This paper introduces RaLMSpec, a framework that accelerates iterative retrieval-augmented language model (RaLM) with *speculative retrieval* and *batched verification*. RaLMSpec further introduces several important systems optimizations, including prefetching, optimal speculation stride scheduler, and asynchronous verification. The combination of these techniques allows RaLMSPec to significantly outperform existing systems. For document-level iterative RaLM serving, evaluation over three LLMs on four QA datasets shows that RaLMSpec improves over existing approaches by $1.75$-$2.39\times$, $1.04$-$1.39\times$, and $1.31$-$1.77\times$ when the retriever is an exact dense retriever, approximate dense retriever, and sparse retriever respectively. For token-level iterative RaLM (KNN-LM) serving, RaLMSpec is up to $7.59\times$ and $2.45\times$ faster than existing methods for exact dense and approximate dense retrievers, respectively.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) emerges as an essential part of the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) and future beyond-5G mobile communication systems. It adds computational power towards the edge of cellular networks, much closer to energy-constrained user devices, and therewith allows the users to offload tasks to the edge computing nodes for low-latency applications with very-limited battery consumption. However, due to the high dynamics of user demand and server load, task congestion may occur at the edge nodes resulting in long queuing delay. Such delays can significantly degrade the quality of experience (QoE) of some latency-sensitive applications, raise the risk of service outage, and cannot be efficiently resolved by conventional queue management solutions. In this article, we study a latency-outage critical scenario, where users intend to limit the risk of latency outage. We propose an impatience-based queuing strategy for such users to intelligently choose between MEC offloading and local computation, allowing them to rationally renege from the task queue. The proposed approach is demonstrated by numerical simulations to be efficient for generic service model, when a perfect queue status information is available. For the practical case where the users obtain only imperfect queue status information, we design an optimal online learning strategy to enable its application in Poisson service scenarios.

In this paper, an image stabilization method based on the adaptive Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is presented in order to smooth down the airborne image vibration. Firstly, the projection algorithm is adopted for the motion estimation; Secondly, GMM parameter is obtained after analyzing characteristics of the first n images; Finally, a stable image sequence is achieved after GMM motion filter operates on the motion parameter. The experimental results show that the method has the advantage of fast speed and effectively smooth unwanted vibration of image sequences.

In this paper a real-time system for 3D human upper body tracking and modeling is proposed. The system uses multiple cameras to recover the depth maps in real-time, then integrates both color and depth information to track the human body, head, and hands, and finally recovers the 3D upper body model parameters from the tracking results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the system can track and rebuild human model in complicated situations. The system makes good tradeoff between the accuracy and system simplicity, and can be widely used in many applications, such as desktop interaction and digital entertainments.

In this paper, we study the dynamic stereo problem, i.e. to recover the shape of dynamic scene from multiple synchronized image sequences. To incorporate both spatial and temporal information for depth recovery, we propose a statistical framework that uses pixel process model to encode temporal coherence, and Markov random fields (MRFs) for spatial coherence. In this framework, the dynamic depth recovery problem is finally formulated as an optimization problem, and is optimized by using the belief propagation algorithm. Experimental results with the real dynamic scenes illustrate our method's ability of robust shape recovery.