NEC Labs America Presentation Highlight from OFC 2023

Looking to learn about the latest fiber optics research and innovation? NEC Labs America (NECLA) recently discussed its latest advances in fiber sensing research at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC), March 5-9, 2023 in San Diego. OFC is the largest global conference and exhibition for optical communications and networking professionals.

Interpretable Skill Learning for Dynamic Treatment Regimes through Imitation

Imitation learning that mimics experts’ skills from their demonstrations has shown great success in discovering dynamic treatment regimes, i.e., the optimal decision rules to treat an individual patient based on related evolving treatment and covariate history. Existing imitation learning methods, however, still lack the capability to interpret the underlying rationales of the learned policy in a faithful way. Moreover, since dynamic treatment regimes for patients often exhibit varying patterns, i.e., symptoms that transit from one to another, the flat policy learned by a vanilla imitation learning method is typically undesired. To this end, we propose an Interpretable Skill Learning (ISL) framework to resolve the aforementioned challenges for dynamic treatment regimes through imitation. The key idea is to model each segment of experts’ demonstrations with a prototype layer and integrate it with the imitation learning layer to enhance the interpretation capability. On one hand, the ISL framework is able to provide interpretable explanations by matching the prototype to exemplar segments during the inference stage, which enables doctors to perform reasoning of the learned demonstrations based on human-understandable patient symptoms and lab results. On the other hand, the obtained skill embedding consisting of prototypes serves as conditional information to the imitation learning layer, which implicitly guides the policy network to provide a more accurate demonstration when the patients’ state switches from one stage to another. Thoroughly empirical studies demonstrate that our proposed ISL technique can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed ISL framework also exhibits good interpretability which cannot be observed in existing methods.

Improvement of Resilience of Submarine Networks Based on Fiber Sensing

Simultaneous phase and polarization sensing with span length resolution using the supervisory path is demonstrated. It is shown that by measuring polarization rotation matrix of the return paths, instead of monitoring only the state of polarization, location of the polarization disturbance can be determined even for large polarization rotations. By using the polarization rotation matrices, the phase and polarization disturbances are successfully decoupled. How the existing supervisory system and sensing can coexist in new SDM cables that utilizes pump sharing is discussed.

Data-driven Modelling of EDFAs by Neural Networks

Dependence of EDFA gain shape on input power and input spectrum shape is modelled using a simple neural network-based architecture for amplifiers with different gains and output powers. The model can predict the gain within ±0.1 dB. Even though the model has good success predicting the performance of the particular EDFA it is trained with, it is not as successful when used to predict a different EDFA, or even the same EDFA with a different pump power. However, retraining the model with a small amount of supplementary data from a second EDFA makes the model able to predict the performance of the second EDFA with little loss in performance.

Dynamic Prompting: A Unified Framework for Prompt Tuning

It has been demonstrated that prompt tuning is highly effective in efficiently eliciting knowledge from language models (LMs). However, the prompt tuning still lags behind fine tuning, especially when the LMs are small. P tuning v2 (Liu et al., 2021b) makes it comparable with finetuning by adding continuous prompts for every layer of the pre trained model. However, prepending fixed soft prompts for all instances, regardless of their discrepancy, is doubtful. In particular, the inserted prompt position, length, and the representations ofprompts for diversified instances through different tasks could all affect the prompt tuning performance. To fill this gap, we propose dynamic prompting (DP): the position, length, and prompt representation can all be dynamically optimized with respect to different tasks and instances. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the SuperGlue benchmark tovalidate our hypothesis and demonstrate substantial improvements. We also derive a unified framework for supporting our dynamic prompting strategy. In particular, we use a simple learning network and Gumble Softmax for learning instance dependent guidance. Experimental results show that simple instance level position aware soft prompts can improve the classification accuracy of up to 6 points on average on five datasets, reducing its gap with fine tuning. Besides, we also prove its universal usefulness under full data, few shot, andmultitask regimes. Combining them together can even further unleash the power of DP, narrowing the distance between fine tuning.

Polarization Sensing Using Polarization Rotation Matrix Eigenvalue Method

Polarization-based, multi-span sensing over a link with reflection-back circuits is demonstrated experimentally. By measuring rotation matrices instead of just monitoring polarization, a 35 dB extinction in localization is achieved regardless of the disturbance magnitude.

Field Trial of Coexistence and Simultaneous Switching of Real-time Fiber Sensing and 400GbE Supporting DCI and 5G Mobile Services

Coexistence of real-time constant-amplitude distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and 400GbE signals is verified by field trial over metro fibers, demonstrating no QoT impact during co-propagation and supporting preemptive DAS-informed optical path switching before link failure

Content-aware auto-scaling of stream processing applications on container orchestration platforms

Modern applications are designed as an interacting set of microservices, and these applications are typically deployed on container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Several attractive features in Kubernetes make it a popular choice for deploying applications, and automatic scaling is one such feature. The default horizontal scaling technique in Kubernetes is the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). It scales each microservice independently while ignoring the interactions among the microservices in an application. In this paper, we show that ignoring such interactions by HPA leads to inefficient scaling, and the optimal scaling of different microservices in the application varies as the stream content changes. To automatically adapt to variations in stream content, we present a novel system called DataX AutoScaler that leverages knowledge of the entire stream processing application pipeline to efficiently auto-scale different microservices by taking into account their complex interactions. Through experiments on real-world video analytics applications, such as face recognition and pose classification, we show that DataX AutoScaler adapts to variations in stream content and achieves up to 43% improvement in overall application performance compared to a baseline system that uses HPA.

Exploring the limits of ChatGPT for Query or Aspect based Text Summarization

Text summarization has been a crucial problem in natural language processing (NLP) for several decades. It aims to condense lengthy documents into shorter versions while retaining the most critical information. Various methods have been proposed for text summarization, including extractive and abstractive summarization. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT3 and ChatGPT has recently created significant interest in using these models for text summarization tasks. Recent studies (Goyal et al., 2022, Zhang et al., 2023) have shown that LLMs generated news summaries are already on par with humans. However, the performance of LLMs for more practical applications like aspect or query based summaries is underexplored. To fill this gap, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT’s performance on four widely used benchmark datasets, encompassing diverse summaries from Reddit posts, news articles, dialogue meetings, and stories. Our experiments reveal that ChatGPT’s performance is comparable to traditional fine tuning methods in terms of Rouge scores. Moreover, we highlight some unique differences between ChatGPT generated summaries and human references, providing valuable insights into the superpower of ChatGPT for diverse text summarization tasks. Our findings call for new directions in this area, and we plan to conduct further research to systematically examine the characteristics of ChatGPT generated summaries through extensive human evaluation.

DAS over 1,007-km Hybrid Link with 10-Tb/s DP-16QAM Co-propagation using Frequency-Diverse Chirped Pulses

We report the first distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) experiment with over >1,000 km reach on a hybrid link comprising of a mixture of field and lab fibers with bi-directional inline Raman amplification after each span. We used 20× frequency-diversity chirped-pulses for the probe signal,and recovered the Rayleigh backscatter using a coherent receiver with correlation detection and diversity combining. A measurand resolution of ∼100 pϵ/√ Hz at a gauge length of 20 meters achieved in the offline experiment. We also demonstrate the first real-time FPGA implementation of chirped-pulse DAS without frequency diversity over a range of 210 km.