The emergence of AI agents and agentic systems represents a significant milestone in artificial intelligence, enabling autonomous systems to operate, learn, and collaborate in complex environments with minimal human intervention. This paper, drawing on multi-expert perspectives, examines the potential of AI agents and agentic systems to reshape industries by decentralizing decision-making, redefining organizational structures, and enhancing cross-functional collaboration. Specific applications include healthcare systems capable of creating adaptive treatment plans, supply chain agents that predict and address disruptions in real-time, and business process automation that reallocates tasks from humans to AI, improving efficiency and innovation. However, the integration of these systems raises critical challenges, including issues of attribution and shared accountability in decision-making, compatibility with legacy systems, and addressing biases in AI-driven processes. The paper concludes that while agentic systems hold immense promise, robust governance frameworks, cross-industry collaboration, and interdisciplinary research into ethical design are essential. Future research should explore adaptive workforce reskilling strategies, transparent accountability mechanisms, and energy-efficient deployment models to ensure ethical and scalable implementation.

A large-scale system contains a huge configuration space because of its large number of configuration parameters. This leads to a combination explosion among configuration parameters when exploring the configuration space. Existing configuration testing techniques first use fuzzing to generate different configuration parameters, and then directly inject them into the program under test to find configuration-induced bugs. However, they do not fully consider the complexity of large-scale systems, resulting in low testing effectiveness. In this paper, we propose ECFuzz, an effective configuration fuzzer for large-scale systems. Our core approach consists of (i) Multi-dimensional configuration generation strategy. ECFuzz first designs different mutation strategies according to different dependencies and selects multiple configuration parameters from the candidate configuration parameters to effectively generate configuration parameters; (ii) Unit-testing-oriented configuration validation strategy. ECFuzz introduces unit testing into configuration testing techniques to filter out configuration parameters that are unlikely to yield errors before executing system testing, and effectively validate generated configuration parameters. We have conducted extensive experiments in real-world large-scale systems including HCommon, HDFS, HBase, ZooKeeper and Alluxio. Our evaluation shows that ECFuzz is effective in finding configuration-induced crash bugs. Compared with the state-of-the-art configuration testing tools including ConfTest, ConfErr and ConfDiagDetector, ECFuzz finds 60.3--67 more unexpected failures when the same 1000 testcases are injected into the system with an increase of 1.87x--2.63x. Moreover, ECFuzz has exposed 14 previously unknown bugs, and 5 of them have been confirmed.

Ensuring the reliability of deep neural networks (DNNs) is paramount in safety-critical applications. Although introducing supplementary fault-tolerant mechanisms can augment the reliability of DNNs, an efficiency tradeoff may be introduced. This study reveals the inherent fault tolerance of neural networks, where individual neurons exhibit varying degrees of fault tolerance, by thoroughly exploring the structural attributes of DNNs. We thereby develop a hardware/software collaborative method that guarantees the reliability of DNNs while minimizing performance degradation. We introduce the neuron vulnerability factor (NVF) to quantify the susceptibility to soft errors. We propose two efficient methods that leverage the NVF to minimize the negative effects of soft errors on neurons. First, we present a novel computational scheduling scheme. By prioritizing error-prone neurons, the expedited completion of their computations is facilitated to mitigate the risk of neural computing errors that arise from soft errors without sacrificing efficiency. Second, we propose the NVF-guided heterogeneous memory system. We employ variable-strength error-correcting codes and tailor their error-correction mechanisms to the vulnerability profile of specific neurons to ensure a highly targeted approach for error mitigation. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme enhances the neural network accuracy by 18% on average, while significantly reducing the fault-tolerance overhead.

Monocular depth estimation finds a wide range of applications in modeling 3D scenes. Since it is expensive to collect ground truth labels to supervise training, plenty of works have been done in a self-supervised manner. A common practice is to train the network optimizing a photometric objective (i.e., view synthesis) due to its effectiveness. However, this training objective is sensitive to optical changes and lacks a consideration of object-level cues, which leads to sub-optimal results in some cases, e.g., artifacts in complex regions and depth discontinuities around thin structures. We summarize them as depth ambiguities. In this paper, we propose an easy yet effective architecture, introducing semantic cues into supervision to solve problems mentioned above. First through our study on the problems we Figure out that they are due to the limitation of the commonly applied photometric reconstruction training objective. Then we come up with our method using semantic cues to encode the geometry constraint behind view synthesis. The proposed novel objective is more credible towards confusing pixels, also takes an object-level perception. Experiments show that without introducing extra inference complexity, our method alleviates depth ambiguities greatly and performs comparably with state-of-the-art methods on KITTI benchmark.

Recently, self-supervised methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have achieved remarkable success in monocular depth estimation. To obtain higher quality depth maps, some of these approaches leverage traditional schemes to compute rough depth maps as proxy labels and adopt classic regression loss functions to minimize the differences between network-predicted depth maps and proxy labels. However, at proxy labels with large depth values, these methods suffer from a loss imbalance problem. To address this limitation and further improve the network performance, this article offers three key contributions. Firstly, a novel regression loss function is proposed, which can alleviate the loss imbalance problem and better handle rough proxy labels. Secondly, a dynamic mask is designed to accelerate network convergence. Thirdly, an innovative consistency loss is introduced, which can produce a more accurate and consistent model by maintaining consistency between the produced depth maps of each input image and its mirror. The effectiveness of our contributions is demonstrated by a series of ablation studies. Extensive experiments on KITTI dataset reveal that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results.