will facilitate further research and applications of NR-VQA can be found at https://github.com/xinyiW915/ReLaX-VQA.

3D reconstruction from a single-view is challenging because of the ambiguity from monocular cues and lack of information about occluded regions. Neural radiance fields (NeRF), while popular for view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, are typically reliant on multi-view images. Existing methods for single-view 3D reconstruction with NeRF rely on either data priors to hallucinate views of occluded regions, which may not be physically accurate, or shadows observed by RGB cameras, which are difficult to detect in ambient light and low albedo backgrounds. We propose using time-of-flight data captured by a single-photon avalanche diode to overcome these limitations. Our method models two-bounce optical paths with NeRF, using lidar transient data for supervision. By leveraging the advantages of both NeRF and two-bounce light measured by lidar, we demonstrate that we can reconstruct visible and occluded geometry without data priors or reliance on controlled ambient lighting or scene albedo. In addition, we demonstrate improved generalization under practical constraints on sensor spatial- and temporal-resolution. We believe our method is a promising direction as single-photon lidars become ubiquitous on consumer devices, such as phones, tablets, and headsets.

We tackle the problem of estimating a Manhattan frame, i.e. three orthogonal vanishing points, and the unknown focal length of the camera, leveraging a prior vertical direction. The direction can come from an Inertial Measurement Unit that is a standard component of recent consumer devices, e.g., smartphones. We provide an exhaustive analysis of minimal line configurations and derive two new 2-line solvers, one of which does not suffer from singularities affecting existing solvers. Additionally, we design a new non-minimal method, running on an arbitrary number of lines, to boost the performance in local optimization. Combining all solvers in a hybrid robust estimator, our method achieves increased accuracy even with a rough prior. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior accuracy of our method compared to the state of the art, while having comparable runtimes. We further demonstrate the applicability of our solvers for relative rotation estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/cvg/VP-Estimation-with-Prior-Gravity.

With the emergence of neural radiance fields (NeRFs), view synthesis quality has reached an unprecedented level. Compared to traditional mesh-based assets, this volumetric representation is more powerful in expressing scene geometry but inevitably suffers from high rendering costs and can hardly be involved in further processes like editing, posing significant difficulties in combination with the existing graphics pipeline. In this paper, we present a hybrid volume-mesh representation, VMesh, which depicts an object with a textured mesh along with an auxiliary sparse volume. VMesh retains the advantages of mesh-based assets, such as efficient rendering, compact storage, and easy editing, while also incorporating the ability to represent subtle geometric structures provided by the volumetric counterpart. VMesh can be obtained from multi-view images of an object and renders at 2K 60FPS on common consumer devices with high fidelity, unleashing new opportunities for real-time immersive applications.

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have unlocked remarkable capabilities. While deploying these models typically requires server-grade GPUs and cloud-based inference, the recent emergence of smaller open-source models and increasingly powerful consumer devices have made on-device deployment practical. The web browser as a platform for on-device deployment is universally accessible, provides a natural agentic environment, and conveniently abstracts out the different backends from diverse device vendors. To address this opportunity, we introduce WebLLM, an open-source JavaScript framework that enables high-performance LLM inference entirely within web browsers. WebLLM provides an OpenAI-style API for seamless integration into web applications, and leverages WebGPU for efficient local GPU acceleration and WebAssembly for performant CPU computation. With machine learning compilers MLC-LLM and Apache TVM, WebLLM leverages optimized WebGPU kernels, overcoming the absence of performant WebGPU kernel libraries. Evaluations show that WebLLM can retain up to 80% native performance on the same device, with room to further close the gap. WebLLM paves the way for universally accessible, privacy-preserving, personalized, and locally powered LLM applications in web browsers. The code is available at: https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm.

Tracking biosignals is crucial for monitoring wellness and preempting the development of severe medical conditions. Today, wearable devices can conveniently record various biosignals, creating the opportunity to monitor health status without disruption to one's daily routine. Despite widespread use of wearable devices and existing digital biomarkers, the absence of curated data with annotated medical labels hinders the development of new biomarkers to measure common health conditions. In fact, medical datasets are usually small in comparison to other domains, which is an obstacle for developing neural network models for biosignals. To address this challenge, we have employed self-supervised learning using the unlabeled sensor data collected under informed consent from the large longitudinal Apple Heart and Movement Study (AHMS) to train foundation models for two common biosignals: photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded on Apple Watch. We curated PPG and ECG datasets from AHMS that include data from ~141K participants spanning ~3 years. Our self-supervised learning framework includes participant level positive pair selection, stochastic augmentation module and a regularized contrastive loss optimized with momentum training, and generalizes well to both PPG and ECG modalities. We show that the pre-trained foundation models readily encode information regarding participants' demographics and health conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that builds foundation models using large-scale PPG and ECG data collected via wearable consumer devices x2013 prior works have commonly used smaller-size datasets collected in clinical and experimental settings. We believe PPG and ECG foundation models can enhance future wearable devices by reducing the reliance on labeled data and hold the potential to help the users improve their health.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advances in supporting long-context comprehension and processing tasks. However, scaling the generation inference of LLMs to such long contexts incurs significant additional computation load, and demands a substantial GPU memory footprint to maintain the key-value (KV) cache of transformer-based LLMs. Existing KV cache compression methods, such as quantization, face memory bottlenecks as context length increases, while static-sized caches, such as eviction, suffer from inefficient policies. These limitations restrict deployment on consumer-grade devices like a single Nvidia 4090 GPU. To overcome this, we propose Locret, a framework for long-context LLM inference that introduces retaining heads to evaluate the causal importance of KV cache units, allowing for more accurate eviction within a fixed cache size. Locret is fine-tuned on top of the frozen backbone LLM using a minimal amount of data from standard long-context SFT datasets. During inference, we evict low-importance cache units along with a chunked prefill pattern, significantly reducing peak GPU memory usage. We conduct an extensive empirical study to evaluate Locret, where the experimental results show that Locret outperforms the recent competitive approaches, including InfLLM, Quantization, SirLLM, and MInference, in terms of memory efficiency and the quality of generated contents -- Locret achieves over a 20x and 8x KV cache compression ratio compared to the full KV cache for Phi-3-mini-128K and Llama-3.1-8B-instruct. Additionally, Locret can be combined with other methods, such as quantization and token merging. To our knowledge, Locret is the first framework capable of deploying Llama-3.1-8B or similar models on a single Nvidia 4090 GPU, enabling 128K long-context inference without compromising generation quality, and requiring little additional system optimizations.

Due to the high resource demands of Large Language Models (LLMs), achieving widespread deployment on consumer-grade devices presents significant challenges. Typically, personal or consumer-grade devices, including servers configured prior to the era of large-scale models, generally have relatively weak GPUs and relatively strong CPUs. However, most current methods primarily depend on GPUs for computation. Therefore, we propose Dovetail, an approach that deploys the draft model on the GPU to generate draft tokens while allowing the target model to perform parallel verification on the CPU, thereby improving the utilization of all available hardware resources and occupying less inter-device communication bandwidth. Accordingly, we have redesigned the draft model to better align with heterogeneous hardware characteristics. To this end, we implemented several optimizations: reducing the number of draft tokens to mitigate latency in parallel verification, increasing the depth of the draft model to enhance its predictive capacity, and introducing DGF (Dynamic Gating Fusion) to improve the integration of features and token embeddings. In the HumanEval benchmark, Dovetail achieved an inference speed of 5.86 tokens per second for LLaMA2-Chat-7B using 3GB of VRAM, representing an approximately 2.77x improvement over CPU-only inference. Furthermore, the inference speed was increased to 8 tokens per second when utilizing 7GB of VRAM.

In recent years, Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) have become the backbone of a large number of consumer electronic devices leading to a surge in their production. This has made it imperative to employ automatic inspection systems to identify manufacturing defects in PCB before they are installed in the respective systems. An important task in this regard is the classification of defects as either true or pseudo defects, which decides if the PCB is to be re-manufactured or not. This work proposes a novel approach to detect most common defects in the PCBs. The problem has been approached by employing highly discriminative features based on multi-scale wavelet transform, which are further boosted by using a kernalized version of the support vector machines (SVM). A real world printed circuit board dataset has been used for quantitative analysis. Experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed method.

Ranking algorithms in traditional search engines are powered by enormous training data sets that are meticulously engineered and curated by a centralized entity. Decentralized peer-to-peer (p2p) networks such as torrenting applications and Web3 protocols deliberately eschew centralized databases and computational architectures when designing services and features. As such, robust search-and-rank algorithms designed for such domains must be engineered specifically for decentralized networks, and must be lightweight enough to operate on consumer-grade personal devices such as a smartphone or laptop computer. We introduce G-Rank, an unsupervised ranking algorithm designed exclusively for decentralized networks. We demonstrate that accurate, relevant ranking results can be achieved in fully decentralized networks without any centralized data aggregation, feature engineering, or model training. Furthermore, we show that such results are obtainable with minimal data preprocessing and computational overhead, and can still return highly relevant results even when a user's device is disconnected from the network. G-Rank is highly modular in design, is not limited to categorical data, and can be implemented in a variety of domains with minimal modification. The results herein show that unsupervised ranking models designed for decentralized p2p networks are not only viable, but worthy of further research.

Single image depth estimation is a foundational task in computer vision and generative modeling. However, prevailing depth estimation models grapple with accommodating the increasing resolutions commonplace in today's consumer cameras and devices. Existing high-resolution strategies show promise, but they often face limitations, ranging from error propagation to the loss of high-frequency details. We present PatchFusion, a novel tile-based framework with three key components to improve the current state of the art: (1) A patch-wise fusion network that fuses a globally-consistent coarse prediction with finer, inconsistent tiled predictions via high-level feature guidance, (2) A Global-to-Local (G2L) module that adds vital context to the fusion network, discarding the need for patch selection heuristics, and (3) A Consistency-Aware Training (CAT) and Inference (CAI) approach, emphasizing patch overlap consistency and thereby eradicating the necessity for post-processing. Experiments on UnrealStereo4K, MVS-Synth, and Middleburry 2014 demonstrate that our framework can generate high-resolution depth maps with intricate details. PatchFusion is independent of the base model for depth estimation. Notably, our framework built on top of SOTA ZoeDepth brings improvements for a total of 17.3% and 29.4% in terms of the root mean squared error (RMSE) on UnrealStereo4K and MVS-Synth, respectively.

Recent work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) showed how neural networks can be used to encode complex 3D environments that can be rendered photorealistically from novel viewpoints. Rendering these images is very computationally demanding and recent improvements are still a long way from enabling interactive rates, even on high-end hardware. Motivated by scenarios on mobile and mixed reality devices, we propose FastNeRF, the first NeRF-based system capable of rendering high fidelity photorealistic images at 200Hz on a high-end consumer GPU. The core of our method is a graphics-inspired factorization that allows for (i) compactly caching a deep radiance map at each position in space, (ii) efficiently querying that map using ray directions to estimate the pixel values in the rendered image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is 3000 times faster than the original NeRF algorithm and at least an order of magnitude faster than existing work on accelerating NeRF, while maintaining visual quality and extensibility.

Large language models (LLMs) are useful in many NLP tasks and become more capable with size, with the best open-source models having over 50 billion parameters. However, using these 50B+ models requires high-end hardware, making them inaccessible to most researchers. In this work, we investigate methods for cost-efficient inference and fine-tuning of LLMs, comparing local and distributed strategies. We observe that a large enough model (50B+) can run efficiently even on geodistributed devices in a consumer-grade network. This could allow running LLM efficiently by pooling together idle compute resources of multiple research groups and volunteers. We address two open problems: (1) how to perform inference and fine-tuning reliably if any device can disconnect abruptly and (2) how to partition LLMs between devices with uneven hardware, joining and leaving at will. In order to do that, we develop special fault-tolerant inference algorithms and load-balancing protocols that automatically assign devices to maximize the total system throughput. We showcase these algorithms in Petals - a decentralized system that runs Llama 2 (70B) and BLOOM (176B) over the Internet up to 10x faster than offloading for interactive generation. We evaluate the performance of our system in simulated conditions and a real-world setup spanning two continents.

Sign language recognition could significantly improve the user experience for d/Deaf people with the general consumer technology, such as IoT devices or videoconferencing. However, current sign language recognition architectures are usually computationally heavy and require robust GPU-equipped hardware to run in real-time. Some models aim for lower-end devices (such as smartphones) by minimizing their size and complexity, which leads to worse accuracy. This highly scrutinizes accurate in-the-wild applications. We build upon the SPOTER architecture, which belongs to the latter group of light methods, as it came close to the performance of large models employed for this task. By substituting its original third-party pose estimation module with the MediaPipe library, we achieve an overall state-of-the-art result on the WLASL100 dataset. Significantly, our method beats previous larger architectures while still being twice as computationally efficient and almost 11 times faster on inference when compared to a relevant benchmark. To demonstrate our method's combined efficiency and precision, we built an online demo that enables users to translate sign lemmas of American sign language in their browsers. This is the first publicly available online application demonstrating this task to the best of our knowledge.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in vision-language tasks across a broad spectrum of domains. However, the large model scale and associated high computational costs pose significant challenges for training and deploying MLLMs on consumer-grade GPUs or edge devices, thereby hindering their widespread application. In this work, we introduce Mini-InternVL, a series of MLLMs with parameters ranging from 1B to 4B, which achieves 90% of the performance with only 5% of the parameters. This significant improvement in efficiency and effectiveness makes our models more accessible and applicable in various real-world scenarios. To further promote the adoption of our models, we develop a unified adaptation framework for Mini-InternVL, which enables our models to transfer and outperform specialized models in downstream tasks, including autonomous driving, medical images, and remote sensing. We believe that our study can provide valuable insights and resources to advance the development of efficient and effective MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVL.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have achieved state-of-the-art results in a wide range of tasks, with the best results obtained with large training sets and large models. In the past, GPUs enabled these breakthroughs because of their greater computational speed. In the future, faster computation at both training and test time is likely to be crucial for further progress and for consumer applications on low-power devices. As a result, there is much interest in research and development of dedicated hardware for Deep Learning (DL). Binary weights, i.e., weights which are constrained to only two possible values (e.g. -1 or 1), would bring great benefits to specialized DL hardware by replacing many multiply-accumulate operations by simple accumulations, as multipliers are the most space and power-hungry components of the digital implementation of neural networks. We introduce BinaryConnect, a method which consists in training a DNN with binary weights during the forward and backward propagations, while retaining precision of the stored weights in which gradients are accumulated. Like other dropout schemes, we show that BinaryConnect acts as regularizer and we obtain near state-of-the-art results with BinaryConnect on the permutation-invariant MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN.

In the evolving e-commerce field, recommendation systems crucially shape user experience and engagement. The rise of Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) recommendation systems, noted for their flexibility and ease of access for customer vendors, marks a significant trend. However, the academic focus remains largely on Business-to-Consumer (B2C) models, leaving a gap filled by the limited C2C recommendation datasets that lack in item attributes, user diversity, and scale. The intricacy of C2C recommendation systems is further accentuated by the dual roles users assume as both sellers and buyers, introducing a spectrum of less uniform and varied inputs. Addressing this, we introduce MerRec, the first large-scale dataset specifically for C2C recommendations, sourced from the Mercari e-commerce platform, covering millions of users and products over 6 months in 2023. MerRec not only includes standard features such as user_id, item_id, and session_id, but also unique elements like timestamped action types, product taxonomy, and textual product attributes, offering a comprehensive dataset for research. This dataset, extensively evaluated across six recommendation tasks, establishes a new benchmark for the development of advanced recommendation algorithms in real-world scenarios, bridging the gap between academia and industry and propelling the study of C2C recommendations.

Estimating the overall user experience (UX) on a device is a common challenge faced by manufacturers. Today, device makers primarily rely on microbenchmark scores, such as Geekbench, that stress test specific hardware components, such as CPU or RAM, but do not satisfactorily capture consumer workloads. System designers often rely on domain-specific heuristics and extensive testing of prototypes to reach a desired UX goal, and yet there is often a mismatch between the manufacturers' performance claims and the consumers' experience. We present our initial results on predicting real-life experience on laptops from their hardware specifications. We target web applications that run on Chromebooks (ChromeOS laptops) for a simple and fair aggregation of experience across applications and workloads. On 54 laptops, we track 9 UX metrics on common end-user workloads: web browsing, video playback and audio/video calls. We focus on a subset of high-level metrics exposed by the Chrome browser, that are part of the Web Vitals initiative for judging the UX on web applications. With a dataset of 100K UX data points, we train gradient boosted regression trees that predict the metric values from device specifications. Across our 9 metrics, we note a mean R^2 score (goodness-of-fit on our dataset) of 97.8% and a mean MAAPE (percentage error in prediction on unseen data) of 10.1%.

Product recommendation systems are important for major movie studios during the movie greenlight process and as part of machine learning personalization pipelines. Collaborative Filtering (CF) models have proved to be effective at powering recommender systems for online streaming services with explicit customer feedback data. CF models do not perform well in scenarios in which feedback data is not available, in cold start situations like new product launches, and situations with markedly different customer tiers (e.g., high frequency customers vs. casual customers). Generative natural language models that create useful theme-based representations of an underlying corpus of documents can be used to represent new product descriptions, like new movie plots. When combined with CF, they have shown to increase the performance in cold start situations. Outside of those cases though in which explicit customer feedback is available, recommender engines must rely on binary purchase data, which materially degrades performance. Fortunately, purchase data can be combined with product descriptions to generate meaningful representations of products and customer trajectories in a convenient product space in which proximity represents similarity. Learning to measure the distance between points in this space can be accomplished with a deep neural network that trains on customer histories and on dense vectorizations of product descriptions. We developed a system based on Collaborative (Deep) Metric Learning (CML) to predict the purchase probabilities of new theatrical releases. We trained and evaluated the model using a large dataset of customer histories, and tested the model for a set of movies that were released outside of the training window. Initial experiments show gains relative to models that do not train on collaborative preferences.

Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data.

Recommendations are broadly used in marketplaces to match users with items relevant to their interests and needs. To understand user intent and tailor recommendations to their needs, we use deep learning to explore various heterogeneous data available in marketplaces. This paper focuses on the challenge of measuring recommender performance and summarizes the online experiment results with several promising types of deep neural network recommenders - hybrid item representation models combining features from user engagement and content, sequence-based models, and multi-armed bandit models that optimize user engagement by re-ranking proposals from multiple submodels. The recommenders are currently running in production at the leading Norwegian marketplace FINN.no and serves over one million visitors everyday.

The growth in the number of parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a significant surge in computational requirements, making them challenging and costly to deploy. Speculative decoding (SD) leverages smaller models to efficiently propose future tokens, which are then verified by the LLM in parallel. Small models that utilise activations from the LLM currently achieve the fastest decoding speeds. However, we identify several limitations of SD models including the lack of on-policyness during training and partial observability. To address these shortcomings, we propose a more grounded architecture for small models by introducing a Mixture of Attentions for SD. Our novel architecture can be applied in two scenarios: a conventional single device deployment and a novel client-server deployment where the small model is hosted on a consumer device and the LLM on a server. In a single-device scenario, we demonstrate state-of-the-art speedups improving EAGLE-2 by 9.5% and its acceptance length by 25%. In a client-server setting, our experiments demonstrate: 1) state-of-the-art latencies with minimal calls to the server for different network conditions, and 2) in the event of a complete disconnection, our approach can maintain higher accuracy compared to other SD methods and demonstrates advantages over API calls to LLMs, which would otherwise be unable to continue the generation process.

Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the reduction in the cost of sensors have encouraged the development of smart environments, such as smart homes. Smart homes can offer home assistance services to improve the quality of life, autonomy and health of their residents, especially for the elderly and dependent. To provide such services, a smart home must be able to understand the daily activities of its residents. Techniques for recognizing human activity in smart homes are advancing daily. But new challenges are emerging every day. In this paper, we present recent algorithms, works, challenges and taxonomy of the field of human activity recognition in a smart home through ambient sensors. Moreover, since activity recognition in smart homes is a young field, we raise specific problems, missing and needed contributions. But also propose directions, research opportunities and solutions to accelerate advances in this field.

Printed Electronics (PE) feature distinct and remarkable characteristics that make them a prominent technology for achieving true ubiquitous computing. This is particularly relevant in application domains that require conformal and ultra-low cost solutions, which have experienced limited penetration of computing until now. Unlike silicon-based technologies, PE offer unparalleled features such as non-recurring engineering costs, ultra-low manufacturing cost, and on-demand fabrication of conformal, flexible, non-toxic, and stretchable hardware. However, PE face certain limitations due to their large feature sizes, that impede the realization of complex circuits, such as machine learning classifiers. In this work, we address these limitations by leveraging the principles of Approximate Computing and Bespoke (fully-customized) design. We propose an automated framework for designing ultra-low power Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers which employs, for the first time, a holistic approach to approximate all functions of the MLP's neurons: multiplication, accumulation, and activation. Through comprehensive evaluation across various MLPs of varying size, our framework demonstrates the ability to enable battery-powered operation of even the most intricate MLP architecture examined, significantly surpassing the current state of the art.

The usage of electronic devices increases, and becomes predominant in most aspects of life. Surface Mount Technology (SMT) is the most common industrial method for manufacturing electric devices in which electrical components are mounted directly onto the surface of a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). Although the expansion of electronic devices affects our lives in a productive way, failures or defects in the manufacturing procedure of those devices might also be counterproductive and even harmful in some cases. It is therefore desired and sometimes crucial to ensure zero-defect quality in electronic devices and their production. While traditional Image Processing (IP) techniques are not sufficient to produce a complete solution, other promising methods like Deep Learning (DL) might also be challenging for PCB inspection, mainly because such methods require big adequate datasets which are missing, not available or not updated in the rapidly growing field of PCBs. Thus, PCB inspection is conventionally performed manually by human experts. Unsupervised Learning (UL) methods may potentially be suitable for PCB inspection, having learning capabilities on the one hand, while not relying on large datasets on the other. In this paper, we introduce ChangeChip, an automated and integrated change detection system for defect detection in PCBs, from soldering defects to missing or misaligned electronic elements, based on Computer Vision (CV) and UL. We achieve good quality defect detection by applying an unsupervised change detection between images of a golden PCB (reference) and the inspected PCB under various setting. In this work, we also present CD-PCB, a synthesized labeled dataset of 20 pairs of PCB images for evaluation of defect detection algorithms.

The proliferation of short video and live-streaming platforms has revolutionized how consumers engage in online shopping. Instead of browsing product pages, consumers are now turning to rich-content e-commerce, where they can purchase products through dynamic and interactive media like short videos and live streams. This emerging form of online shopping has introduced technical challenges, as products may be presented differently across various media domains. Therefore, a unified product representation is essential for achieving cross-domain product recognition to ensure an optimal user search experience and effective product recommendations. Despite the urgent industrial need for a unified cross-domain product representation, previous studies have predominantly focused only on product pages without taking into account short videos and live streams. To fill the gap in the rich-content e-commerce area, in this paper, we introduce a large-scale cRoss-dOmain Product Ecognition dataset, called ROPE. ROPE covers a wide range of product categories and contains over 180,000 products, corresponding to millions of short videos and live streams. It is the first dataset to cover product pages, short videos, and live streams simultaneously, providing the basis for establishing a unified product representation across different media domains. Furthermore, we propose a Cross-dOmain Product rEpresentation framework, namely COPE, which unifies product representations in different domains through multimodal learning including text and vision. Extensive experiments on downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of COPE in learning a joint feature space for all product domains.