Wei Cui

Dezhan Tu, Yeye He, Weiwei Cui et al.

Data pipelines are widely employed in modern enterprises to power a variety of Machine-Learning (ML) and Business-Intelligence (BI) applications. Crucially, these pipelines are \emph{recurring} (e.g., daily or hourly) in production settings to keep data updated so that ML models can be re-trained regularly, and BI dashboards refreshed frequently. However, data quality (DQ) issues can often creep into recurring pipelines because of upstream schema and data drift over time. As modern enterprises operate thousands of recurring pipelines, today data engineers have to spend substantial efforts to \emph{manually} monitor and resolve DQ issues, as part of their DataOps and MLOps practices. Given the high human cost of managing large-scale pipeline operations, it is imperative that we can \emph{automate} as much as possible. In this work, we propose Auto-Validate-by-History (AVH) that can automatically detect DQ issues in recurring pipelines, leveraging rich statistics from historical executions. We formalize this as an optimization problem, and develop constant-factor approximation algorithms with provable precision guarantees. Extensive evaluations using 2000 production data pipelines at Microsoft demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of AVH.

Dazhuo Wang, Jianfei Yang, Wei Cui et al.

WiFi-based smart human sensing technology enabled by Channel State Information (CSI) has received great attention in recent years. However, CSI-based sensing systems suffer from performance degradation when deployed in different environments. Existing works solve this problem by domain adaptation using massive unlabeled high-quality data from the new environment, which is usually unavailable in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel augmented environment-invariant robust WiFi gesture recognition system named AirFi that deals with the issue of environment dependency from a new perspective. The AirFi is a novel domain generalization framework that learns the critical part of CSI regardless of different environments and generalizes the model to unseen scenarios, which does not require collecting any data for adaptation to the new environment. AirFi extracts the common features from several training environment settings and minimizes the distribution differences among them. The feature is further augmented to be more robust to environments. Moreover, the system can be further improved by few-shot learning techniques. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, AirFi is able to work in different environment settings without acquiring any CSI data from the new environment. The experimental results demonstrate that our system remains robust in the new environment and outperforms the compared systems.

Peng Li, Yeye He, Dror Yashar et al.

Language models, such as GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable abilities to follow diverse human instructions and perform a wide range of tasks. However, when probing language models using a range of basic table-understanding tasks, we observe that today's language models are still sub-optimal in many table-related tasks, likely because they are pre-trained predominantly on \emph{one-dimensional} natural-language texts, whereas relational tables are \emph{two-dimensional} objects. In this work, we propose a new "\emph{table-tuning}" paradigm, where we continue to train/fine-tune language models like GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, using diverse table-tasks synthesized from real tables as training data, with the goal of enhancing language models' ability to understand tables and perform table tasks. We show that our resulting Table-GPT models demonstrate (1) better \emph{table-understanding} capabilities, by consistently outperforming the vanilla GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, on a wide-range of table tasks, including holdout unseen tasks, and (2) strong \emph{generalizability}, in its ability to respond to diverse human instructions to perform new table-tasks, in a manner similar to GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT.

Weiwei Cui, Yaqi Wang, Yilong Li et al.

Accurate tooth volume segmentation is a prerequisite for computer-aided dental analysis. Deep learning-based tooth segmentation methods have achieved satisfying performances but require a large quantity of tooth data with ground truth. The dental data publicly available is limited meaning the existing methods can not be reproduced, evaluated and applied in clinical practice. In this paper, we establish a 3D dental CBCT dataset CTooth+, with 22 fully annotated volumes and 146 unlabeled volumes. We further evaluate several state-of-the-art tooth volume segmentation strategies based on fully-supervised learning, semi-supervised learning and active learning, and define the performance principles. This work provides a new benchmark for the tooth volume segmentation task, and the experiment can serve as the baseline for future AI-based dental imaging research and clinical application development.

Weiwei Cui, Yaqi Wang, Qianni Zhang et al.

3D tooth segmentation is a prerequisite for computer-aided dental diagnosis and treatment. However, segmenting all tooth regions manually is subjective and time-consuming. Recently, deep learning-based segmentation methods produce convincing results and reduce manual annotation efforts, but it requires a large quantity of ground truth for training. To our knowledge, there are few tooth data available for the 3D segmentation study. In this paper, we establish a fully annotated cone beam computed tomography dataset CTooth with tooth gold standard. This dataset contains 22 volumes (7363 slices) with fine tooth labels annotated by experienced radiographic interpreters. To ensure a relative even data sampling distribution, data variance is included in the CTooth including missing teeth and dental restoration. Several state-of-the-art segmentation methods are evaluated on this dataset. Afterwards, we further summarise and apply a series of 3D attention-based Unet variants for segmenting tooth volumes. This work provides a new benchmark for the tooth volume segmentation task. Experimental evidence proves that attention modules of the 3D UNet structure boost responses in tooth areas and inhibit the influence of background and noise. The best performance is achieved by 3D Unet with SKNet attention module, of 88.04 \% Dice and 78.71 \% IOU, respectively. The attention-based Unet framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on the CTooth dataset. The codebase and dataset are released.

Fucheng Jia, Shiqi Jiang, Ting Cao et al.

Web is increasingly becoming the primary platform to deliver AI services onto edge devices, making in-browser deep learning (DL) inference more prominent. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of edge devices, combined with the underdeveloped state of Web hardware acceleration practices, hinders current in-browser inference from achieving its full performance potential on target devices. To address this issue, this paper presents the pioneering inbrowser inference system, nnJIT, which enables just-in-time (JIT) auto-generation of optimized computing kernels for edge devices. nnJIT is built upon two novel techniques that significantly reduce kernel search and compilation overhead while improving performance firmly: Tensor-Web Compiling Co-Design lowers compiling costs by around 100X through eliminating redundant and ineffective compiling passes; Web-Specific Lite Kernel Optimization Space reduces kernel tuning costs by focusing on Web programming requirements and efficient device resource utilization, pruning the optimization space from millions to only dozens. nnJIT is evaluated for modern models, e.g., BART, T5, and Llama 2, on a range of edge devices including laptops and smartphones using different browsers and hardware from ARM, Intel, AMD and Nvidia. The results show that nnJIT can achieve up to 8.2X faster within 30 seconds compared to the existing baselines.

Sibei Chen, Yeye He, Weiwei Cui et al.

Spreadsheets are widely recognized as the most popular end-user programming tools, which blend the power of formula-based computation, with an intuitive table-based interface. Today, spreadsheets are used by billions of users to manipulate tables, most of whom are neither database experts nor professional programmers. Despite the success of spreadsheets, authoring complex formulas remains challenging, as non-technical users need to look up and understand non-trivial formula syntax. To address this pain point, we leverage the observation that there is often an abundance of similar-looking spreadsheets in the same organization, which not only have similar data, but also share similar computation logic encoded as formulas. We develop an Auto-Formula system that can accurately predict formulas that users want to author in a target spreadsheet cell, by learning and adapting formulas that already exist in similar spreadsheets, using contrastive-learning techniques inspired by "similar-face recognition" from compute vision. Extensive evaluations on over 2K test formulas extracted from real enterprise spreadsheets show the effectiveness of Auto-Formula over alternatives. Our benchmark data is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Auto-Formula to facilitate future research.

Tong Dou, Guofeng Zhang, Wei Cui

Recent work has begun to explore the potential of parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) as general function approximators. In this work, we propose a quantum-classical deep network structure to enhance classical CNN model discriminability. The convolutional layer uses linear filters to scan the input data. Moreover, we build PQC, which is a more potent function approximator, with more complex structures to capture the features within the receptive field. The feature maps are obtained by sliding the PQCs over the input in a similar way as CNN. We also give a training algorithm for the proposed model. The hybrid models used in our design are validated by numerical simulation. We demonstrate the reasonable classification performances on MNIST and we compare the performances with models in different settings. The results disclose that the model with ansatz in high expressibility achieves lower cost and higher accuracy.

Foad Sohrabi, Tao Jiang, Wei Cui et al.

This paper proposes a deep learning approach to a class of active sensing problems in wireless communications in which an agent sequentially interacts with an environment over a predetermined number of time frames to gather information in order to perform a sensing or actuation task for maximizing some utility function. In such an active learning setting, the agent needs to design an adaptive sensing strategy sequentially based on the observations made so far. To tackle such a challenging problem in which the dimension of historical observations increases over time, we propose to use a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to exploit the temporal correlations in the sequence of observations and to map each observation to a fixed-size state information vector. We then use a deep neural network (DNN) to map the LSTM state at each time frame to the design of the next measurement step. Finally, we employ another DNN to map the final LSTM state to the desired solution. We investigate the performance of the proposed framework for adaptive channel sensing problems in wireless communications. In particular, we consider the adaptive beamforming problem for mmWave beam alignment and the adaptive reconfigurable intelligent surface sensing problem for reflection alignment. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed deep active sensing strategy outperforms the existing adaptive or nonadaptive sensing schemes.

Zhongxing Sun, Wei Cui, Yulong Liu

This paper is concerned with the problem of recovering a structured signal from a relatively small number of corrupted random measurements. Sharp phase transitions have been numerically observed in practice when different convex programming procedures are used to solve this problem. This paper is devoted to presenting theoretical explanations for these phenomenons by employing some basic tools from Gaussian process theory. Specifically, we identify the precise locations of the phase transitions for both constrained and penalized recovery procedures. Our theoretical results show that these phase transitions are determined by some geometric measures of structure, e.g., the spherical Gaussian width of a tangent cone and the Gaussian (squared) distance to a scaled subdifferential. By utilizing the established phase transition theory, we further investigate the relationship between these two kinds of recovery procedures, which also reveals an optimal strategy (in the sense of Lagrange theory) for choosing the tradeoff parameter in the penalized recovery procedure. Numerical experiments are provided to verify our theoretical results.