Abstract

With advances in vehicular communications technology such as Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), the computation of vehicular tasks has become distributed facilitated by computation offloading from the vehicular platform to road side units (RSUs) or the cloud infrastructure. In this work, due to communication overheads, we do not consider the cloud and only consider offloading horizontally across RSU nodes. However, the advantage of offloading depends upon how the tasks are scheduled across the RSUs. Unlike existing horizontal offloading works, this work explores the benefits of online task partitioned scheduling for computation offloading from multiple vehicles to RSUs or edge nodes. Specifically, we propose a new efficient timeslot-based online hybrid partitioned scheduling algorithm, which splits some tasks into subtasks and schedules them across RSU nodes while considering vehicle flow constraints. We compared and evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid partitioned scheduling algorithm with the fully partitioned algorithm. We also compared the performance of the aforementioned algorithms with an optimal scheduling algorithm utilizing several experiments conducted on a real-world vehicular dataset.

Abstract

Finding a set of empirical criteria fulfilled by any theory that satisfies the generalized notion of noncontextuality is a challenging task of both operational and foundational importance. The conventional approach of deriving facet inequalities from the relevant noncontextual polytope is computationally demanding. Specifically, the noncontextual polytope is a product of two polytopes, one for preparations and the other for measurements, and the dimension of the former typically increases polynomially with the number of measurements. This work presents an alternative methodology for constructing a polytope that encompasses the actual noncontextual polytope while ensuring that the dimension of the polytope associated with the preparations remains constant regardless of the number of measurements and their outcome size. In particular, the facet inequalities of this polytope serve as necessary conditions for noncontextuality. To demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology, we apply it to nine distinct contextuality scenarios involving four to nine preparations and two to three measurements to obtain the respective sets of facet inequalities. Additionally, we retrieve the maximum quantum violations of these inequalities. Our investigation uncovers many novel non-trivial noncontextuality inequalities and reveals intriguing aspects and applications of quantum contextual correlations.

Abstract

Walking is one of the most natural ways to explore an environment. While Virtual Reality (VR) facilities simulation of infinite spaces, its limited by the physical space available. To address this limitation, several techniques have been proposed, such as redirected walking, walking in place, and teleportation. While some of these techniques, such as teleportation and walking in place, disrupt the natural immersion, others like redirected walking limit the walkable area within the virtual space. The concept of overlapping architecture tackles this challenge by compressing large virtual environments into smaller spaces. This is achieved by generating portions of an environment that might be physically impossible as a whole. In this paper, we propose a system for creating maze-based virtual environments with multi-path capabilities. This system allows for infinite natural walking experiences while maintaining architectural consistency. Specifically, our system can generate distinct, customizable, and scalable virtual mazes for physical areas exceeding 4x4 meters. The combination of multi-path capabilities and architectural consistency can enhance the overall maze traversal experience for end users.

Abstract

Funicular geometries, which are compression governing structural systems, are a significant part of our architectural heritage. To ensure the safety and serviceability of these historical infrastructures, where arches, vaults and domes are integral components, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the structural behaviour of these geometries. Unlike conventional structural systems, the failure of funicular geometries is governed by the system equilibrium and geometric instability rather than strength exceedance. Further, the collapse behaviour of these structures is usually quantified either using simplified two dimensional analytical approaches, which might not be representative, or using complex numerical models, which might be computationally expensive. To address this, a novel analytical approach is proposed, leveraging structural geometry and system equilibrium to quantify the collapse behaviour of funicular structures.

Abstract

Addressing blockchain's insufficient throughput and scalability is imperative for practical viability. Off-chain approaches, such as state channels (including Hash Time Lock Contract (HTLC), virtual channels), demonstrate enhanced throughput by enabling parallel transaction processing. While virtual channels introduce execution complexity, HTLC suffers from high update delays. Moreover, existing methods face network attacks. We present Sharding-based Hybrid State Channel (SharHSC) to address these issues. Firstly, we introduce a novel off-chain sharding architecture, which partitions proxy nodes into multiple shards. Thus, when the off-chain node count increases, adding shards enhances system throughput. Secondly, each shard establishes a supervisory committee to record latest channel statuses to ensure accurate fund distribution upon channel closure. Thirdly, we combine the strengths of HTLC and virtual channels. In particular, SharHSC constructs a single virtual channel across all the nodes involved in the payment by treating the nodes between payer and payee as an intermediate entity, which utilizes HTLC for fund routing. This realizes both low latency and streamlined complexity. Finally, our work is substantiated by security analysis and experiments. As the node number varies, compared with HTLC and virtual channels, the latency is reduced by 49.32% and 31.82%, and the throughput is increased by 8.93 and 1.89 times.

Abstract

With an increasing number of vehicles on the road every day, intelligent traffic monitoring and control is essential. This entails development of cost-effective, scalable, and easy-to-install monitoring systems. In this letter, a versatile piezoresistance-based cost-effective on-road sensor system is presented to estimate vehicle speed and vehicle wheelbase length. The system consists of a velostat thin film sensing element placed on the road, with read out circuits and control electronics located at the sidewalk. The system measures the speed of a vehicle with 90.4% accuracy, and the length of the wheelbase with 94.3% accuracy. The wheelbase length can be used to classify the vehicle type. Our experiments show that the system is reliable, as the sensor output returns to the initial values after each vehicle passes. The utilization of flexible piezoresistive sensors makes this system convenient to deploy in different applications where basic traffic activity monitoring is required with speed, count, and classification estimation of vehicles.

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of 16 machine translation systems submitted to the Shared Task of the 9th Conference of Machine Translation (WMT24) for the English-Hindi (en-hi) language pair using our Complex Structures Test (CoST) suite. Aligning with this year’s test suite sub-task theme, “Help us break LLMs”, we curated a comprehensive test suite encompassing diverse datasets across various categories, including autobiography, poetry, legal, conversation, play, narration, technical, and mixed genres. Our evaluation reveals that all the systems struggle significantly with the archaic style of text like legal and technical writings or text with creative twist like conversation and poetry datasets, highlighting their weaknesses in handling complex linguistic structures and stylistic nuances inherent in these text types. Our evaluation identifies the strengths and limitations of the submitted models, pointing to specific areas where further research and development are needed to enhance their performance. Our test suite is available at https://github.com/AnanyaCoder/CoST-WMT-24-Test-Suite-Task.

Abstract

Machine translation (MT) evaluation metrics like BLEU and chrF++ are widely used reference-based metrics that do not require training and are language-independent. However, these metrics primarily focus on n-gram matching and often overlook semantic depth and contextual understanding. To address this gap, we introduce chrF-S (Semantic chrF++), an enhanced metric that integrates sentence embeddings to evaluate translation quality more comprehensively. By combining traditional character and word n-gram analysis with semantic information derived from embeddings, chrF-S captures both syntactic accuracy and sentence-level semantics. This paper presents our contributions to the WMT24 shared metrics task, showcasing our participation and the development of chrF-S. We also demonstrate that, according to preliminary results on the leaderboard, our metric performs on par with other supervised and LLM-based metrics. By merging semantic insights with n-gram precision, chrF-S offers a significant enhancement in the assessment of machine-generated translations, advancing the field of MT evaluation. Our code and data will be made available at https://github.com/AnanyaCoder/chrF-S.

Abstract

Translating for languages with limited resources poses a persistent challenge due to the scarcity of high-quality training data. To enhance translation accuracy, we explored controlled generation mechanisms, focusing on the importance of control tokens. In our experiments, while training, we encoded the target sentence length as a control token to the source sentence, treating it as an additional feature for the source sentence. We developed various NMT models using transformer architecture and conducted experiments across 8 language directions (English = Assamese, Manipuri, Khasi, and Mizo), exploring four variations of length encoding mechanisms. Through comparative analysis against the baseline model, we submitted two systems for each language direction. We report our findings for the same in this work.

Abstract

With the primary focus on evaluating the ef- fectiveness of large language models for au- tomatic reference-less translation assessment, this work presents our experiments on mimick- ing human direct assessment to evaluate the quality of translations in English and Indian languages. We constructed a translation evalua- tion task where we performed zero-shot learn- ing, in-context example-driven learning, and fine-tuning of large language models to pro- vide a score out of 100, where 100 represents a perfect translation and 1 represents a poor translation. We compared the performance of our trained systems with existing methods such as COMET, BERT-Scorer, and LABSE, and found that the LLM-based evaluator (LLaMA- 2-13B) achieves a comparable or higher overall correlation with human judgments for the con- sidered Indian language pairs (Refer figure 1).