Authors: Thiago Santos, Harish Kamath, Christopher R. McAdams, Mary S. Newell, Marina Mosunjac, Gabriela Oprea-Ilies, Geoffrey Smith, Constance Lehman, Judy Gichoya, Imon Banerjee, Hari Trivedi
Automated classification of cancer pathology reports can extract information from unstructured reports and categorize each report into structured diagnosis and severity categories. Thus, such system can reduce the burden for populating tumor registries, help registration for clinical trial as well as developing large dataset for deep learning model development using true pathologic ground truth. However, the content of breast pathology reports can be difficult for categorize due to the high linguistic variability in content and wide variety of potential diagnoses >50. Existing NLP models are primarily focused on developing classifier for primary breast cancer types (e.g. IDC, DCIS, ILC) and tumor characteristics, and ignore the rare diagnosis of cancer subtypes. We then developed a hierarchical hybrid transformer-based pipeline (59 labels) - Hierarchical Classification System for Breast Cancer Specimen Report (HCSBC), which utilizes the potential of the transformer context-preserving NLP technique and compared our model to several state of the art ML and DL models. We trained the model on the EUH data and evaluated our model's performance on two external datasets - MGH and Mayo Clinic. We publicly release the code and a live application under Huggingface spaces repository
Authors: Kaylee Burns, Zach Witzel, Jubayer Ibn Hamid, Tianhe Yu, Chelsea Finn, Karol Hausman
Inspired by the success of transfer learning in computer vision, roboticists have investigated visual pre-training as a means to improve the learning efficiency and generalization ability of policies learned from pixels. To that end, past work has favored large object interaction datasets, such as first-person videos of humans completing diverse tasks, in pursuit of manipulation-relevant features. Although this approach improves the efficiency of policy learning, it remains unclear how reliable these representations are in the presence of distribution shifts that arise commonly in robotic applications. Surprisingly, we find that visual representations designed for manipulation and control tasks do not necessarily generalize under subtle changes in lighting and scene texture or the introduction of distractor objects. To understand what properties do lead to robust representations, we compare the performance of 15 pre-trained vision models under different visual appearances. We find that emergent segmentation ability is a strong predictor of out-of-distribution generalization among ViT models. The rank order induced by this metric is more predictive than metrics that have previously guided generalization research within computer vision and machine learning, such as downstream ImageNet accuracy, in-domain accuracy, or shape-bias as evaluated by cue-conflict performance. We test this finding extensively on a suite of distribution shifts in ten tasks across two simulated manipulation environments. On the ALOHA setup, segmentation score predicts real-world performance after offline training with 50 demonstrations.
Authors: Federico Cassano, Luisa Li, Akul Sethi, Noah Shinn, Abby Brennan-Jones, Anton Lozhkov, Carolyn Anderson, Arjun Guha
A significant amount of research is focused on developing and evaluating large language models for a variety of code synthesis tasks. These include synthesizing code from natural language instructions, synthesizing tests from code, and synthesizing explanations of code. In contrast, the behavior of instructional code editing with LLMs is understudied. These are tasks in which the model is instructed to update a block of code provided in a prompt. The editing instruction may ask for a feature to added or removed, describe a bug and ask for a fix, ask for a different kind of solution, or many other common code editing tasks.
We introduce a carefully crafted benchmark of code editing tasks and use it evaluate several cutting edge LLMs. Our evaluation exposes a significant gap between the capabilities of state-of-the-art open and closed models. For example, even GPT-3.5-Turbo is 8.8% better than the best open model at editing code.
We also introduce a new, carefully curated, permissively licensed training set of code edits coupled with natural language instructions. Using this training set, we show that we can fine-tune open Code LLMs to significantly improve their code editing capabilities.
Authors: Yi Xiao, Lei Bai, Wei Xue, Kang Chen, Tao Han, Wanli Ouyang
Weather forecasting is a crucial yet highly challenging task. With the maturity of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the emergence of data-driven weather forecasting models has opened up a new paradigm for the development of weather forecasting systems. Despite the significant successes that have been achieved (e.g., surpassing advanced traditional physical models for global medium-range forecasting), existing data-driven weather forecasting models still rely on the analysis fields generated by the traditional assimilation and forecasting system, which hampers the significance of data-driven weather forecasting models regarding both computational cost and forecasting accuracy. In this work, we explore the possibility of coupling the data-driven weather forecasting model with data assimilation by integrating the global AI weather forecasting model, FengWu, with one of the most popular assimilation algorithms, Four-Dimensional Variational (4DVar) assimilation, and develop an AI-based cyclic weather forecasting system, FengWu-4DVar. FengWu-4DVar can incorporate observational data into the data-driven weather forecasting model and consider the temporal evolution of atmospheric dynamics to obtain accurate analysis fields for making predictions in a cycling manner without the help of physical models. Owning to the auto-differentiation ability of deep learning models, FengWu-4DVar eliminates the need of developing the cumbersome adjoint model, which is usually required in the traditional implementation of the 4DVar algorithm. Experiments on the simulated observational dataset demonstrate that FengWu-4DVar is capable of generating reasonable analysis fields for making accurate and efficient iterative predictions.
Authors: Jingying Zeng, Jaewon Yang, Waleed Malik, Xiao Yan, Richard Huang, Qi He
While generative AI excels in content generation, it does not always increase user engagement. This can be attributed to two main factors. First, generative AI generates content without incorporating explicit or implicit feedback about user interactions. Even if the generated content seems to be more informative or well-written, it does not necessarily lead to an increase in user activities, such as clicks. Second, there is a concern with the quality of the content generative AI produces, which often lacks the distinctiveness and authenticity that human-created content possesses. These two factors can lead to content that fails to meet specific needs and preferences of users, ultimately reducing its potential to be engaging.
This paper presents a generic framework of how to improve user engagement with generative AI by leveraging user feedback. Our solutions employ rejection sampling, a technique used in reinforcement learning, to boost engagement metrics. We leveraged the framework in the context of email notification subject lines generation for an online social network, and achieved significant engagement metric lift including +1% Session and +0.4% Weekly Active Users. We believe our work offers a universal framework that enhances user engagement with generative AI, particularly when standard generative AI reaches its limits in terms of enhancing content to be more captivating. To the best of our knowledge, this represents an early milestone in the industry's successful use of generative AI to enhance user engagement.
Authors: Yihang Zhai, Haixin Wang, Jianlong Chang, Xinlong Yang, Jinan Sun, Shikun Zhang, Qi Tian
Instruction tuning has shown promising potential for developing general-purpose AI capabilities by using large-scale pre-trained models and boosts growing research to integrate multimodal information for creative applications. However, existing works still face two main limitations: the high training costs and heavy computing resource dependence of full model fine-tuning, and the lack of semantic information in instructions, which hinders multimodal alignment. Addressing these challenges, this paper proposes a novel approach to utilize Parameter-Efficient Tuning for generAl-purpose vision-Language models, namely PETAL. PETAL revolutionizes the training process by requiring only 0.5% of the total parameters, achieved through a unique mode approximation technique, which significantly reduces the training costs and reliance on heavy computing resources. Furthermore, PETAL enhances the semantic depth of instructions in two innovative ways: 1) by introducing adaptive instruction mixture-of-experts(MOEs), and 2) by fortifying the score-based linkage between parameter-efficient tuning and mutual information. Our extensive experiments across five multimodal downstream benchmarks reveal that PETAL not only outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in most scenarios but also surpasses full fine-tuning models in effectiveness. Additionally, our approach demonstrates remarkable advantages in few-shot settings, backed by comprehensive visualization analyses. Our source code is available at: https://github. com/melonking32/PETAL.
Authors: Kun Chen, Lei Bai, Fenghua Ling, Peng Ye, Tao Chen, Kang Chen, Tao Han, Wanli Ouyang
The weather forecasting system is important for science and society, and significant achievements have been made in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to medium-range weather forecasting. However, existing AI-based weather forecasting models still rely on analysis or reanalysis products from the traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems as initial conditions for making predictions, preventing them from being fully independent systems. As a crucial component of an end-to-end global weather forecasting system, data assimilation is vital in generating initial states for forecasting. In this paper, we present an AI-based data assimilation model, i.e., Adas, for global weather variables, which learns to generate the analysis from the background and sparse observations. Different from existing assimilation methods, Adas employs the gated convolution module to handle sparse observations and the gated cross-attention module for capturing the interactions between observations and background efficiently, which are guided by the confidence matrix to represent the availability and quality of observations. Then, we combine Adas with the advanced AI-based weather forecasting model (i.e., FengWu) and construct the first end-to-end AI-based global weather forecasting system: FengWu-Adas. Experiments demonstrate that Adas can assimilate the simulated global observations with the AI-generated background through a one-year simulation and generate high-quality analysis stably in a cyclic manner. Based on the generated analysis, FengWu-Adas exhibits skillful performance and outperforms the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) in weather forecasting over seven days.
Authors: Sukriti Jaitly, Tanay Shah, Ashish Shugani, Razik Singh Grewal
We present a study on the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in tabular data classification, emphasizing an efficient framework. Building upon existing work done in TabLLM (arXiv:2210.10723), we introduce three novel serialization techniques, including the standout LaTeX serialization method. This method significantly boosts the performance of LLMs in processing domain-specific datasets, Our method stands out for its memory efficiency and ability to fully utilize complex data structures. Through extensive experimentation, including various serialization approaches like feature combination and importance, we demonstrate our work's superiority in accuracy and efficiency over traditional models.
Authors: Youn-Yeol Yu, Jeongwhan Choi, Woojin Cho, Kookjin Lee, Nayong Kim, Kiseok Chang, ChangSeung Woo, Ilho Kim, SeokWoo Lee, Joon Young Yang, Sooyoung Yoon, Noseong Park
Recently, many mesh-based graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. Remarkable achievements have been made in significantly reducing the solving time compared to traditional numerical solvers. These methods are typically designed to i) reduce the computational cost in solving physical dynamics and/or ii) propose techniques to enhance the solution accuracy in fluid and rigid body dynamics. However, it remains under-explored whether they are effective in addressing the challenges of flexible body dynamics, where instantaneous collisions occur within a very short timeframe. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer (HCMT), which uses hierarchical mesh structures and can learn long-range dependencies (occurred by collisions) among spatially distant positions of a body -- two close positions in a higher-level mesh corresponds to two distant positions in a lower-level mesh. HCMT enables long-range interactions, and the hierarchical mesh structure quickly propagates collision effects to faraway positions. To this end, it consists of a contact mesh Transformer and a hierarchical mesh Transformer (CMT and HMT, respectively). Lastly, we propose a flexible body dynamics dataset, consisting of trajectories that reflect experimental settings frequently used in the display industry for product designs. We also compare the performance of several baselines using well-known benchmark datasets. Our results show that HCMT provides significant performance improvements over existing methods.
Authors: Yubin Xiao, Di Wang, Boyang Li, Mingzhao Wang, Xuan Wu, Changliang Zhou, You Zhou
Neural construction models have shown promising performance for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by adopting either the Autoregressive (AR) or Non-Autoregressive (NAR) learning approach. While AR models produce high-quality solutions, they generally have a high inference latency due to their sequential generation nature. Conversely, NAR models generate solutions in parallel with a low inference latency but generally exhibit inferior performance. In this paper, we propose a generic Guided Non-Autoregressive Knowledge Distillation (GNARKD) method to obtain high-performance NAR models having a low inference latency. GNARKD removes the constraint of sequential generation in AR models while preserving the learned pivotal components in the network architecture to obtain the corresponding NAR models through knowledge distillation. We evaluate GNARKD by applying it to three widely adopted AR models to obtain NAR VRP solvers for both synthesized and real-world instances. The experimental results demonstrate that GNARKD significantly reduces the inference time (4-5 times faster) with acceptable performance drop (2-3\%). To the best of our knowledge, this study is first-of-its-kind to obtain NAR VRP solvers from AR ones through knowledge distillation.
Authors: Tolga Çöplü, Marc Loedi, Arto Bendiken, Mykhailo Makohin, Joshua J. Bouw, Stephen Cobb (Haltia, Inc.)
This paper explores the feasibility and performance of on-device large language model (LLM) inference on various Apple iPhone models. Amidst the rapid evolution of generative AI, on-device LLMs offer solutions to privacy, security, and connectivity challenges inherent in cloud-based models. Leveraging existing literature on running multi-billion parameter LLMs on resource-limited devices, our study examines the thermal effects and interaction speeds of a high-performing LLM across different smartphone generations. We present real-world performance results, providing insights into on-device inference capabilities.
Authors: Tung Nguyen, Eric Nichols, Randy Gomez
Recently, research in human-robot interaction began to consider a robot's influence at the group level. Despite the recent growth in research investigating the effects of robots within groups of people, our overall understanding of what happens when robots are placed within groups or teams of people is still limited. This paper investigates several key problems for soci robots that manage conversations in a group setting, where the number of participants is more than two. In a group setting, the conversation dynamics are a lot more complicated than the conventional one-to-one conversation, thus, there are more challenges need to be solved.
Authors: Zhengyu Chen, Teng Xiao, Kun Kuang, Zheqi Lv, Min Zhang, Jinluan Yang, Chengqiang Lu, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) show promising results for graph tasks. However, existing GNNs' generalization ability will degrade when there exist distribution shifts between testing and training graph data. The cardinal impetus underlying the severe degeneration is that the GNNs are architected predicated upon the I.I.D assumptions. In such a setting, GNNs are inclined to leverage imperceptible statistical correlations subsisting in the training set to predict, albeit it is a spurious correlation. In this paper, we study the problem of the generalization ability of GNNs in Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) settings. To solve this problem, we propose the Learning to Reweight for Generalizable Graph Neural Network (L2R-GNN) to enhance the generalization ability for achieving satisfactory performance on unseen testing graphs that have different distributions with training graphs. We propose a novel nonlinear graph decorrelation method, which can substantially improve the out-of-distribution generalization ability and compares favorably to previous methods in restraining the over-reduced sample size. The variables of the graph representation are clustered based on the stability of the correlation, and the graph decorrelation method learns weights to remove correlations between the variables of different clusters rather than any two variables. Besides, we interpose an efficacious stochastic algorithm upon bi-level optimization for the L2R-GNN framework, which facilitates simultaneously learning the optimal weights and GNN parameters, and avoids the overfitting problem. Experimental results show that L2R-GNN greatly outperforms baselines on various graph prediction benchmarks under distribution shifts.
Authors: Wenzhao Jiang, Hao Liu, Hui Xiong
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful representation learning tools for capturing complex dependencies within diverse graph-structured data. Despite their success in a wide range of graph mining tasks, GNNs have raised serious concerns regarding their trustworthiness, including susceptibility to distribution shift, biases towards certain populations, and lack of explainability. Recently, integrating causal learning techniques into GNNs has sparked numerous ground-breaking studies since most of the trustworthiness issues can be alleviated by capturing the underlying data causality rather than superficial correlations. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on causality-inspired GNNs. Specifically, we first present the key trustworthy risks of existing GNN models through the lens of causality. Moreover, we introduce a taxonomy of Causality-Inspired GNNs (CIGNNs) based on the type of causal learning capability they are equipped with, i.e., causal reasoning and causal representation learning. Besides, we systematically discuss typical methods within each category and demonstrate how they mitigate trustworthiness risks. Finally, we summarize useful resources and discuss several future directions, hoping to shed light on new research opportunities in this emerging field. The representative papers, along with open-source data and codes, are available in https://github.com/usail-hkust/Causality-Inspired-GNNs.
Authors: Ziyu Lin, Enzo Tartaglione, Van-Tam Nguyen
On-device training is an emerging approach in machine learning where models are trained on edge devices, aiming to enhance privacy protection and real-time performance. However, edge devices typically possess restricted computational power and resources, making it challenging to perform computationally intensive model training tasks. Consequently, reducing resource consumption during training has become a pressing concern in this field. To this end, we propose SCoTTi (Save Computation at Training Time), an adaptive framework that addresses the aforementioned challenge. It leverages an optimizable threshold parameter to effectively reduce the number of neuron updates during training which corresponds to a decrease in memory and computation footprint. Our proposed approach demonstrates superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods regarding computational resource savings on various commonly employed benchmarks and popular architectures, including ResNets, MobileNet, and Swin-T.
Authors: Egon Peršak, Miguel F. Anjos
Decision-focused learning is a promising development for contextual optimisation. It enables us to train prediction models that reflect the contextual sensitivity structure of the problem. However, there have been limited attempts to extend this paradigm to robust optimisation. We propose a double implicit layer model for training prediction models with respect to robust decision loss in uncertain convex quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQP). The first layer solves a deterministic version of the problem, the second layer evaluates the worst case realisation for an uncertainty set centred on the observation given the decisions obtained from the first layer. This enables us to learn model parameterisations that lead to robust decisions while only solving a simpler deterministic problem at test time. Additionally, instead of having to solve a robust counterpart we solve two smaller and potentially easier problems in training. The second layer (worst case problem) can be seen as a regularisation approach for predict-and-optimise by fitting to a neighbourhood of problems instead of just a point observation. We motivate relaxations of the worst-case problem in cases of uncertainty sets that would otherwise lead to trust region problems, and leverage various relaxations to deal with uncertain constraints. Both layers are typically strictly convex in this problem setting and thus have meaningful gradients almost everywhere. We demonstrate an application of this model on simulated experiments. The method is an effective regularisation tool for decision-focused learning for uncertain convex QCQPs.
Authors: Divya Mereddy
With advanced AI, while every industry is growing at rocket speed, the smart home industry has not reached the next generation. There is still a huge leap of innovation that needs to happen before we call a home a Smart home. A Smart home should predict residents' needs and fulfill them in a timely manner. One of the important tasks of maintaining a home is timely grocery tracking and supply maintenance. Grocery tracking models are very famous in the retail industry but they are nonexistent in the common household. Groceries detection in household refrigerators or storage closets is very complicated compared to retail shelving data. In this paper, home grocery tracking problem is resolved by combining retail shelving data and fruits dataset with real-time 360 view data points collected from home groceries storage. By integrating this vision-based object detection system along with supply chain and user food interest prediction systems, complete automation of groceries ordering can be achieved.
Authors: Angela Castillo, Jonas Kohler, Juan C. Pérez, Juan Pablo Pérez, Albert Pumarola, Bernard Ghanem, Pablo Arbeláez, Ali Thabet
This paper presents a comprehensive study on the role of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) in text-conditioned diffusion models from the perspective of inference efficiency. In particular, we relax the default choice of applying CFG in all diffusion steps and instead search for efficient guidance policies. We formulate the discovery of such policies in the differentiable Neural Architecture Search framework. Our findings suggest that the denoising steps proposed by CFG become increasingly aligned with simple conditional steps, which renders the extra neural network evaluation of CFG redundant, especially in the second half of the denoising process. Building upon this insight, we propose "Adaptive Guidance" (AG), an efficient variant of CFG, that adaptively omits network evaluations when the denoising process displays convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AG preserves CFG's image quality while reducing computation by 25%. Thus, AG constitutes a plug-and-play alternative to Guidance Distillation, achieving 50% of the speed-ups of the latter while being training-free and retaining the capacity to handle negative prompts. Finally, we uncover further redundancies of CFG in the first half of the diffusion process, showing that entire neural function evaluations can be replaced by simple affine transformations of past score estimates. This method, termed LinearAG, offers even cheaper inference at the cost of deviating from the baseline model. Our findings provide insights into the efficiency of the conditional denoising process that contribute to more practical and swift deployment of text-conditioned diffusion models.
Authors: Yanru Wu, Jianning Wang, Weida Wang, Yang Li
Multi-source transfer learning is an effective solution to data scarcity by utilizing multiple source tasks for the learning of the target task. However, access to source data and model details is limited in the era of commercial models, giving rise to the setting of multi-source-free (MSF) transfer learning that aims to leverage source domain knowledge without such access. As a newly defined problem paradigm, MSF transfer learning remains largely underexplored and not clearly formulated. In this work, we adopt an information theoretic perspective on it and propose a framework named H-ensemble, which dynamically learns the optimal linear combination, or ensemble, of source models for the target task, using a generalization of maximal correlation regression. The ensemble weights are optimized by maximizing an information theoretic metric for transferability. Compared to previous works, H-ensemble is characterized by: 1) its adaptability to a novel and realistic MSF setting for few-shot target tasks, 2) theoretical reliability, 3) a lightweight structure easy to interpret and adapt. Our method is empirically validated by ablation studies, along with extensive comparative analysis with other task ensemble and transfer learning methods. We show that the H-ensemble can successfully learn the optimal task ensemble, as well as outperform prior arts.
Authors: Hangjie Yuan, Shiwei Zhang, Xiang Wang, Yujie Wei, Tao Feng, Yining Pan, Yingya Zhang, Ziwei Liu, Samuel Albanie, Dong Ni
Diffusion models have emerged as the de facto paradigm for video generation. However, their reliance on web-scale data of varied quality often yields results that are visually unappealing and misaligned with the textual prompts. To tackle this problem, we propose InstructVideo to instruct text-to-video diffusion models with human feedback by reward fine-tuning. InstructVideo has two key ingredients: 1) To ameliorate the cost of reward fine-tuning induced by generating through the full DDIM sampling chain, we recast reward fine-tuning as editing. By leveraging the diffusion process to corrupt a sampled video, InstructVideo requires only partial inference of the DDIM sampling chain, reducing fine-tuning cost while improving fine-tuning efficiency. 2) To mitigate the absence of a dedicated video reward model for human preferences, we repurpose established image reward models, e.g., HPSv2. To this end, we propose Segmental Video Reward, a mechanism to provide reward signals based on segmental sparse sampling, and Temporally Attenuated Reward, a method that mitigates temporal modeling degradation during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments, both qualitative and quantitative, validate the practicality and efficacy of using image reward models in InstructVideo, significantly enhancing the visual quality of generated videos without compromising generalization capabilities. Code and models will be made publicly available.
Authors: Sofia Lemons, Wheeler Ruml, Robert C. Holte, Carlos Linares López
Anytime heuristic search algorithms try to find a (potentially suboptimal) solution as quickly as possible and then work to find better and better solutions until an optimal solution is obtained or time is exhausted. The most widely-known anytime search algorithms are based on best-first search. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, rectangle search, that is instead based on beam search, a variant of breadth-first search. It repeatedly explores alternatives at all depth levels and is thus best-suited to problems featuring deep local minima. Experiments using a variety of popular search benchmarks suggest that rectangle search is competitive with fixed-width beam search and often performs better than the previous best anytime search algorithms.
Authors: Christina Hastings Blow, Lijun Qian, Camille Gibson, Pamela Obiomon, Xishuang Dong
Fairness AI aims to detect and alleviate bias across the entire AI development life cycle, encompassing data curation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment-a pivotal aspect of ethical AI implementation. Addressing data bias, particularly concerning sensitive attributes like gender and race, reweighting samples proves efficient for fairness AI. This paper contributes a systematic examination of reweighting samples for traditional machine learning (ML) models, employing five models for binary classification on the Adult Income and COMPUS datasets with various protected attributes. The study evaluates prediction results using five fairness metrics, uncovering the nuanced and model-specific nature of reweighting sample effectiveness in achieving fairness in traditional ML models, as well as revealing the complexity of bias dynamics.
Authors: Akbir Khan, Timon Willi, Newton Kwan, Andrea Tacchetti, Chris Lu, Edward Grefenstette, Tim Rocktäschel, Jakob Foerster
In multi-agent settings with mixed incentives, methods developed for zero-sum games have been shown to lead to detrimental outcomes. To address this issue, opponent shaping (OS) methods explicitly learn to influence the learning dynamics of co-players and empirically lead to improved individual and collective outcomes. However, OS methods have only been evaluated in low-dimensional environments due to the challenges associated with estimating higher-order derivatives or scaling model-free meta-learning. Alternative methods that scale to more complex settings either converge to undesirable solutions or rely on unrealistic assumptions about the environment or co-players. In this paper, we successfully scale an OS-based approach to general-sum games with temporally-extended actions and long-time horizons for the first time. After analysing the representations of the meta-state and history used by previous algorithms, we propose a simplified version called Shaper. We show empirically that Shaper leads to improved individual and collective outcomes in a range of challenging settings from literature. We further formalize a technique previously implicit in the literature, and analyse its contribution to opponent shaping. We show empirically that this technique is helpful for the functioning of prior methods in certain environments. Lastly, we show that previous environments, such as the CoinGame, are inadequate for analysing temporally-extended general-sum interactions.
Authors: Jing Cui, Yufei Han, Yuzhe Ma, Jianbin Jiao, Junge Zhang
Backdoor attacks in reinforcement learning (RL) have previously employed intense attack strategies to ensure attack success. However, these methods suffer from high attack costs and increased detectability. In this work, we propose a novel approach, BadRL, which focuses on conducting highly sparse backdoor poisoning efforts during training and testing while maintaining successful attacks. Our algorithm, BadRL, strategically chooses state observations with high attack values to inject triggers during training and testing, thereby reducing the chances of detection. In contrast to the previous methods that utilize sample-agnostic trigger patterns, BadRL dynamically generates distinct trigger patterns based on targeted state observations, thereby enhancing its effectiveness. Theoretical analysis shows that the targeted backdoor attack is always viable and remains stealthy under specific assumptions. Empirical results on various classic RL tasks illustrate that BadRL can substantially degrade the performance of a victim agent with minimal poisoning efforts 0.003% of total training steps) during training and infrequent attacks during testing.
Authors: Roberto Francisco de Lima Junior, Luiz Fernando Paes de Barros Presta, Lucca Santos Borborema, Vanderson Nogueira da Silva, Marcio Leal de Melo Dahia, Anderson Carlos Sousa e Santos
This paper presents a detailed case study examining the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the construction of test cases within the context of software engineering. LLMs, characterized by their advanced natural language processing capabilities, are increasingly garnering attention as tools to automate and enhance various aspects of the software development lifecycle. Leveraging a case study methodology, we systematically explore the integration of LLMs in the test case construction process, aiming to shed light on their practical efficacy, challenges encountered, and implications for software quality assurance.
The study encompasses the selection of a representative software application, the formulation of test case construction methodologies employing LLMs, and the subsequent evaluation of outcomes. Through a blend of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we assess the impact of LLMs on test case comprehensiveness, accuracy, and efficiency. Additionally, we delve into challenges such as model interpretability, ethical considerations, and adaptation to diverse software contexts.
The findings from this case study contribute nuanced insights into the practical utility of LLMs in the domain of test case construction, elucidating their potential benefits and limitations. By addressing real-world scenarios and complexities, this research aims to inform software practitioners and researchers alike about the tangible implications of incorporating LLMs into the software testing landscape, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of their role in optimizing the software development process.
Authors: Heming Yao, Jérôme Lüscher, Benjamin Gutierrez Becker, Josep Arús-Pous, Tommaso Biancalani, Amelie Bigorgne, David Richmond
Colonoscopy plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and prognosis of various gastrointestinal diseases. Due to the challenges of collecting large-scale high-quality ground truth annotations for colonoscopy images, and more generally medical images, we explore using self-supervised features from vision transformers in three challenging tasks for colonoscopy images. Our results indicate that image-level features learned from DINO models achieve image classification performance comparable to fully supervised models, and patch-level features contain rich semantic information for object detection. Furthermore, we demonstrate that self-supervised features combined with unsupervised segmentation can be used to discover multiple clinically relevant structures in a fully unsupervised manner, demonstrating the tremendous potential of applying these methods in medical image analysis.
Authors: Clément Grisi, Geert Litjens, Jeroen van der Laak
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have ushered in a new era in computer vision, showcasing unparalleled performance in many challenging tasks. However, their practical deployment in computational pathology has largely been constrained by the sheer size of whole slide images (WSIs), which result in lengthy input sequences. Transformers faced a similar limitation when applied to long documents, and Hierarchical Transformers were introduced to circumvent it. Given the analogous challenge with WSIs and their inherent hierarchical structure, Hierarchical Vision Transformers (H-ViTs) emerge as a promising solution in computational pathology. This work delves into the capabilities of H-ViTs, evaluating their efficiency for prostate cancer grading in WSIs. Our results show that they achieve competitive performance against existing state-of-the-art solutions.
Authors: Payam Jome Yazdian, Eric Liu, Li Cheng, Angelica Lim
This paper proposes MotionScript, a motion-to-text conversion algorithm and natural language representation for human body motions. MotionScript aims to describe movements in greater detail and with more accuracy than previous natural language approaches. Many motion datasets describe relatively objective and simple actions with little variation on the way they are expressed (e.g. sitting, walking, dribbling a ball). But for expressive actions that contain a diversity of movements in the class (e.g. being sad, dancing), or for actions outside the domain of standard motion capture datasets (e.g. stylistic walking, sign-language), more specific and granular natural language descriptions are needed. Our proposed MotionScript descriptions differ from existing natural language representations in that it provides direct descriptions in natural language instead of simple action labels or high-level human captions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at translating 3D motions to natural language descriptions without requiring training data. Our experiments show that when MotionScript representations are used in a text-to-motion neural task, body movements are more accurately reconstructed, and large language models can be used to generate unseen complex motions.
Authors: Ryan Campbell, Emma Guo, Evan Hu, Reya Vir, Ethan Hsiao
In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential, non-textual function class data distributions. We introduce a novel sliding window sequential function class and employ toy-sized transformers with a GPT-2 architecture to conduct our experiments. Our analysis indicates that these models can indeed leverage ICL when trained on non-textual sequential function classes. Additionally, our experiments with randomized y-label sequences highlights that transformers retain some ICL capabilities even when the label associations are obfuscated. We provide evidence that transformers can reason with and understand sequentiality encoded within function classes, as reflected by the effective learning of our proposed tasks. Our results also show that the performance deteriorated with increasing randomness in the labels, though not to the extent one might expect, implying a potential robustness of learned sequentiality against label noise. Future research may want to look into how previous explanations of transformers, such as induction heads and task vectors, relate to sequentiality in ICL in these toy examples. Our investigation lays the groundwork for further research into how transformers process and perceive sequential data.
Authors: Tolga Ergen, Mert Pilanci
Due to the non-convex nature of training Deep Neural Network (DNN) models, their effectiveness relies on the use of non-convex optimization heuristics. Traditional methods for training DNNs often require costly empirical methods to produce successful models and do not have a clear theoretical foundation. In this study, we examine the use of convex optimization theory and sparse recovery models to refine the training process of neural networks and provide a better interpretation of their optimal weights. We focus on training two-layer neural networks with piecewise linear activations and demonstrate that they can be formulated as a finite-dimensional convex program. These programs include a regularization term that promotes sparsity, which constitutes a variant of group Lasso. We first utilize semi-infinite programming theory to prove strong duality for finite width neural networks and then we express these architectures equivalently as high dimensional convex sparse recovery models. Remarkably, the worst-case complexity to solve the convex program is polynomial in the number of samples and number of neurons when the rank of the data matrix is bounded, which is the case in convolutional networks. To extend our method to training data of arbitrary rank, we develop a novel polynomial-time approximation scheme based on zonotope subsampling that comes with a guaranteed approximation ratio. We also show that all the stationary of the nonconvex training objective can be characterized as the global optimum of a subsampled convex program. Our convex models can be trained using standard convex solvers without resorting to heuristics or extensive hyper-parameter tuning unlike non-convex methods. Through extensive numerical experiments, we show that convex models can outperform traditional non-convex methods and are not sensitive to optimizer hyperparameters.
Authors: Chenzhong Yin, Hantang Zhang, Mingxi Cheng, Xiongye Xiao, Xinghe Chen, Xin Ren, Paul Bogdan
Malware represents a significant security concern in today's digital landscape, as it can destroy or disable operating systems, steal sensitive user information, and occupy valuable disk space. However, current malware detection methods, such as static-based and dynamic-based approaches, struggle to identify newly developed (``zero-day") malware and are limited by customized virtual machine (VM) environments. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel malware detection approach that leverages deep learning, mathematical techniques, and network science. Our approach focuses on static and dynamic analysis and utilizes the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) to profile applications within a complex network. The generated network topologies are input into the GraphSAGE architecture to efficiently distinguish between benign and malicious software applications, with the operation names denoted as node features. Importantly, the GraphSAGE models analyze the network's topological geometry to make predictions, enabling them to detect state-of-the-art malware and prevent potential damage during execution in a VM. To evaluate our approach, we conduct a study on a dataset comprising source code from 24,376 applications, specifically written in C/C++, sourced directly from widely-recognized malware and various types of benign software. The results show a high detection performance with an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) of 99.85%. Our approach marks a substantial improvement in malware detection, providing a notably more accurate and efficient solution when compared to current state-of-the-art malware detection methods.
Authors: Andreas Papachristodoulou, Christos Kyrkou, Stelios Timotheou, Theocharis Theocharides
The Forward-Forward (FF) Algorithm has been recently proposed to alleviate the issues of backpropagation (BP) commonly used to train deep neural networks. However, its current formulation exhibits limitations such as the generation of negative data, slower convergence, and inadequate performance on complex tasks. In this paper, we take the main ideas of FF and improve them by leveraging channel-wise competitive learning in the context of convolutional neural networks for image classification tasks. A layer-wise loss function is introduced that promotes competitive learning and eliminates the need for negative data construction. To enhance both the learning of compositional features and feature space partitioning, a channel-wise feature separator and extractor block is proposed that complements the competitive learning process. Our method outperforms recent FF-based models on image classification tasks, achieving testing errors of 0.58%, 7.69%, 21.89%, and 48.77% on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 respectively. Our approach bridges the performance gap between FF learning and BP methods, indicating the potential of our proposed approach to learn useful representations in a layer-wise modular fashion, enabling more efficient and flexible learning.
Authors: Jianhui Sun, Xidong Wu, Heng Huang, Aidong Zhang
Federated Averaging (FedAvg) is known to experience convergence issues when encountering significant clients system heterogeneity and data heterogeneity. Server momentum has been proposed as an effective mitigation. However, existing server momentum works are restrictive in the momentum formulation, do not properly schedule hyperparameters and focus only on system homogeneous settings, which leaves the role of server momentum still an under-explored problem. In this paper, we propose a general framework for server momentum, that (a) covers a large class of momentum schemes that are unexplored in federated learning (FL), (b) enables a popular stagewise hyperparameter scheduler, (c) allows heterogeneous and asynchronous local computing. We provide rigorous convergence analysis for the proposed framework. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that thoroughly analyzes the performances of server momentum with a hyperparameter scheduler and system heterogeneity. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Authors: Jack Sandberg, Niklas Åkerblom, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani
We consider a combinatorial Gaussian process semi-bandit problem with time-varying arm availability. Each round, an agent is provided a set of available base arms and must select a subset of them to maximize the long-term cumulative reward. Assuming the expected rewards are sampled from a Gaussian process (GP) over the arm space, the agent can efficiently learn. We study the Bayesian setting and provide novel Bayesian regret bounds for three GP-based algorithms: GP-UCB, Bayes-GP-UCB and GP-TS. Our bounds extend previous results for GP-UCB and GP-TS to a combinatorial setting with varying arm availability and to the best of our knowledge, we provide the first Bayesian regret bound for Bayes-GP-UCB. Time-varying arm availability encompasses other widely considered bandit problems such as contextual bandits. We formulate the online energy-efficient navigation problem as a combinatorial and contextual bandit and provide a comprehensive experimental study on synthetic and real-world road networks with detailed simulations. The contextual GP model obtains lower regret and is less dependent on the informativeness of the prior compared to the non-contextual Bayesian inference model. In addition, Thompson sampling obtains lower regret than Bayes-UCB for both the contextual and non-contextual model.
Authors: Eric Rawls, Bryan Andrews, Kelvin Lim, Erich Kummerfeld
Designing studies that apply causal discovery requires navigating many researcher degrees of freedom. This complexity is exacerbated when the study involves fMRI data. In this paper we (i) describe nine challenges that occur when applying causal discovery to fMRI data, (ii) discuss the space of decisions that need to be made, (iii) review how a recent case study made those decisions, (iv) and identify existing gaps that could potentially be solved by the development of new methods. Overall, causal discovery is a promising approach for analyzing fMRI data, and multiple successful applications have indicated that it is superior to traditional fMRI functional connectivity methods, but current causal discovery methods for fMRI leave room for improvement.
Authors: Pei Huang, Haoze Wu, Yuting Yang, Ieva Daukantas, Min Wu, Yedi Zhang, Clark Barrett
Quantization replaces floating point arithmetic with integer arithmetic in deep neural network models, providing more efficient on-device inference with less power and memory. In this work, we propose a framework for formally verifying properties of quantized neural networks. Our baseline technique is based on integer linear programming which guarantees both soundness and completeness. We then show how efficiency can be improved by utilizing gradient-based heuristic search methods and also bound-propagation techniques. We evaluate our approach on perception networks quantized with PyTorch. Our results show that we can verify quantized networks with better scalability and efficiency than the previous state of the art.
Authors: Hen Emuna, Nadav Borenstein, Xin Qian, Hyeonsu Kang, Joel Chan, Aniket Kittur, Dafna Shahaf
Biologically Inspired Design (BID), or Biomimicry, is a problem-solving methodology that applies analogies from nature to solve engineering challenges. For example, Speedo engineers designed swimsuits based on shark skin. Finding relevant biological solutions for real-world problems poses significant challenges, both due to the limited biological knowledge engineers and designers typically possess and to the limited BID resources. Existing BID datasets are hand-curated and small, and scaling them up requires costly human annotations.
In this paper, we introduce BARcode (Biological Analogy Retriever), a search engine for automatically mining bio-inspirations from the web at scale. Using advances in natural language understanding and data programming, BARcode identifies potential inspirations for engineering challenges. Our experiments demonstrate that BARcode can retrieve inspirations that are valuable to engineers and designers tackling real-world problems, as well as recover famous historical BID examples. We release data and code; we view BARcode as a step towards addressing the challenges that have historically hindered the practical application of BID to engineering innovation.
Authors: Tim Valicenti, Justice Vidal, Ritik Patnaik
In AI research, the optimization of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, crucial for advancing the field's practical applications and sustainability. Building upon the foundational work of Professor Song Han's lab at MIT, this paper introduces a novel approach in developing Mini-GPTs via contextual pruning. Our methodology strategically prunes the computational architecture of traditional LLMs, like Phi-1.5, focusing on retaining core functionalities while drastically reducing model sizes. We employ the technique across diverse and complex datasets, including US law, Medical Q&A, Skyrim dialogue, English-Taiwanese translation, and Economics articles. The results underscore the efficiency and effectiveness of contextual pruning, not merely as a theoretical concept but as a practical tool in developing domain-specific, resource-efficient LLMs. Contextual pruning is a promising method for building domain-specific LLMs, and this research is a building block towards future development with more hardware compute, refined fine-tuning, and quantization.
Authors: Sajal Dash, Isaac Lyngaas, Junqi Yin, Xiao Wang, Romain Egele, Guojing Cong, Feiyi Wang, Prasanna Balaprakash
Large language models (LLM) are showing tremendous success as foundation models, and many downstream applications benefit from fine-tuning. Prior works on loss scaling have demonstrated that the larger LLMs perform better than their smaller counterparts. However, training LLMs with billions of parameters requires considerable computational resources; to train a one trillion GPT-style model on 20 trillion tokens, we need to perform 120 million exaflops. Frontier is the world's first and fastest exascale supercomputer for open science and is equipped with 75264 MI250X GPUs. This work explores efficient distributed strategies such as tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and sharded data parallelism to train a trillion-parameter model on the Frontier exascale supercomputer. We analyze these distributed training techniques and associated parameters individually to decide which techniques to use and what associated parameters to select for a particular technique. We perform hyperparameter tuning on these techniques to understand their complex interplay. Combined with these two tuning efforts, we have found optimal strategies to train three models of size 22B, 175B, and 1T parameters with $38.38\%$ , $36.14\%$ , and $31.96\%$ achieved throughput. For training the 175B parameter model and 1T model, we have achieved $100\%$ weak scaling efficiency and $89\%$ and $87\%$ strong scaling efficiency, respectively. Our work presents a set of strategies for distributed training of LLMs through experimental findings and hyperparameter tuning.
Authors: Jianheng Huang, Ante Wang, Linfeng Gao, Linfeng Song, Jinsong Su
Leveraging vast and continually updated knowledge from the Internet has been considered an important ability for a dialogue system. Therefore, the dialogue query generation task is proposed for generating search queries from dialogue histories, which will be submitted to a search engine for retrieving relevant websites on the Internet. In this regard, previous efforts were devoted to collecting conversations with annotated queries and training a query producer (QP) via standard supervised learning. However, these studies still face the challenges of data scarcity and domain adaptation. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning framework -- SemiDQG, to improve model performance with unlabeled conversations. Based on the observation that the search query is typically related to the topic of dialogue response, we train a response-augmented query producer (RA) to provide rich and effective training signals for QP. We first apply a similarity-based query selection strategy to select high-quality RA-generated pseudo queries, which are used to construct pseudo instances for training QP and RA. Then, we adopt the REINFORCE algorithm to further enhance QP, with RA-provided rewards as fine-grained training signals. Experimental results and in-depth analysis of three benchmarks show the effectiveness of our framework in cross-domain and low-resource scenarios. Particularly, SemiDQG significantly surpasses ChatGPT and competitive baselines. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/SemiDQG}.
Authors: Yiming Chen, Haiwei Wu, Jiantao Zhou
Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are susceptible to backdoor attacks where malicious attackers manipulate the model's predictions via data poisoning. It is hence imperative to develop a strategy for training a clean model using a potentially poisoned dataset. Previous training-time defense mechanisms typically employ an one-time isolation process, often leading to suboptimal isolation outcomes. In this study, we present a novel and efficacious defense method, termed Progressive Isolation of Poisoned Data (PIPD), that progressively isolates poisoned data to enhance the isolation accuracy and mitigate the risk of benign samples being misclassified as poisoned ones. Once the poisoned portion of the dataset has been identified, we introduce a selective training process to train a clean model. Through the implementation of these techniques, we ensure that the trained model manifests a significantly diminished attack success rate against the poisoned data. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and DNN models, assessed against nine state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, demonstrate the superior performance of our PIPD method for backdoor defense. For instance, our PIPD achieves an average True Positive Rate (TPR) of 99.95% and an average False Positive Rate (FPR) of 0.06% for diverse attacks over CIFAR-10 dataset, markedly surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Yao Zhao, Zhitian Xie, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu
As Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements across various tasks, such as question answering, translation, text summarization, and dialogue systems, the need for accuracy in information becomes crucial, especially for serious financial products serving billions of users like Alipay. To address this, Alipay has developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that grounds LLMs on the most accurate and up-to-date information. However, for a real-world product serving millions of users, the inference speed of LLMs becomes a critical factor compared to a mere experimental model.
Hence, this paper presents a generic framework for accelerating the inference process, resulting in a substantial increase in speed and cost reduction for our RAG system, with lossless generation accuracy. In the traditional inference process, each token is generated sequentially by the LLM, leading to a time consumption proportional to the number of generated tokens. To enhance this process, our framework, named \textit{lookahead}, introduces a \textit{multi-branch} strategy. Instead of generating a single token at a time, we propose a \textit{Trie-based Retrieval} (TR) process that enables the generation of multiple branches simultaneously, each of which is a sequence of tokens. Subsequently, for each branch, a \textit{Verification and Accept} (VA) process is performed to identify the longest correct sub-sequence as the final output. Our strategy offers two distinct advantages: (1) it guarantees absolute correctness of the output, avoiding any approximation algorithms, and (2) the worst-case performance of our approach is equivalent to the conventional process. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the significant improvements achieved by applying our inference acceleration framework.
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound biases from the observational data. Ignoring these biases and blindly fitting a model with the biased data could even negatively affect the online learning phase. In this work, we formulate this problem from a causal perspective. First, we categorize the biases into confounding bias and selection bias based on the causal structure they imply. Next, we extract the causal bound for each arm that is robust towards compound biases from biased observational data. The derived bounds contain the ground truth mean reward and can effectively guide the bandit agent to learn a nearly-optimal decision policy. We also conduct regret analysis in both contextual and non-contextual bandit settings and show that prior causal bounds could help consistently reduce the asymptotic regret.
Authors: Edmund Mills, Shiye Su, Stuart Russell, Scott Emmons
How do we measure the efficacy of language model explainability methods? While many explainability methods have been developed, they are typically evaluated on bespoke tasks, preventing an apples-to-apples comparison. To help fill this gap, we present ALMANACS, a language model explainability benchmark. ALMANACS scores explainability methods on simulatability, i.e., how well the explanations improve behavior prediction on new inputs. The ALMANACS scenarios span twelve safety-relevant topics such as ethical reasoning and advanced AI behaviors; they have idiosyncratic premises to invoke model-specific behavior; and they have a train-test distributional shift to encourage faithful explanations. By using another language model to predict behavior based on the explanations, ALMANACS is a fully automated benchmark. We use ALMANACS to evaluate counterfactuals, rationalizations, attention, and Integrated Gradients explanations. Our results are sobering: when averaged across all topics, no explanation method outperforms the explanation-free control. We conclude that despite modest successes in prior work, developing an explanation method that aids simulatability in ALMANACS remains an open challenge.
Authors: Zhiguang Yang, Lu Wang, Chun Gan, Liufang Sang, Haoran Wang, Wenlong Chen, Jie He, Changping Peng, Zhangang Lin, Jingping Shao
"Creativity is the heart and soul of advertising services". Effective creatives can create a win-win scenario: advertisers can reach target users and achieve marketing objectives more effectively, users can more quickly find products of interest, and platforms can generate more advertising revenue. With the advent of AI-Generated Content, advertisers now can produce vast amounts of creative content at a minimal cost. The current challenge lies in how advertising systems can select the most pertinent creative in real-time for each user personally. Existing methods typically perform serial ranking of ads or creatives, limiting the creative module in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we propose for the first time a novel architecture for online parallel estimation of ads and creatives ranking, as well as the corresponding offline joint optimization model. The online architecture enables sophisticated personalized creative modeling while reducing overall latency. The offline joint model for CTR estimation allows mutual awareness and collaborative optimization between ads and creatives. Additionally, we optimize the offline evaluation metrics for the implicit feedback sorting task involved in ad creative ranking. We conduct extensive experiments to compare ours with two state-of-the-art approaches. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in both offline evaluations and real-world advertising platforms online in terms of response time, CTR, and CPM.
Authors: Riordan Alfredo, Vanessa Echeverria, Yueqiao Jin, Lixiang Yan, Zachari Swiecki, Dragan Gašević, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado
The rapid expansion of Learning Analytics (LA) and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) offers new scalable, data-intensive systems but also raises concerns about data privacy and agency. Excluding stakeholders -- like students and teachers -- from the design process can potentially lead to mistrust and inadequately aligned tools. Despite a shift towards human-centred design in recent LA and AIED research, there remain gaps in our understanding of the importance of human control, safety, reliability, and trustworthiness in the design and implementation of these systems. We conducted a systematic literature review to explore these concerns and gaps. We analysed 108 papers to provide insights about i) the current state of human-centred LA/AIED research; ii) the extent to which educational stakeholders have contributed to the design process of human-centred LA/AIED systems; iii) the current balance between human control and computer automation of such systems; and iv) the extent to which safety, reliability and trustworthiness have been considered in the literature. Results indicate some consideration of human control in LA/AIED system design, but limited end-user involvement in actual design. Based on these findings, we recommend: 1) carefully balancing stakeholders' involvement in designing and deploying LA/AIED systems throughout all design phases, 2) actively involving target end-users, especially students, to delineate the balance between human control and automation, and 3) exploring safety, reliability, and trustworthiness as principles in future human-centred LA/AIED systems.
Authors: Donglin Yang, Zhenfeng Liu, Wentao Jiang, Guohang Yan, Xing Gao, Botian Shi, Si Liu, Xinyu Cai
Employing data augmentation methods to enhance perception performance in adverse weather has attracted considerable attention recently. Most of the LiDAR augmentation methods post-process the existing dataset by physics-based models or machine-learning methods. However, due to the limited environmental annotations and the fixed vehicle trajectories in the existing dataset, it is challenging to edit the scene and expand the diversity of traffic flow and scenario. To this end, we propose a simulator-based physical modeling approach to augment LiDAR data in rainy weather in order to improve the perception performance of LiDAR in this scenario. We complete the modeling task of the rainy weather in the CARLA simulator and establish a pipeline for LiDAR data collection. In particular, we pay special attention to the spray and splash rolled up by the wheels of surrounding vehicles in rain and complete the simulation of this special scenario through the Spray Emitter method we developed. In addition, we examine the influence of different weather conditions on the intensity of the LiDAR echo, develop a prediction network for the intensity of the LiDAR echo, and complete the simulation of 4-feat LiDAR point cloud data. In the experiment, we observe that the model augmented by the synthetic data improves the object detection task's performance in the rainy sequence of the Waymo Open Dataset. Both the code and the dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSim#rainypcsim.
Authors: Olga Cherednichenko, Fahad Muhammad
The present-day business landscape necessitates novel methodologies that integrate intelligent technologies and tools capable of swiftly providing precise and dependable information for decision-making purposes. Contemporary society is characterized by vast amounts of accumulated data across various domains, which hold considerable potential for informing and guiding decision-making processes. However, these data are typically collected and stored by disparate and unrelated software systems, stored in diverse formats, and offer varying levels of accessibility and security. To address the challenges associated with processing such large volumes of data, organizations often rely on data analysts. Nonetheless, a significant hurdle in harnessing the benefits of accumulated data lies in the lack of direct communication between technical specialists, decision-makers, and business process analysts. To overcome this issue, the application of collaborative business intelligence (CBI) emerges as a viable solution. This research focuses on the applications of data mining and aims to model CBI processes within distributed virtual teams through the interaction of users and a CBI Virtual Assistant. The proposed virtual assistant for CBI endeavors to enhance data exploration accessibility for a wider range of users and streamline the time and effort required for data analysis. The key contributions of this study encompass: 1) a reference model representing collaborative BI, inspired by linguistic theory; 2) an approach that enables the transformation of user queries into executable commands, thereby facilitating their utilization within data exploration software; and 3) the primary workflow of a conversational agent designed for data analytics.
Authors: Mrinal Mathur, Sergey Plis
Deep learning models have become increasingly computationally intensive, requiring extensive computational resources and time for both training and inference. A significant contributing factor to this challenge is the uniform computational effort expended on each input example, regardless of its complexity. We introduce \textbf{DynaLay}, an alternative architecture that features a decision-making agent to adaptively select the most suitable layers for processing each input, thereby endowing the model with a remarkable level of introspection. DynaLay reevaluates more complex inputs during inference, adjusting the computational effort to optimize both performance and efficiency. The core of the system is a main model equipped with Fixed-Point Iterative (FPI) layers, capable of accurately approximating complex functions, paired with an agent that chooses these layers or a direct action based on the introspection of the models inner state. The model invests more time in processing harder examples, while minimal computation is required for easier ones. This introspective approach is a step toward developing deep learning models that "think" and "ponder", rather than "ballistically'' produce answers. Our experiments demonstrate that DynaLay achieves accuracy comparable to conventional deep models while significantly reducing computational demands.
Authors: Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh, Dinesh Manocha
Continued self-supervised (SSL) pre-training for adapting existing SSL models to the target domain has shown to be extremely effective for low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). This paper proposes Stable Distillation, a simple and novel approach for SSL-based continued pre-training that boosts ASR performance in the target domain where both labeled and unlabeled data are limited. Stable Distillation employs self-distillation as regularization for continued pre-training, alleviating the over-fitting issue, a common problem continued pre-training faces when the source and target domains differ. Specifically, first, we perform vanilla continued pre-training on an initial SSL pre-trained model on the target domain ASR dataset and call it the teacher. Next, we take the same initial pre-trained model as a student to perform continued pre-training while enforcing its hidden representations to be close to that of the teacher (via MSE loss). This student is then used for downstream ASR fine-tuning on the target dataset. In practice, Stable Distillation outperforms all our baselines by 0.8 - 7 WER when evaluated in various experimental settings.
Authors: Ziang Liu, Genggeng Zhou, Jeff He, Tobia Marcucci, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu, Yunzhu Li
Learning predictive models from observations using deep neural networks (DNNs) is a promising new approach to many real-world planning and control problems. However, common DNNs are too unstructured for effective planning, and current control methods typically rely on extensive sampling or local gradient descent. In this paper, we propose a new framework for integrated model learning and predictive control that is amenable to efficient optimization algorithms. Specifically, we start with a ReLU neural model of the system dynamics and, with minimal losses in prediction accuracy, we gradually sparsify it by removing redundant neurons. This discrete sparsification process is approximated as a continuous problem, enabling an end-to-end optimization of both the model architecture and the weight parameters. The sparsified model is subsequently used by a mixed-integer predictive controller, which represents the neuron activations as binary variables and employs efficient branch-and-bound algorithms. Our framework is applicable to a wide variety of DNNs, from simple multilayer perceptrons to complex graph neural dynamics. It can efficiently handle tasks involving complicated contact dynamics, such as object pushing, compositional object sorting, and manipulation of deformable objects. Numerical and hardware experiments show that, despite the aggressive sparsification, our framework can deliver better closed-loop performance than existing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Yan Cai, Linlin Wang, Ye Wang, Gerard de Melo, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Liang He
The emergence of various medical large language models (LLMs) in the medical domain has highlighted the need for unified evaluation standards, as manual evaluation of LLMs proves to be time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we introduce MedBench, a comprehensive benchmark for the Chinese medical domain, comprising 40,041 questions sourced from authentic examination exercises and medical reports of diverse branches of medicine. In particular, this benchmark is composed of four key components: the Chinese Medical Licensing Examination, the Resident Standardization Training Examination, the Doctor In-Charge Qualification Examination, and real-world clinic cases encompassing examinations, diagnoses, and treatments. MedBench replicates the educational progression and clinical practice experiences of doctors in Mainland China, thereby establishing itself as a credible benchmark for assessing the mastery of knowledge and reasoning abilities in medical language learning models. We perform extensive experiments and conduct an in-depth analysis from diverse perspectives, which culminate in the following findings: (1) Chinese medical LLMs underperform on this benchmark, highlighting the need for significant advances in clinical knowledge and diagnostic precision. (2) Several general-domain LLMs surprisingly possess considerable medical knowledge. These findings elucidate both the capabilities and limitations of LLMs within the context of MedBench, with the ultimate goal of aiding the medical research community.
Authors: Seunghoo Hong, Juhun Lee, Simon S. Woo
Text-to-Image models such as Stable Diffusion have shown impressive image generation synthesis, thanks to the utilization of large-scale datasets. However, these datasets may contain sexually explicit, copyrighted, or undesirable content, which allows the model to directly generate them. Given that retraining these large models on individual concept deletion requests is infeasible, fine-tuning algorithms have been developed to tackle concept erasing in diffusion models. While these algorithms yield good concept erasure, they all present one of the following issues: 1) the corrupted feature space yields synthesis of disintegrated objects, 2) the initially synthesized content undergoes a divergence in both spatial structure and semantics in the generated images, and 3) sub-optimal training updates heighten the model's susceptibility to utility harm. These issues severely degrade the original utility of generative models. In this work, we present a new approach that solves all of these challenges. We take inspiration from the concept of classifier guidance and propose a surgical update on the classifier guidance term while constraining the drift of the unconditional score term. Furthermore, our algorithm empowers the user to select an alternative to the erasing concept, allowing for more controllability. Our experimental results show that our algorithm not only erases the target concept effectively but also preserves the model's generation capability.
Authors: Luke Yoffe, Aditya Sharma, Tobias Höllerer
One key challenge in augmented reality is the placement of virtual content in natural locations. Existing automated techniques are only able to work with a closed-vocabulary, fixed set of objects. In this paper, we introduce a new open-vocabulary method for object placement. Our eight-stage pipeline leverages recent advances in segmentation models, vision-language models, and LLMs to place any virtual object in any AR camera frame or scene. In a preliminary user study, we show that our method performs at least as well as human experts 57% of the time.
Authors: Yuqi Lin, Minghao Chen, Kaipeng Zhang, Hengjia Li, Mingming Li, Zheng Yang, Dongqin Lv, Binbin Lin, Haifeng Liu, Deng Cai
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated impressive capabilities in open-vocabulary classification. The class token in the image encoder is trained to capture the global features to distinguish different text descriptions supervised by contrastive loss, making it highly effective for single-label classification. However, it shows poor performance on multi-label datasets because the global feature tends to be dominated by the most prominent class and the contrastive nature of softmax operation aggravates it. In this study, we observe that the multi-label classification results heavily rely on discriminative local features but are overlooked by CLIP. As a result, we dissect the preservation of patch-wise spatial information in CLIP and proposed a local-to-global framework to obtain image tags. It comprises three steps: (1) patch-level classification to obtain coarse scores; (2) dual-masking attention refinement (DMAR) module to refine the coarse scores; (3) class-wise reidentification (CWR) module to remedy predictions from a global perspective. This framework is solely based on frozen CLIP and significantly enhances its multi-label classification performance on various benchmarks without dataset-specific training. Besides, to comprehensively assess the quality and practicality of generated tags, we extend their application to the downstream task, i.e., weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) with generated tags as image-level pseudo labels. Experiments demonstrate that this classify-then-segment paradigm dramatically outperforms other annotation-free segmentation methods and validates the effectiveness of generated tags. Our code is available at https://github.com/linyq2117/TagCLIP.
Authors: Yiwei Li, Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Boyuan Pan, Bin Sun, Xinglin Wang, Heda Wang, Kan Li
Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed well on various reasoning tasks, but their inaccessibility and numerous parameters hinder wide application in practice. One promising way is distilling the reasoning ability from LLMs to small models by the generated chain-of-thought reasoning paths. In some cases, however, LLMs may produce incorrect reasoning chains, especially when facing complex mathematical problems. Previous studies only transfer knowledge from positive samples and drop the synthesized data with wrong answers. In this work, we illustrate the merit of negative data and propose a model specialization framework to distill LLMs with negative samples besides positive ones. The framework consists of three progressive steps, covering from training to inference stages, to absorb knowledge from negative data. We conduct extensive experiments across arithmetic reasoning tasks to demonstrate the role of negative data in distillation from LLM.
Authors: Naiyu Yin, Tian Gao, Yue Yu, Qiang Ji
Capturing the underlying structural causal relations represented by Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) has been a fundamental task in various AI disciplines. Causal DAG learning via the continuous optimization framework has recently achieved promising performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. However, most methods make strong assumptions of homoscedastic noise, i.e., exogenous noises have equal variances across variables, observations, or even both. The noises in real data usually violate both assumptions due to the biases introduced by different data collection processes. To address the issue of heteroscedastic noise, we introduce relaxed and implementable sufficient conditions, proving the identifiability of a general class of SEM subject to these conditions. Based on the identifiable general SEM, we propose a novel formulation for DAG learning that accounts for the variation in noise variance across variables and observations. We then propose an effective two-phase iterative DAG learning algorithm to address the increasing optimization difficulties and to learn a causal DAG from data with heteroscedastic variable noise under varying variance. We show significant empirical gains of the proposed approaches over state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic data and real data.
Authors: Bram Vanroy
Despite the rapid expansion of types of large language models, there remains a notable gap in models specifically designed for the Dutch language. This gap is not only a shortage in terms of pretrained Dutch models but also in terms of data, and benchmarks and leaderboards. This work provides a small step to improve the situation. First, we introduce two fine-tuned variants of the Llama 2 13B model. We first fine-tuned Llama 2 using Dutch-specific web-crawled data and subsequently refined this model further on multiple synthetic instruction and chat datasets. These datasets as well as the model weights are made available. In addition, we provide a leaderboard to keep track of the performance of (Dutch) models on a number of generation tasks, and we include results of a number of state-of-the-art models, including our own. Finally we provide a critical conclusion on what we believe is needed to push forward Dutch language models and the whole eco-system around the models.
Authors: Zhecheng Wang, Rajanie Prabha, Tianyuan Huang, Jiajun Wu, Ram Rajagopal
Remote sensing imagery, despite its broad applications in helping achieve Sustainable Development Goals and tackle climate change, has not yet benefited from the recent advancements of versatile, task-agnostic vision language models (VLMs). A key reason is that the large-scale, semantically diverse image-text dataset required for developing VLMs is still absent for remote sensing images. Unlike natural images, remote sensing images and their associated text descriptions cannot be efficiently collected from the public Internet at scale. In this work, we bridge this gap by using geo-coordinates to automatically connect open, unlabeled remote sensing images with rich semantics covered in OpenStreetMap, and thus construct SkyScript, a comprehensive vision-language dataset for remote sensing images, comprising 2.6 million image-text pairs covering 29K distinct semantic tags. With continual pre-training on this dataset, we obtain a VLM that surpasses baseline models with a 6.2% average accuracy gain in zero-shot scene classification across seven benchmark datasets. It also demonstrates the ability of zero-shot transfer for fine-grained object attribute classification and cross-modal retrieval. We hope this dataset can support the advancement of VLMs for various multi-modal tasks in remote sensing, such as open-vocabulary classification, retrieval, captioning, and text-to-image synthesis.
Authors: Fernando Pérez-García, Sam Bond-Taylor, Pedro P. Sanchez, Boris van Breugel, Daniel C. Castro, Harshita Sharma, Valentina Salvatelli, Maria T. A. Wetscherek, Hannah Richardson, Matthew P. Lungren, Aditya Nori, Javier Alvarez-Valle, Ozan Oktay, Maximilian Ilse
Biomedical imaging datasets are often small and biased, meaning that real-world performance of predictive models can be substantially lower than expected from internal testing. This work proposes using generative image editing to simulate dataset shifts and diagnose failure modes of biomedical vision models; this can be used in advance of deployment to assess readiness, potentially reducing cost and patient harm. Existing editing methods can produce undesirable changes, with spurious correlations learned due to the co-occurrence of disease and treatment interventions, limiting practical applicability. To address this, we train a text-to-image diffusion model on multiple chest X-ray datasets and introduce a new editing method RadEdit that uses multiple masks, if present, to constrain changes and ensure consistency in the edited images. We consider three types of dataset shifts: acquisition shift, manifestation shift, and population shift, and demonstrate that our approach can diagnose failures and quantify model robustness without additional data collection, complementing more qualitative tools for explainable AI.
Authors: Ardavan S. Nobandegani, Irina Rish, Thomas R. Shultz
Widely considered a cornerstone of human morality, trust shapes many aspects of human social interactions. In this work, we present a theoretical analysis of the $\textit{trust game}$, the canonical task for studying trust in behavioral and brain sciences, along with simulation results supporting our analysis. Specifically, leveraging reinforcement learning (RL) to train our AI agents, we systematically investigate learning trust under various parameterizations of this task. Our theoretical analysis, corroborated by the simulations results presented, provides a mathematical basis for the emergence of trust in the trust game.
Authors: Théo Vincent, Alberto Maria Metelli, Boris Belousov, Jan Peters, Marcello Restelli, Carlo D'Eramo
Approximate value iteration~(AVI) is a family of algorithms for reinforcement learning~(RL) that aims to obtain an approximation of the optimal value function. Generally, AVI algorithms implement an iterated procedure where each step consists of (i) an application of the Bellman operator and (ii) a projection step into a considered function space. Notoriously, the Bellman operator leverages transition samples, which strongly determine its behavior, as uninformative samples can result in negligible updates or long detours, whose detrimental effects are further exacerbated by the computationally intensive projection step. To address these issues, we propose a novel alternative approach based on learning an approximate version of the Bellman operator rather than estimating it through samples as in AVI approaches. This way, we are able to (i) generalize across transition samples and (ii) avoid the computationally intensive projection step. For this reason, we call our novel operator projected Bellman operator (PBO). We formulate an optimization problem to learn PBO for generic sequential decision-making problems, and we theoretically analyze its properties in two representative classes of RL problems. Furthermore, we theoretically study our approach under the lens of AVI and devise algorithmic implementations to learn PBO in offline and online settings by leveraging neural network parameterizations. Finally, we empirically showcase the benefits of PBO w.r.t. the regular Bellman operator on several RL problems.
Authors: Bo Liu, Liqiang Yu, Chang Che, Qunwei Lin, Hao Hu, Xinyu Zhao
This paper focuses on the analysis of the application effectiveness of the integration of deep learning and computer vision technologies. Deep learning achieves a historic breakthrough by constructing hierarchical neural networks, enabling end-to-end feature learning and semantic understanding of images. The successful experiences in the field of computer vision provide strong support for training deep learning algorithms. The tight integration of these two fields has given rise to a new generation of advanced computer vision systems, significantly surpassing traditional methods in tasks such as machine vision image classification and object detection. In this paper, typical image classification cases are combined to analyze the superior performance of deep neural network models while also pointing out their limitations in generalization and interpretability, proposing directions for future improvements. Overall, the efficient integration and development trend of deep learning with massive visual data will continue to drive technological breakthroughs and application expansion in the field of computer vision, making it possible to build truly intelligent machine vision systems. This deepening fusion paradigm will powerfully promote unprecedented tasks and functions in computer vision, providing stronger development momentum for related disciplines and industries.
Authors: Junkang Wu, Jiawei Chen, Jiancan Wu, Wentao Shi, Jizhi Zhang, Xiang Wang
Loss functions steer the optimization direction of recommendation models and are critical to model performance, but have received relatively little attention in recent recommendation research. Among various losses, we find Softmax loss (SL) stands out for not only achieving remarkable accuracy but also better robustness and fairness. Nevertheless, the current literature lacks a comprehensive explanation for the efficacy of SL. Toward addressing this research gap, we conduct theoretical analyses on SL and uncover three insights: 1) Optimizing SL is equivalent to performing Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) on the negative data, thereby learning against perturbations on the negative distribution and yielding robustness to noisy negatives. 2) Comparing with other loss functions, SL implicitly penalizes the prediction variance, resulting in a smaller gap between predicted values and and thus producing fairer results. Building on these insights, we further propose a novel loss function Bilateral SoftMax Loss (BSL) that extends the advantage of SL to both positive and negative sides. BSL augments SL by applying the same Log-Expectation-Exp structure to positive examples as is used for negatives, making the model robust to the noisy positives as well. Remarkably, BSL is simple and easy-to-implement -- requiring just one additional line of code compared to SL. Experiments on four real-world datasets and three representative backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal. The code is available at https://github.com/junkangwu/BSL
Authors: William Hill, Ireton Liu, Anita De Mello Koch, Damion Harvey, George Konidaris, Steven James
We propose a new benchmark for planning tasks based on the Minecraft game. Our benchmark contains 45 tasks overall, but also provides support for creating both propositional and numeric instances of new Minecraft tasks automatically. We benchmark numeric and propositional planning systems on these tasks, with results demonstrating that state-of-the-art planners are currently incapable of dealing with many of the challenges advanced by our new benchmark, such as scaling to instances with thousands of objects. Based on these results, we identify areas of improvement for future planners. Our framework is made available at https://github.com/IretonLiu/mine-pddl/.
Authors: Xiangjuan Li, Feifan Li, Yang Li, Quan Pan
Deep reinforcement learning has advanced greatly and applied in many areas. In this paper, we explore the vulnerability of deep reinforcement learning by proposing a novel generative model for creating effective adversarial examples to attack the agent. Our proposed model can achieve both targeted attacks and untargeted attacks. Considering the specificity of deep reinforcement learning, we propose the action consistency ratio as a measure of stealthiness, and a new measurement index of effectiveness and stealthiness. Experiment results show that our method can ensure the effectiveness and stealthiness of attack compared with other algorithms. Moreover, our methods are considerably faster and thus can achieve rapid and efficient verification of the vulnerability of deep reinforcement learning.
Authors: Pan Xie, Taiyi Peng, Yao Du, Qipeng Zhang
Sign Language Production (SLP) is the tough task of turning sign language into sign videos. The main goal of SLP is to create these videos using a sign gloss. In this research, we've developed a new method to make high-quality sign videos without using human poses as a middle step. Our model works in two main parts: first, it learns from a generator and the video's hidden features, and next, it uses another model to understand the order of these hidden features. To make this method even better for sign videos, we make several significant improvements. (i) In the first stage, we take an improved 3D VQ-GAN to learn downsampled latent representations. (ii) In the second stage, we introduce sequence-to-sequence attention to better leverage conditional information. (iii) The separated two-stage training discards the realistic visual semantic of the latent codes in the second stage. To endow the latent sequences semantic information, we extend the token-level autoregressive latent codes learning with perceptual loss and reconstruction loss for the prior model with visual perception. Compared with previous state-of-the-art approaches, our model performs consistently better on two word-level sign language datasets, i.e., WLASL and NMFs-CSL.
Authors: Eleonora Poeta, Gabriele Ciravegna, Eliana Pastor, Tania Cerquitelli, Elena Baralis
The field of explainable artificial intelligence emerged in response to the growing need for more transparent and reliable models. However, using raw features to provide explanations has been disputed in several works lately, advocating for more user-understandable explanations. To address this issue, a wide range of papers proposing Concept-based eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (C-XAI) methods have arisen in recent years. Nevertheless, a unified categorization and precise field definition are still missing. This paper fills the gap by offering a thorough review of C-XAI approaches. We define and identify different concepts and explanation types. We provide a taxonomy identifying nine categories and propose guidelines for selecting a suitable category based on the development context. Additionally, we report common evaluation strategies including metrics, human evaluations and dataset employed, aiming to assist the development of future methods. We believe this survey will serve researchers, practitioners, and domain experts in comprehending and advancing this innovative field.
Authors: Alireza Amirshahi, Giovanni Ansaloni, David Atienza
The increasing complexity of transformer models in artificial intelligence expands their computational costs, memory usage, and energy consumption. Hardware acceleration tackles the ensuing challenges by designing processors and accelerators tailored for transformer models, supporting their computation hotspots with high efficiency. However, memory bandwidth can hinder improvements in hardware accelerators. Against this backdrop, in this paper we propose a novel memory arrangement strategy, governed by the hardware accelerator's kernel size, which effectively minimizes off-chip data access. This arrangement is particularly beneficial for end-to-end transformer model inference, where most of the computation is based on general matrix multiplication (GEMM) operations. Additionally, we address the overhead of non-GEMM operations in transformer models within the scope of this memory data arrangement. Our study explores the implementation and effectiveness of the proposed accelerator-driven data arrangement approach in both single- and multi-core systems. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach can achieve up to a 2.8x speed increase when executing inferences employing state-of-the-art transformers.
Authors: Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Simon Jenni, Mubarak Shah
Self-supervised approaches for video have shown impressive results in video understanding tasks. However, unlike early works that leverage temporal self-supervision, current state-of-the-art methods primarily rely on tasks from the image domain (e.g., contrastive learning) that do not explicitly promote the learning of temporal features. We identify two factors that limit existing temporal self-supervision: 1) tasks are too simple, resulting in saturated training performance, and 2) we uncover shortcuts based on local appearance statistics that hinder the learning of high-level features. To address these issues, we propose 1) a more challenging reformulation of temporal self-supervision as frame-level (rather than clip-level) recognition tasks and 2) an effective augmentation strategy to mitigate shortcuts. Our model extends a representation of single video frames, pre-trained through contrastive learning, with a transformer that we train through temporal self-supervision. We demonstrate experimentally that our more challenging frame-level task formulations and the removal of shortcuts drastically improve the quality of features learned through temporal self-supervision. The generalization capability of our self-supervised video method is evidenced by its state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of high-level semantic tasks, including video retrieval, action classification, and video attribute recognition (such as object and scene identification), as well as low-level temporal correspondence tasks like video object segmentation and pose tracking. Additionally, we show that the video representations learned through our method exhibit increased robustness to the input perturbations.
Authors: Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh, Dinesh Manocha
Continued pre-training (CP) offers multiple advantages, like target domain adaptation and the potential to exploit the continuous stream of unlabeled data available online. However, continued pre-training on out-of-domain distributions often leads to catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge, leading to sub-optimal ASR performance. This paper presents FusDom, a simple and novel methodology for SSL-based continued pre-training. FusDom learns speech representations that are robust and adaptive yet not forgetful of concepts seen in the past. Instead of solving the SSL pre-text task on the output representations of a single model, FusDom leverages two identical pre-trained SSL models, a teacher and a student, with a modified pre-training head to solve the CP SSL pre-text task. This head employs a cross-attention mechanism between the representations of both models while only the student receives gradient updates and the teacher does not. Finally, the student is fine-tuned for ASR. In practice, FusDom outperforms all our baselines across settings significantly, with WER improvements in the range of 0.2 WER - 7.3 WER in the target domain while retaining the performance in the earlier domain.
Authors: Weigang Lu, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Long Jin
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become mainstream methods for solving the semi-supervised node classification problem. However, due to the uneven location distribution of labeled nodes in the graph, labeled nodes are only accessible to a small portion of unlabeled nodes, leading to the \emph{under-reaching} issue. In this study, we firstly reveal under-reaching by conducting an empirical investigation on various well-known graphs. Then, we demonstrate that under-reaching results in unsatisfactory distribution alignment between labeled and unlabeled nodes through systematic experimental analysis, significantly degrading GNNs' performance. To tackle under-reaching for GNNs, we propose an architecture-agnostic method dubbed NodeMixup. The fundamental idea is to (1) increase the reachability of labeled nodes by labeled-unlabeled pairs mixup, (2) leverage graph structures via fusing the neighbor connections of intra-class node pairs to improve performance gains of mixup, and (3) use neighbor label distribution similarity incorporating node degrees to determine sampling weights for node mixup. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of NodeMixup in assisting GNNs in handling under-reaching. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/WeigangLu/NodeMixup}.
Authors: Param Rajpura, Hubert Cecotti, Yogesh Kumar Meena
This review paper provides an integrated perspective of Explainable Artificial Intelligence techniques applied to Brain-Computer Interfaces. BCIs use predictive models to interpret brain signals for various high-stake applications. However, achieving explainability in these complex models is challenging as it compromises accuracy. The field of XAI has emerged to address the need for explainability across various stakeholders, but there is a lack of an integrated perspective in XAI for BCI (XAI4BCI) literature. It is necessary to differentiate key concepts like explainability, interpretability, and understanding in this context and formulate a comprehensive framework. To understand the need of XAI for BCI, we pose six key research questions for a systematic review and meta-analysis, encompassing its purposes, applications, usability, and technical feasibility. We employ the PRISMA methodology -- preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses to review (n=1246) and analyze (n=84) studies published in 2015 and onwards for key insights. The results highlight that current research primarily focuses on interpretability for developers and researchers, aiming to justify outcomes and enhance model performance. We discuss the unique approaches, advantages, and limitations of XAI4BCI from the literature. We draw insights from philosophy, psychology, and social sciences. We propose a design space for XAI4BCI, considering the evolving need to visualize and investigate predictive model outcomes customised for various stakeholders in the BCI development and deployment lifecycle. This paper is the first to focus solely on reviewing XAI4BCI research articles. This systematic review and meta-analysis findings with the proposed design space prompt important discussions on establishing standards for BCI explanations, highlighting current limitations, and guiding the future of XAI in BCI.
Authors: Abdulkadir Celikkanat, Nikolaos Nakis, Morten Mørup
Over the past two decades, there has been a tremendous increase in the growth of representation learning methods for graphs, with numerous applications across various fields, including bioinformatics, chemistry, and the social sciences. However, current dynamic network approaches focus on discrete-time networks or treat links in continuous-time networks as instantaneous events. Therefore, these approaches have limitations in capturing the persistence or absence of links that continuously emerge and disappear over time for particular durations. To address this, we propose a novel stochastic process relying on survival functions to model the durations of links and their absences over time. This forms a generic new likelihood specification explicitly accounting for intermittent edge-persistent networks, namely GraSSP: Graph Representation with Sequential Survival Process. We apply the developed framework to a recent continuous time dynamic latent distance model characterizing network dynamics in terms of a sequence of piecewise linear movements of nodes in latent space. We quantitatively assess the developed framework in various downstream tasks, such as link prediction and network completion, demonstrating that the developed modeling framework accounting for link persistence and absence well tracks the intrinsic trajectories of nodes in a latent space and captures the underlying characteristics of evolving network structure.
Authors: Haili Ye, Xiaoqing Zhang, Yan Hu, Huazhu Fu, Jiang Liu
The morphologies of vessel-like structures, such as blood vessels and nerve fibres, play significant roles in disease diagnosis, e.g., Parkinson's disease. Deep network-based refinement segmentation methods have recently achieved promising vessel-like structure segmentation results. There are still two challenges: (1) existing methods have limitations in rehabilitating subsection ruptures in segmented vessel-like structures; (2) they are often overconfident in predicted segmentation results. To tackle these two challenges, this paper attempts to leverage the potential of spatial interconnection relationships among subsection ruptures from the structure rehabilitation perspective. Based on this, we propose a novel Vessel-like Structure Rehabilitation Network (VSR-Net) to rehabilitate subsection ruptures and improve the model calibration based on coarse vessel-like structure segmentation results. VSR-Net first constructs subsection rupture clusters with Curvilinear Clustering Module (CCM). Then, the well-designed Curvilinear Merging Module (CMM) is applied to rehabilitate the subsection ruptures to obtain the refined vessel-like structures. Extensive experiments on five 2D/3D medical image datasets show that VSR-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) refinement segmentation methods with lower calibration error. Additionally, we provide quantitative analysis to explain the morphological difference between the rehabilitation results of VSR-Net and ground truth (GT), which is smaller than SOTA methods and GT, demonstrating that our method better rehabilitates vessel-like structures by restoring subsection ruptures.
Authors: Edoardo Debenedetti, Zishen Wan, Maksym Andriushchenko, Vikash Sehwag, Kshitij Bhardwaj, Bhavya Kailkhura
The last six years have witnessed significant progress in adversarially robust deep learning. As evidenced by the CIFAR-10 dataset category in RobustBench benchmark, the accuracy under $\ell_\infty$ adversarial perturbations improved from 44\% in \citet{Madry2018Towards} to 71\% in \citet{peng2023robust}. Although impressive, existing state-of-the-art is still far from satisfactory. It is further observed that best-performing models are often very large models adversarially trained by industrial labs with significant computational budgets. In this paper, we aim to understand: ``how much longer can computing power drive adversarial robustness advances?" To answer this question, we derive \emph{scaling laws for adversarial robustness} which can be extrapolated in the future to provide an estimate of how much cost we would need to pay to reach a desired level of robustness. We show that increasing the FLOPs needed for adversarial training does not bring as much advantage as it does for standard training in terms of performance improvements. Moreover, we find that some of the top-performing techniques are difficult to exactly reproduce, suggesting that they are not robust enough for minor changes in the training setup. Our analysis also uncovers potentially worthwhile directions to pursue in future research. Finally, we make our benchmarking framework (built on top of \texttt{timm}~\citep{rw2019timm}) publicly available to facilitate future analysis in efficient robust deep learning.
Authors: Lening Wang, Han Jiang, Pinlong Cai, Daocheng Fu, Tianqi Wang, Zhiyong Cui, Yilong Ren, Haiyang Yu, Xuesong Wang, Yinhai Wang
Traffic accidents, being a significant contributor to both human casualties and property damage, have long been a focal point of research for many scholars in the field of traffic safety. However, previous studies, whether focusing on static environmental assessments or dynamic driving analyses, as well as pre-accident predictions or post-accident rule analyses, have typically been conducted in isolation. There has been a lack of an effective framework for developing a comprehensive understanding and application of traffic safety. To address this gap, this paper introduces AccidentGPT, a comprehensive accident analysis and prevention multi-modal large model. AccidentGPT establishes a multi-modal information interaction framework grounded in multi-sensor perception, thereby enabling a holistic approach to accident analysis and prevention in the field of traffic safety. Specifically, our capabilities can be categorized as follows: for autonomous driving vehicles, we provide comprehensive environmental perception and understanding to control the vehicle and avoid collisions. For human-driven vehicles, we offer proactive long-range safety warnings and blind-spot alerts while also providing safety driving recommendations and behavioral norms through human-machine dialogue and interaction. Additionally, for traffic police and management agencies, our framework supports intelligent and real-time analysis of traffic safety, encompassing pedestrian, vehicles, roads, and the environment through collaborative perception from multiple vehicles and road testing devices. The system is also capable of providing a thorough analysis of accident causes and liability after vehicle collisions. Our framework stands as the first large model to integrate comprehensive scene understanding into traffic safety studies.
Authors: Neeraj Kumar Singh, Koyel Ghosh, Joy Mahapatra, Utpal Garain, Apurbalal Senapati
Warning: This paper contains examples of the language that some people may find offensive.
Detecting and reducing hateful, abusive, offensive comments is a critical and challenging task on social media. Moreover, few studies aim to mitigate the intensity of hate speech. While studies have shown that context-level semantics are crucial for detecting hateful comments, most of this research focuses on English due to the ample datasets available. In contrast, low-resource languages, like Indian languages, remain under-researched because of limited datasets. Contrary to hate speech detection, hate intensity reduction remains unexplored in high-resource and low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end model, HCDIR, for Hate Context Detection, and Hate Intensity Reduction in social media posts. First, we fine-tuned several pre-trained language models to detect hateful comments to ascertain the best-performing hateful comments detection model. Then, we identified the contextual hateful words. Identification of such hateful words is justified through the state-of-the-art explainable learning model, i.e., Integrated Gradient (IG). Lastly, the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) model has been employed to capture domain-specific nuances to reduce hate intensity. We masked the 50\% hateful words of the comments identified as hateful and predicted the alternative words for these masked terms to generate convincing sentences. An optimal replacement for the original hate comments from the feasible sentences is preferred. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several recent datasets using automatic metric-based evaluation (BERTScore) and thorough human evaluation. To enhance the faithfulness in human evaluation, we arranged a group of three human annotators with varied expertise.
Authors: Takuya Kurihana, Kyongmin Yeo, Daniela Szwarcman, Bruce Elmegreen, Karthik Mukkavilli, Johannes Schmude, Levente Klein
To mitigate global warming, greenhouse gas sources need to be resolved at a high spatial resolution and monitored in time to ensure the reduction and ultimately elimination of the pollution source. However, the complexity of computation in resolving high-resolution wind fields left the simulations impractical to test different time lengths and model configurations. This study presents a preliminary development of a physics-informed super-resolution (SR) generative adversarial network (GAN) that super-resolves the three-dimensional (3D) low-resolution wind fields by upscaling x9 times. We develop a pixel-wise self-attention (PWA) module that learns 3D weather dynamics via a self-attention computation followed by a 2D convolution. We also employ a loss term that regularizes the self-attention map during pretraining, capturing the vertical convection process from input wind data. The new PWA SR-GAN shows the high-fidelity super-resolved 3D wind data, learns a wind structure at the high-frequency domain, and reduces the computational cost of a high-resolution wind simulation by x89.7 times.
Authors: Jean V. Alves, Diogo Leitão, Sérgio Jesus, Marco O. P. Sampaio, Pedro Saleiro, Mário A. T. Figueiredo, Pedro Bizarro
Public dataset limitations have significantly hindered the development and benchmarking of learning to defer (L2D) algorithms, which aim to optimally combine human and AI capabilities in hybrid decision-making systems. In such systems, human availability and domain-specific concerns introduce difficulties, while obtaining human predictions for training and evaluation is costly. Financial fraud detection is a high-stakes setting where algorithms and human experts often work in tandem; however, there are no publicly available datasets for L2D concerning this important application of human-AI teaming. To fill this gap in L2D research, we introduce the Financial Fraud Alert Review Dataset (FiFAR), a synthetic bank account fraud detection dataset, containing the predictions of a team of 50 highly complex and varied synthetic fraud analysts, with varied bias and feature dependence. We also provide a realistic definition of human work capacity constraints, an aspect of L2D systems that is often overlooked, allowing for extensive testing of assignment systems under real-world conditions. We use our dataset to develop a capacity-aware L2D method and rejection learning approach under realistic data availability conditions, and benchmark these baselines under an array of 300 distinct testing scenarios. We believe that this dataset will serve as a pivotal instrument in facilitating a systematic, rigorous, reproducible, and transparent evaluation and comparison of L2D methods, thereby fostering the development of more synergistic human-AI collaboration in decision-making systems. The public dataset and detailed synthetic expert information are available at: https://github.com/feedzai/fifar-dataset
Authors: Javad T. Firouzjaee, Pouriya Khaliliyan
Oil companies are among the largest companies in the world whose economic indicators in the global stock market have a great impact on the world economy\cite{ec00} and market due to their relation to gold\cite{ec01}, crude oil\cite{ec02}, and the dollar\cite{ec03}. This study investigates the impact of correlated features on the interpretability of Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM)\cite{ec04} models for predicting oil company stocks. To achieve this, we designed a Standard Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and trained it using various correlated datasets. Our approach aims to improve the accuracy of stock price prediction by considering the multiple factors affecting the market, such as crude oil prices, gold prices, and the US dollar. The results demonstrate that adding a feature correlated with oil stocks does not improve the interpretability of LSTM models. These findings suggest that while LSTM models may be effective in predicting stock prices, their interpretability may be limited. Caution should be exercised when relying solely on LSTM models for stock price prediction as their lack of interpretability may make it difficult to fully understand the underlying factors driving stock price movements. We have employed complexity analysis to support our argument, considering that financial markets encompass a form of physical complex system\cite{ec05}. One of the fundamental challenges faced in utilizing LSTM models for financial markets lies in interpreting the unexpected feedback dynamics within them.
Authors: Sara A. Miskovich, Willie Neiswanger, William Colocho, Claudio Emma, Jacqueline Garrahan, Timothy Maxwell, Christopher Mayes, Stefano Ermon, Auralee Edelen, Daniel Ratner
Although beam emittance is critical for the performance of high-brightness accelerators, optimization is often time limited as emittance calculations, commonly done via quadrupole scans, are typically slow. Such calculations are a type of $\textit{multipoint query}$, i.e. each query requires multiple secondary measurements. Traditional black-box optimizers such as Bayesian optimization are slow and inefficient when dealing with such objectives as they must acquire the full series of measurements, but return only the emittance, with each query. We propose a new information-theoretic algorithm, Multipoint-BAX, for black-box optimization on multipoint queries, which queries and models individual beam-size measurements using techniques from Bayesian Algorithm Execution (BAX). Our method avoids the slow multipoint query on the accelerator by acquiring points through a $\textit{virtual objective}$, i.e. calculating the emittance objective from a fast learned model rather than directly from the accelerator. We use Multipoint-BAX to minimize emittance at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests II (FACET-II). In simulation, our method is 20$\times$ faster and more robust to noise compared to existing methods. In live tests, it matched the hand-tuned emittance at FACET-II and achieved a 24% lower emittance than hand-tuning at LCLS. Our method represents a conceptual shift for optimizing multipoint queries, and we anticipate that it can be readily adapted to similar problems in particle accelerators and other scientific instruments.
Authors: Jinus Bordbar, Mohammadreza Mohammadrezaie, Saman Ardalan, Mohammad Ebrahim Shiri
Online social media is integral to human life, facilitating messaging, information sharing, and confidential communication while preserving privacy. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook exemplify this phenomenon. However, users face challenges due to network anomalies, often stemming from malicious activities such as identity theft for financial gain or harm. This paper proposes a novel method using user similarity measures and the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm to identify fake user accounts in the Twitter dataset. Despite the problem's complexity, the method achieves an AUC rate of 80\% in classifying and detecting fake accounts. Notably, the study builds on previous research, highlighting advancements and insights into the evolving landscape of anomaly detection in online social networks.
Authors: Jinus Bordbar, Saman Ardalan, Mohammadreza Mohammadrezaie, Zahra Ghasemi
As social media continues to grow rapidly, the prevalence of harassment on these platforms has also increased. This has piqued the interest of researchers in the field of fake detection. Social media data, often forms complex graphs with numerous nodes, posing several challenges. These challenges and limitations include dealing with a significant amount of irrelevant features in matrices and addressing issues such as high data dispersion and an imbalanced class distribution within the dataset. To overcome these challenges and limitations, researchers have employed auto-encoders and a combination of semi-supervised learning with a GAN algorithm, referred to as SGAN. Our proposed method utilizes auto-encoders for feature extraction and incorporates SGAN. By leveraging an unlabeled dataset, the unsupervised layer of SGAN compensates for the limited availability of labeled data, making efficient use of the limited number of labeled instances. Multiple evaluation metrics were employed, including the Confusion Matrix and the ROC curve. The dataset was divided into training and testing sets, with 100 labeled samples for training and 1,000 samples for testing. The novelty of our research lies in applying SGAN to address the issue of imbalanced datasets in fake account detection. By optimizing the use of a smaller number of labeled instances and reducing the need for extensive computational power, our method offers a more efficient solution. Additionally, our study contributes to the field by achieving an 81% accuracy in detecting fake accounts using only 100 labeled samples. This demonstrates the potential of SGAN as a powerful tool for handling minority classes and addressing big data challenges in fake account detection.
Authors: Harshit Joshi, Abishai Ebenezer, José Cambronero, Sumit Gulwani, Aditya Kanade, Vu Le, Ivan Radiček, Gust Verbruggen
Spreadsheets are a vital tool for end-user data management. Using large language models for formula authoring assistance in these environments can be difficult, as these models are expensive to train and challenging to deploy due to their size (up to billions of parameters). We present FLAME, a transformer-based model trained exclusively on Excel formulas that leverages domain insights to achieve competitive performance while being substantially smaller (60M parameters) and training on two orders of magnitude less data. We curate a training dataset using sketch deduplication, introduce an Excel-specific formula tokenizer, and use domain-specific versions of masked span prediction and noisy auto-encoding as pre-training objectives. We evaluate FLAME on formula repair, formula completion, and similarity-based formula retrieval. FLAME can outperform much larger models, such as the Davinci (175B) and Cushman (12B) variants of Codex and CodeT5 (220M), in 10 of 14 evaluation settings for the repair and completion tasks. For formula retrieval, FLAME outperforms CodeT5, CodeBERT, and GraphCodeBERT.
Authors: Navid Mohammadi Foumani, Lynn Miller, Chang Wei Tan, Geoffrey I. Webb, Germain Forestier, Mahsa Salehi
Time Series Classification and Extrinsic Regression are important and challenging machine learning tasks. Deep learning has revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision and holds great promise in other fields such as time series analysis where the relevant features must often be abstracted from the raw data but are not known a priori. This paper surveys the current state of the art in the fast-moving field of deep learning for time series classification and extrinsic regression. We review different network architectures and training methods used for these tasks and discuss the challenges and opportunities when applying deep learning to time series data. We also summarize two critical applications of time series classification and extrinsic regression, human activity recognition and satellite earth observation.
Authors: Andong Wang, Chao Li, Mingyuan Bai, Zhong Jin, Guoxu Zhou, Qibin Zhao
Achieving efficient and robust multi-channel data learning is a challenging task in data science. By exploiting low-rankness in the transformed domain, i.e., transformed low-rankness, tensor Singular Value Decomposition (t-SVD) has achieved extensive success in multi-channel data representation and has recently been extended to function representation such as Neural Networks with t-product layers (t-NNs). However, it still remains unclear how t-SVD theoretically affects the learning behavior of t-NNs. This paper is the first to answer this question by deriving the upper bounds of the generalization error of both standard and adversarially trained t-NNs. It reveals that the t-NNs compressed by exact transformed low-rank parameterization can achieve a sharper adversarial generalization bound. In practice, although t-NNs rarely have exactly transformed low-rank weights, our analysis further shows that by adversarial training with gradient flow (GF), the over-parameterized t-NNs with ReLU activations are trained with implicit regularization towards transformed low-rank parameterization under certain conditions. We also establish adversarial generalization bounds for t-NNs with approximately transformed low-rank weights. Our analysis indicates that the transformed low-rank parameterization can promisingly enhance robust generalization for t-NNs.
Authors: Cheng Jin, Zhengrui Guo, Yi Lin, Luyang Luo, Hao Chen
Deep learning has seen rapid growth in recent years and achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of applications. However, training models typically requires expensive and time-consuming collection of large quantities of labeled data. This is particularly true within the scope of medical imaging analysis (MIA), where data are limited and labels are expensive to be acquired. Thus, label-efficient deep learning methods are developed to make comprehensive use of the labeled data as well as the abundance of unlabeled and weak-labeled data. In this survey, we extensively investigated over 300 recent papers to provide a comprehensive overview of recent progress on label-efficient learning strategies in MIA. We first present the background of label-efficient learning and categorize the approaches into different schemes. Next, we examine the current state-of-the-art methods in detail through each scheme. Specifically, we provide an in-depth investigation, covering not only canonical semi-supervised, self-supervised, and multi-instance learning schemes, but also recently emerged active and annotation-efficient learning strategies. Moreover, as a comprehensive contribution to the field, this survey not only elucidates the commonalities and unique features of the surveyed methods but also presents a detailed analysis of the current challenges in the field and suggests potential avenues for future research.
Authors: Yi Qi, Xingyu Zhao, Siddartha Khastgir, Xiaowei Huang
Can safety analysis make use of Large Language Models (LLMs)? A case study explores Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) applied to Automatic Emergency Brake (AEB) and Electricity Demand Side Management (DSM) systems using ChatGPT. We investigate how collaboration schemes, input semantic complexity, and prompt guidelines influence STPA results. Comparative results show that using ChatGPT without human intervention may be inadequate due to reliability related issues, but with careful design, it may outperform human experts. No statistically significant differences are found when varying the input semantic complexity or using common prompt guidelines, which suggests the necessity for developing domain-specific prompt engineering. We also highlight future challenges, including concerns about LLM trustworthiness and the necessity for standardisation and regulation in this domain.
Authors: Ruiqiang Liu, Qiqiang Zhong, Mengmeng Cui, Hanjie Mai, Qiang Zhang, Shaohua Xu, Xiangzheng Liu, Yanlong Du
In recent years, short Text Matching tasks have been widely applied in the fields ofadvertising search and recommendation. The difficulty lies in the lack of semantic information and word ambiguity caused by the short length of the text. Previous works have introduced complement sentences or knowledge bases to provide additional feature information. However, these methods have not fully interacted between the original sentence and the complement sentence, and have not considered the noise issue that may arise from the introduction of external knowledge bases. Therefore, this paper proposes a short Text Matching model that combines contrastive learning and external knowledge. The model uses a generative model to generate corresponding complement sentences and uses the contrastive learning method to guide the model to obtain more semantically meaningful encoding of the original sentence. In addition, to avoid noise, we use keywords as the main semantics of the original sentence to retrieve corresponding knowledge words in the knowledge base, and construct a knowledge graph. The graph encoding model is used to integrate the knowledge base information into the model. Our designed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available Chinese Text Matching datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.
Authors: Hoang Anh Just, Feiyang Kang, Jiachen T. Wang, Yi Zeng, Myeongseob Ko, Ming Jin, Ruoxi Jia
Traditionally, data valuation (DV) is posed as a problem of equitably splitting the validation performance of a learning algorithm among the training data. As a result, the calculated data values depend on many design choices of the underlying learning algorithm. However, this dependence is undesirable for many DV use cases, such as setting priorities over different data sources in a data acquisition process and informing pricing mechanisms in a data marketplace. In these scenarios, data needs to be valued before the actual analysis and the choice of the learning algorithm is still undetermined then. Another side-effect of the dependence is that to assess the value of individual points, one needs to re-run the learning algorithm with and without a point, which incurs a large computation burden. This work leapfrogs over the current limits of data valuation methods by introducing a new framework that can value training data in a way that is oblivious to the downstream learning algorithm. Our main results are as follows. (1) We develop a proxy for the validation performance associated with a training set based on a non-conventional class-wise Wasserstein distance between training and validation sets. We show that the distance characterizes the upper bound of the validation performance for any given model under certain Lipschitz conditions. (2) We develop a novel method to value individual data based on the sensitivity analysis of the class-wise Wasserstein distance. Importantly, these values can be directly obtained for free from the output of off-the-shelf optimization solvers when computing the distance. (3) We evaluate our new data valuation framework over various use cases related to detecting low-quality data and show that, surprisingly, the learning-agnostic feature of our framework enables a significant improvement over SOTA performance while being orders of magnitude faster.
Authors: Alessio Cecconi, Luca Barbaro, Claudio Di Ciccio, Arik Senderovich
Declarative process specifications define the behavior of processes by means of rules based on Linear Temporal Logic on Finite Traces (LTLf). In a mining context, these specifications are inferred from, and checked on, multi-sets of runs recorded by information systems (namely, event logs). To this end, being able to gauge the degree to which process data comply with a specification is key. However, existing mining and verification techniques analyze the rules in isolation, thereby disregarding their interplay. In this paper, we introduce a framework to devise probabilistic measures for declarative process specifications. Thereupon, we propose a technique that measures the degree of satisfaction of specifications over event logs. To assess our approach, we conduct an evaluation with real-world data, evidencing its applicability in discovery, checking, and drift detection contexts.
Authors: Xenia Ohmer, Elia Bruni, Dieuwke Hupkes
At the staggering pace with which the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are increasing, creating future-proof evaluation sets to assess their understanding becomes more and more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for evaluating LLMs which leverages the idea that correct world understanding should be consistent across different (Fregean) senses of the same meaning. Accordingly, we measure understanding not in terms of correctness but by evaluating consistency across multiple senses that are generated by the model itself. We showcase our approach by instantiating a test where the different senses are different languages, hence using multilingual self-consistency as a litmus test for the model's understanding and simultaneously addressing the important topic of multilinguality. Taking one of the latest versions of ChatGPT as our object of study, we evaluate multilingual consistency for two different tasks across three different languages. We show that its multilingual consistency is still lacking, and that its task and world understanding are thus not language-independent. As our approach does not require any static evaluation corpora in languages other than English, it can easily and cheaply be extended to different languages and tasks and could become an integral part of future benchmarking efforts.
Authors: Marco Bellagente, Manuel Brack, Hannah Teufel, Felix Friedrich, Björn Deiseroth, Constantin Eichenberg, Andrew Dai, Robert Baldock, Souradeep Nanda, Koen Oostermeijer, Andres Felipe Cruz-Salinas, Patrick Schramowski, Kristian Kersting, Samuel Weinbach
The recent popularity of text-to-image diffusion models (DM) can largely be attributed to the intuitive interface they provide to users. The intended generation can be expressed in natural language, with the model producing faithful interpretations of text prompts. However, expressing complex or nuanced ideas in text alone can be difficult. To ease image generation, we propose MultiFusion that allows one to express complex and nuanced concepts with arbitrarily interleaved inputs of multiple modalities and languages. MutliFusion leverages pre-trained models and aligns them for integration into a cohesive system, thereby avoiding the need for extensive training from scratch. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficient transfer of capabilities from individual modules to the downstream model. Specifically, the fusion of all independent components allows the image generation module to utilize multilingual, interleaved multimodal inputs despite being trained solely on monomodal data in a single language.
Authors: Lei Shu, Liangchen Luo, Jayakumar Hoskere, Yun Zhu, Yinxiao Liu, Simon Tong, Jindong Chen, Lei Meng
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creative tasks such as storytelling and E-mail generation. However, as LLMs are primarily trained on final text results rather than intermediate revisions, it might be challenging for them to perform text rewriting tasks. Most studies in the rewriting tasks focus on a particular transformation type within the boundaries of single sentences. In this work, we develop new strategies for instruction tuning and reinforcement learning to better align LLMs for cross-sentence rewriting tasks using diverse wording and structures expressed through natural languages including 1) generating rewriting instruction data from Wiki edits and public corpus through instruction generation and chain-of-thought prompting; 2) collecting comparison data for reward model training through a new ranking function. To facilitate this research, we introduce OpenRewriteEval, a novel benchmark covers a wide variety of rewriting types expressed through natural language instructions. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines. The public repository is available on GitHub under Google Research (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/rewritelm).
Authors: Zhengbang Zhu, Minghuan Liu, Liyuan Mao, Bingyi Kang, Minkai Xu, Yong Yu, Stefano Ermon, Weinan Zhang
Diffusion model (DM), as a powerful generative model, recently achieved huge success in various scenarios including offline reinforcement learning, where the policy learns to conduct planning by generating trajectory in the online evaluation. However, despite the effectiveness shown for single-agent learning, it remains unclear how DMs can operate in multi-agent problems, where agents can hardly complete teamwork without good coordination by independently modeling each agent's trajectories. In this paper, we propose MADiff, a novel generative multi-agent learning framework to tackle this problem. MADiff is realized with an attention-based diffusion model to model the complex coordination among behaviors of multiple diffusion agents. To the best of our knowledge, MADiff is the first diffusion-based multi-agent offline RL framework, which behaves as both a decentralized policy and a centralized controller. During decentralized executions, MADiff simultaneously performs teammate modeling, and the centralized controller can also be applied in multi-agent trajectory predictions. Our experiments show the superior performance of MADiff compared to baseline algorithms in a wide range of multi-agent learning tasks, which emphasizes the effectiveness of MADiff in modeling complex multi-agent interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/zbzhu99/madiff.
Authors: Zhengxiang Shi, Xi Wang, Aldo Lipani
Session-based recommendation, which aims to predict the next item of users' interest as per an existing sequence interaction of items, has attracted growing applications of Contrastive Learning (CL) with improved user and item representations. However, these contrastive objectives: (1) serve a similar role as the cross-entropy loss while ignoring the item representation space optimisation; and (2) commonly require complicated modelling, including complex positive/negative sample constructions and extra data augmentation. In this work, we introduce Self-Contrastive Learning (SCL), which simplifies the application of CL and enhances the performance of state-of-the-art CL-based recommendation techniques. Specifically, SCL is formulated as an objective function that directly promotes a uniform distribution among item representations and efficiently replaces all the existing contrastive objective components of state-of-the-art models. Unlike previous works, SCL eliminates the need for any positive/negative sample construction or data augmentation, leading to enhanced interpretability of the item representation space and facilitating its extensibility to existing recommender systems. Through experiments on three benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that SCL consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art models with statistical significance. Notably, our experiments show that SCL improves the performance of two best-performing models by 8.2% and 9.5% in P@10 (Precision) and 9.9% and 11.2% in MRR@10 (Mean Reciprocal Rank) on average across different benchmarks. Additionally, our analysis elucidates the improvement in terms of alignment and uniformity of representations, as well as the effectiveness of SCL with a low computational cost.
Authors: Boxin Wang, Weixin Chen, Hengzhi Pei, Chulin Xie, Mintong Kang, Chenhui Zhang, Chejian Xu, Zidi Xiong, Ritik Dutta, Rylan Schaeffer, Sang T. Truong, Simran Arora, Mantas Mazeika, Dan Hendrycks, Zinan Lin, Yu Cheng, Sanmi Koyejo, Dawn Song, Bo Li
Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in their capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications such as healthcare and finance -- where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives -- including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially because GPT-4 follows (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/; our dataset can be previewed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AI-Secure/DecodingTrust; a concise version of this work is at https://openreview.net/pdf?id=kaHpo8OZw2.
Authors: Guy Azran, Mohamad H. Danesh, Stefano V. Albrecht, Sarah Keren
Recent studies show that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents tend to overfit to the task on which they were trained and fail to adapt to minor environment changes. To expedite learning when transferring to unseen tasks, we propose a novel approach to representing the current task using reward machines (RMs), state machine abstractions that induce subtasks based on the current task's rewards and dynamics. Our method provides agents with symbolic representations of optimal transitions from their current abstract state and rewards them for achieving these transitions. These representations are shared across tasks, allowing agents to exploit knowledge of previously encountered symbols and transitions, thus enhancing transfer. Empirical results show that our representations improve sample efficiency and few-shot transfer in a variety of domains.
Authors: Xiaopeng Li, Shasha Li, Shezheng Song, Jing Yang, Jun Ma, Jie Yu
Model editing techniques modify a minor proportion of knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) at a relatively low cost, which have demonstrated notable success. Existing methods assume Transformer Layer (TL) hidden states are values of key-value memories of the Feed-Forward Network (FFN). They usually optimize the TL hidden states to memorize target knowledge and use it to update the weights of the FFN in LLMs. However, the information flow of TL hidden states comes from three parts: Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA), FFN, and residual connections. Existing methods neglect the fact that the TL hidden states contains information not specifically required for FFN. Consequently, the performance of model editing decreases. To achieve more precise model editing, we analyze hidden states of MHSA and FFN, finding that MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns. This implies that MHSA weights do not require updating when new knowledge is introduced. Based on above findings, we introduce PMET, which simultaneously optimizes Transformer Component (TC, namely MHSA and FFN) hidden states, while only using the optimized TC hidden states of FFN to precisely update FFN weights. Our experiments demonstrate that PMET exhibits state-of-the-art performance on both the COUNTERFACT and zsRE datasets. Our ablation experiments substantiate the effectiveness of our enhancements, further reinforcing the finding that the MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns and indicating its storage of a small amount of factual knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/xpq-tech/PMET.
Authors: Ian Arawjo, Chelse Swoopes, Priyan Vaithilingam, Martin Wattenberg, Elena Glassman
Evaluating outputs of large language models (LLMs) is challenging, requiring making -- and making sense of -- many responses. Yet tools that go beyond basic prompting tend to require knowledge of programming APIs, focus on narrow domains, or are closed-source. We present ChainForge, an open-source visual toolkit for prompt engineering and on-demand hypothesis testing of text generation LLMs. ChainForge provides a graphical interface for comparison of responses across models and prompt variations. Our system was designed to support three tasks: model selection, prompt template design, and hypothesis testing (e.g., auditing). We released ChainForge early in its development and iterated on its design with academics and online users. Through in-lab and interview studies, we find that a range of people could use ChainForge to investigate hypotheses that matter to them, including in real-world settings. We identify three modes of prompt engineering and LLM hypothesis testing: opportunistic exploration, limited evaluation, and iterative refinement.
Authors: Mahyar Abedi, Ibrahem Alshybani, Muhammad Rubayat Bin Shahadat, Michael S. Murillo
In the rapidly evolving landscape of education, digital technologies have repeatedly disrupted traditional pedagogical methods. This paper explores the latest of these disruptions: the potential integration of large language models (LLMs) and chatbots into graduate engineering education. We begin by tracing historical and technological disruptions to provide context and then introduce key terms such as machine learning and deep learning and the underlying mechanisms of recent advancements, namely attention/transformer models and graphics processing units. The heart of our investigation lies in the application of an LLM-based chatbot in a graduate fluid mechanics course. We developed a question bank from the course material and assessed the chatbot's ability to provide accurate, insightful responses. The results are encouraging, demonstrating not only the bot's ability to effectively answer complex questions but also the potential advantages of chatbot usage in the classroom, such as the promotion of self-paced learning, the provision of instantaneous feedback, and the reduction of instructors' workload. The study also examines the transformative effect of intelligent prompting on enhancing the chatbot's performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate how powerful plugins like Wolfram Alpha for mathematical problem-solving and code interpretation can significantly extend the chatbot's capabilities, transforming it into a comprehensive educational tool. While acknowledging the challenges and ethical implications surrounding the use of such AI models in education, we advocate for a balanced approach. The use of LLMs and chatbots in graduate education can be greatly beneficial but requires ongoing evaluation and adaptation to ensure ethical and efficient use.
Authors: Colin Sullivan, Mo Tiwari, Sebastian Thrun
Decision trees remain one of the most popular machine learning models today, largely due to their out-of-the-box performance and interpretability. In this work, we present a Bayesian approach to decision tree induction via maximum a posteriori inference of a posterior distribution over trees. We first demonstrate a connection between maximum a posteriori inference of decision trees and AND/OR search. Using this connection, we propose an AND/OR search algorithm, dubbed MAPTree, which is able to recover the maximum a posteriori tree. Lastly, we demonstrate the empirical performance of the maximum a posteriori tree both on synthetic data and in real world settings. On 16 real world datasets, MAPTree either outperforms baselines or demonstrates comparable performance but with much smaller trees. On a synthetic dataset, MAPTree also demonstrates greater robustness to noise and better generalization than existing approaches. Finally, MAPTree recovers the maxiumum a posteriori tree faster than existing sampling approaches and, in contrast with those algorithms, is able to provide a certificate of optimality. The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/ThrunGroup/maptree.
Authors: Jiaoyan Chen, Hang Dong, Janna Hastings, Ernesto Jiménez-Ruiz, Vanessa López, Pierre Monnin, Catia Pesquita, Petr Škoda, Valentina Tamma
The term life sciences refers to the disciplines that study living organisms and life processes, and include chemistry, biology, medicine, and a range of other related disciplines. Research efforts in life sciences are heavily data-driven, as they produce and consume vast amounts of scientific data, much of which is intrinsically relational and graph-structured.
The volume of data and the complexity of scientific concepts and relations referred to therein promote the application of advanced knowledge-driven technologies for managing and interpreting data, with the ultimate aim to advance scientific discovery.
In this survey and position paper, we discuss recent developments and advances in the use of graph-based technologies in life sciences and set out a vision for how these technologies will impact these fields into the future. We focus on three broad topics: the construction and management of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), the use of KGs and associated technologies in the discovery of new knowledge, and the use of KGs in artificial intelligence applications to support explanations (explainable AI). We select a few exemplary use cases for each topic, discuss the challenges and open research questions within these topics, and conclude with a perspective and outlook that summarizes the overarching challenges and their potential solutions as a guide for future research.
Authors: Johannes Aspman, Georgios Korpas, Jakub Marecek
There has been a great deal of recent interest in binarized neural networks, especially because of their explainability. At the same time, automatic differentiation algorithms such as backpropagation fail for binarized neural networks, which limits their applicability. By reformulating the problem of training binarized neural networks as a subadditive dual of a mixed-integer program, we show that binarized neural networks admit a tame representation. This, in turn, makes it possible to use the framework of Bolte et al. for implicit differentiation, which offers the possibility for practical implementation of backpropagation in the context of binarized neural networks.
This approach could also be used for a broader class of mixed-integer programs, beyond the training of binarized neural networks, as encountered in symbolic approaches to AI and beyond.
Authors: Qi Heng Ho, Tyler Becker, Benjamin Kraske, Zakariya Laouar, Martin S. Feather, Federico Rossi, Morteza Lahijanian, Zachary N. Sunberg
In many problems, it is desirable to optimize an objective function while imposing constraints on some other objectives. A Constrained Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (C-POMDP) allows modeling of such problems under transition uncertainty and partial observability. Typically, the constraints in C-POMDPs enforce a threshold on expected cumulative costs starting from an initial state distribution. In this work, we first show that optimal C-POMDP policies may violate Bellman's principle of optimality and thus may exhibit unintuitive behaviors, which can be undesirable for some (e.g., safety critical) applications. Additionally, online re-planning with C-POMDPs is often ineffective due to the inconsistency resulting from the violation of Bellman's principle of optimality. To address these drawbacks, we introduce a new formulation: the Recursively-Constrained POMDP (RC-POMDP), that imposes additional history-dependent cost constraints on the C-POMDP. We show that, unlike C-POMDPs, RC-POMDPs always have deterministic optimal policies, and that optimal policies obey Bellman's principle of optimality. We also present a point-based dynamic programming algorithm that synthesizes admissible near-optimal policies for RC-POMDPs. Evaluations on a set of benchmark problems demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm and show that policies for RC-POMDPs produce more desirable behaviors than policies for C-POMDPs.
Authors: Yi Yang, Qingwen Zhang, Ci Li, Daniel Simões Marta, Nazre Batool, John Folkesson
The evolution of autonomous driving has made remarkable advancements in recent years, evolving into a tangible reality. However, a human-centric large-scale adoption hinges on meeting a variety of multifaceted requirements. To ensure that the autonomous system meets the user's intent, it is essential to accurately discern and interpret user commands, especially in complex or emergency situations. To this end, we propose to leverage the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer system requirements from in-cabin users' commands. Through a series of experiments that include different LLM models and prompt designs, we explore the few-shot multivariate binary classification accuracy of system requirements from natural language textual commands. We confirm the general ability of LLMs to understand and reason about prompts but underline that their effectiveness is conditioned on the quality of both the LLM model and the design of appropriate sequential prompts. Code and models are public with the link \url{https://github.com/KTH-RPL/DriveCmd_LLM}.
Authors: Zeyu Gao, Hao Wang, Yuchen Zhou, Wenyu Zhu, Chao Zhang
As software becomes increasingly complex and prone to vulnerabilities, automated vulnerability detection is critically important, yet challenging. Given the significant successes of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there is growing anticipation of their efficacy in vulnerability detection. However, a quantitative understanding of their potential in vulnerability detection is still missing. To bridge this gap, we introduce a comprehensive vulnerability benchmark VulBench. This benchmark aggregates high-quality data from a wide range of CTF (Capture-the-Flag) challenges and real-world applications, with annotations for each vulnerable function detailing the vulnerability type and its root cause. Through our experiments encompassing 16 LLMs and 6 state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning-based models and static analyzers, we find that several LLMs outperform traditional deep learning approaches in vulnerability detection, revealing an untapped potential in LLMs. This work contributes to the understanding and utilization of LLMs for enhanced software security.
Authors: Yuhao Yang, Lianghao Xia, Da Luo, Kangyi Lin, Chao Huang
GNN-based recommenders have excelled in modeling intricate user-item interactions through multi-hop message passing. However, existing methods often overlook the dynamic nature of evolving user-item interactions, which impedes the adaption to changing user preferences and distribution shifts in newly arriving data. Thus, their scalability and performances in real-world dynamic environments are limited. In this study, we propose GraphPro, a framework that incorporates parameter-efficient and dynamic graph pre-training with prompt learning. This novel combination empowers GNNs to effectively capture both long-term user preferences and short-term behavior dynamics, enabling the delivery of accurate and timely recommendations. Our GraphPro framework addresses the challenge of evolving user preferences by seamlessly integrating a temporal prompt mechanism and a graph-structural prompt learning mechanism into the pre-trained GNN model. The temporal prompt mechanism encodes time information on user-item interaction, allowing the model to naturally capture temporal context, while the graph-structural prompt learning mechanism enables the transfer of pre-trained knowledge to adapt to behavior dynamics without the need for continuous incremental training. We further bring in a dynamic evaluation setting for recommendation to mimic real-world dynamic scenarios and bridge the offline-online gap to a better level. Our extensive experiments including a large-scale industrial deployment showcases the lightweight plug-in scalability of our GraphPro when integrated with various state-of-the-art recommenders, emphasizing the advantages of GraphPro in terms of effectiveness, robustness and efficiency.
Authors: Mohammad Abu-Haifa, Bara'a Etawi, Huthaifa Alkhatatbeh, Ayman Ababneh
This research paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of three artificial 10 intelligence chatbots: Bing, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, in addressing standardized test questions. Graduate record examination, known as GRE, serves as a case study in this paper, encompassing both quantitative reasoning and verbal skills. A total of 137 quantitative reasoning questions, featuring diverse styles and 157 verbal questions categorized into varying levels of difficulty (easy, medium, and hard) were administered to assess the chatbots' capabilities. This paper provides a detailed examination of the results and their implications for the utilization of artificial intelligence in standardized test preparation by presenting the performance of each chatbot across various skills and styles tested in the exam. Additionally, this paper explores the proficiency of artificial intelligence in addressing image-based questions and illustrates the uncertainty level of each chatbot. The results reveal varying degrees of success across the chatbots, demonstrating the influence of model sophistication and training data. GPT-4 emerged as the most proficient, especially in complex language understanding tasks, highlighting the evolution of artificial intelligence in language comprehension and its ability to pass the exam with a high score.
Authors: Shiyu Xia, Miaosen Zhang, Xu Yang, Ruiming Chen, Haokun Chen, Xin Geng
We propose expanding the shared Transformer module to produce and initialize Transformers of varying depths, enabling adaptation to diverse resource constraints. Drawing an analogy to genetic expansibility, we term such module as learngene. To identify the expansion mechanism, we delve into the relationship between the layer's position and its corresponding weight value, and find that linear function appropriately approximates this relationship. Building on this insight, we present Transformer as Linear Expansion of learnGene (TLEG), a novel approach for flexibly producing and initializing Transformers of diverse depths. Specifically, to learn learngene, we firstly construct an auxiliary Transformer linearly expanded from learngene, after which we train it through employing soft distillation. Subsequently, we can produce and initialize Transformers of varying depths via linearly expanding the well-trained learngene, thereby supporting diverse downstream scenarios. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K demonstrate that TLEG achieves comparable or better performance in contrast to many individual models trained from scratch, while reducing around 2x training cost. When transferring to several downstream classification datasets, TLEG surpasses existing initialization methods by a large margin (e.g., +6.87% on iNat 2019 and +7.66% on CIFAR-100). Under the situation where we need to produce models of varying depths adapting for different resource constraints, TLEG achieves comparable results while reducing around 19x parameters stored to initialize these models and around 5x pre-training costs, in contrast to the pre-training and fine-tuning approach. When transferring a fixed set of parameters to initialize different models, TLEG presents better flexibility and competitive performance while reducing around 2.9x parameters stored to initialize, compared to the pre-training approach.
Authors: Xiangyu Yin, Sihao Wu, Jiaxu Liu, Meng Fang, Xingyu Zhao, Xiaowei Huang, Wenjie Ruan
While Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) has gained attention, its algorithmic robustness against adversarial perturbations remains unexplored. The attacks and robust representation training methods that are designed for traditional RL become less effective when applied to GCRL. To address this challenge, we first propose the Semi-Contrastive Representation attack, a novel approach inspired by the adversarial contrastive attack. Unlike existing attacks in RL, it only necessitates information from the policy function and can be seamlessly implemented during deployment. Then, to mitigate the vulnerability of existing GCRL algorithms, we introduce Adversarial Representation Tactics, which combines Semi-Contrastive Adversarial Augmentation with Sensitivity-Aware Regularizer to improve the adversarial robustness of the underlying RL agent against various types of perturbations. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our attack and defence methods across multiple state-of-the-art GCRL algorithms. Our tool ReRoGCRL is available at https://github.com/TrustAI/ReRoGCRL.
Authors: Zhenduo Zhang, Bo-Wen Zhang, Guang Liu
Current text-to-image editing models often encounter challenges with smoothly manipulating multiple attributes using a single instruction. Taking inspiration from the Chain-of-Thought prompting technique utilized in language models, we present an innovative concept known as Chain-of-Instruct Editing (CoIE), which enhances the capabilities of these models through step-by-step editing using a series of instructions. In particular, in the context of face manipulation, we leverage the contextual learning abilities of a pretrained Large Language Model (LLM), such as GPT-4, to generate a sequence of instructions from the original input, utilizing a purpose-designed 1-shot template. To further improve the precision of each editing step, we conduct fine-tuning on the editing models using our self-constructed instruction-guided face editing dataset, Instruct-CelebA. And additionally, we incorporate a super-resolution module to mitigate the adverse effects of editability and quality degradation. Experimental results across various challenging cases confirm the significant boost in multi-attribute facial image manipulation using chain-of-instruct editing. This is evident in enhanced editing success rates, measured by CLIPSim and Coverage metrics, improved by 17.86% and 85.45% respectively, and heightened controllability indicated by Preserve L1 and Quality metrics, improved by 11.58% and 4.93% respectively.
Authors: Hao Wu, Shilong Wang, Yuxuan Liang, Zhengyang Zhou, Wei Huang, Wei Xiong, Kun Wang
Efficiently modeling spatio-temporal (ST) physical processes and observations presents a challenging problem for the deep learning community. Many recent studies have concentrated on meticulously reconciling various advantages, leading to designed models that are neither simple nor practical. To address this issue, this paper presents a systematic study on existing shortcomings faced by off-the-shelf models, including lack of local fidelity, poor prediction performance over long time-steps,low scalability, and inefficiency. To systematically address the aforementioned problems, we propose an EarthFarseer, a concise framework that combines parallel local convolutions and global Fourier-based transformer architectures, enabling dynamically capture the local-global spatial interactions and dependencies. EarthFarseer also incorporates a multi-scale fully convolutional and Fourier architectures to efficiently and effectively capture the temporal evolution. Our proposal demonstrates strong adaptability across various tasks and datasets, with fast convergence and better local fidelity in long time-steps predictions. Extensive experiments and visualizations over eight human society physical and natural physical datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of EarthFarseer. We release our code at https://github.com/easylearningscores/EarthFarseer.
Authors: Rongwu Xu, Brian S. Lin, Shujian Yang, Tianqi Zhang, Weiyan Shi, Tianwei Zhang, Zhixuan Fang, Wei Xu, Han Qiu
Large Language Models (LLMs) encapsulate vast amounts of knowledge but still remain vulnerable to external misinformation. Existing research mainly studied this susceptibility behavior in a single-turn setting. However, belief can change during a multi-turn conversation, especially a persuasive one. Therefore, in this study, we delve into LLMs' susceptibility to persuasive conversations, particularly on factual questions that they can answer correctly. We first curate the Farm (i.e., Fact to Misinform) dataset, which contains factual questions paired with systematically generated persuasive misinformation. Then, we develop a testing framework to track LLMs' belief changes in a persuasive dialogue. Through extensive experiments, we find that LLMs' correct beliefs on factual knowledge can be easily manipulated by various persuasive strategies.
Authors: Feng Lu, Wei Li, Yifei Sun, Cheng Song, Yufei Ren, Albert Y. Zomaya
Artificial intelligence (AI) has immense potential in time series prediction, but most explainable tools have limited capabilities in providing a systematic understanding of important features over time. These tools typically rely on evaluating a single time point, overlook the time ordering of inputs, and neglect the time-sensitive nature of time series applications. These factors make it difficult for users, particularly those without domain knowledge, to comprehend AI model decisions and obtain meaningful explanations. We propose CGS-Mask, a post-hoc and model-agnostic cellular genetic strip mask-based saliency approach to address these challenges. CGS-Mask uses consecutive time steps as a cohesive entity to evaluate the impact of features on the final prediction, providing binary and sustained feature importance scores over time. Our algorithm optimizes the mask population iteratively to obtain the optimal mask in a reasonable time. We evaluated CGS-Mask on synthetic and real-world datasets, and it outperformed state-of-the-art methods in elucidating the importance of features over time. According to our pilot user study via a questionnaire survey, CGS-Mask is the most effective approach in presenting easily understandable time series prediction results, enabling users to comprehend the decision-making process of AI models with ease.
Authors: Nimesh Agrawal, Anuj Kumar Sirohi, Jayadeva, Sandeep Kumar
Ensuring fairness in Recommendation Systems (RSs) across demographic groups is critical due to the increased integration of RSs in applications such as personalized healthcare, finance, and e-commerce. Graph-based RSs play a crucial role in capturing intricate higher-order interactions among entities. However, integrating these graph models into the Federated Learning (FL) paradigm with fairness constraints poses formidable challenges as this requires access to the entire interaction graph and sensitive user information (such as gender, age, etc.) at the central server. This paper addresses the pervasive issue of inherent bias within RSs for different demographic groups without compromising the privacy of sensitive user attributes in FL environment with the graph-based model. To address the group bias, we propose F2PGNN (Fair Federated Personalized Graph Neural Network), a novel framework that leverages the power of Personalized Graph Neural Network (GNN) coupled with fairness considerations. Additionally, we use differential privacy techniques to fortify privacy protection. Experimental evaluation on three publicly available datasets showcases the efficacy of F2PGNN in mitigating group unfairness by 47% - 99% compared to the state-of-the-art while preserving privacy and maintaining the utility. The results validate the significance of our framework in achieving equitable and personalized recommendations using GNN within the FL landscape.
Authors: Andrew B. Kahng, Robert R. Nerem, Yusu Wang, Chien-Yi Yang
Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in the use of neural networks to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Nevertheless, designing the "right" neural model that can effectively handle a given optimization problem can be challenging, and often there is no theoretical understanding or justification of the resulting neural model. In this paper, we focus on the rectilinear Steiner minimum tree (RSMT) problem, which is of critical importance in IC layout design and as a result has attracted numerous heuristic approaches in the VLSI literature. Our contributions are two-fold. On the methodology front, we propose NN-Steiner, which is a novel mixed neural-algorithmic framework for computing RSMTs that leverages the celebrated PTAS algorithmic framework of Arora to solve this problem (and other geometric optimization problems). Our NN-Steiner replaces key algorithmic components within Arora's PTAS by suitable neural components. In particular, NN-Steiner only needs four neural network (NN) components that are called repeatedly within an algorithmic framework. Crucially, each of the four NN components is only of bounded size independent of input size, and thus easy to train. Furthermore, as the NN component is learning a generic algorithmic step, once learned, the resulting mixed neural-algorithmic framework generalizes to much larger instances not seen in training. Our NN-Steiner, to our best knowledge, is the first neural architecture of bounded size that has capacity to approximately solve RSMT (and variants). On the empirical front, we show how NN-Steiner can be implemented and demonstrate the effectiveness of our resulting approach, especially in terms of generalization, by comparing with state-of-the-art methods (both neural and non-neural based).
Authors: Jiachen Zhou, Peizhuo Lv, Yibing Lan, Guozhu Meng, Kai Chen, Hualong Ma
Dataset sanitization is a widely adopted proactive defense against poisoning-based backdoor attacks, aimed at filtering out and removing poisoned samples from training datasets. However, existing methods have shown limited efficacy in countering the ever-evolving trigger functions, and often leading to considerable degradation of benign accuracy. In this paper, we propose DataElixir, a novel sanitization approach tailored to purify poisoned datasets. We leverage diffusion models to eliminate trigger features and restore benign features, thereby turning the poisoned samples into benign ones. Specifically, with multiple iterations of the forward and reverse process, we extract intermediary images and their predicted labels for each sample in the original dataset. Then, we identify anomalous samples in terms of the presence of label transition of the intermediary images, detect the target label by quantifying distribution discrepancy, select their purified images considering pixel and feature distance, and determine their ground-truth labels by training a benign model. Experiments conducted on 9 popular attacks demonstrates that DataElixir effectively mitigates various complex attacks while exerting minimal impact on benign accuracy, surpassing the performance of baseline defense methods.
Authors: Dillon Z. Chen, Sylvie Thiébaux, Felipe Trevizan
We present three novel graph representations of planning tasks suitable for learning domain-independent heuristics using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to guide search. In particular, to mitigate the issues caused by large grounded GNNs we present the first method for learning domain-independent heuristics with only the lifted representation of a planning task. We also provide a theoretical analysis of the expressiveness of our models, showing that some are more powerful than STRIPS-HGN, the only other existing model for learning domain-independent heuristics. Our experiments show that our heuristics generalise to much larger problems than those in the training set, vastly surpassing STRIPS-HGN heuristics.
Authors: Yijiong Yu
Although LLMs continue to iterate and improve, most open-source models still have a context window of no more than 4k, limiting their ability to handle long-context problems. Most existing open-source models for long-context chat still lack satisfactory accuracy. To address this issue, I approach it from the perspective of training data and theoretically prove that training the capability to handle long contexts requires "effective" rather than "long" data. Based on this, I propose using the "original text paraphrase" task, and successfully extend the context window of the existing model to 32k by a low-cost and effective method, achieving extremely high accuracy in multi-document-QA and surpassing all existing open-source models of the same scale. The model and training data have been open-sourced on HuggingFace(https://huggingface.co/yuyijiong/Qwen-14b-chat-yarn-32k) and WiseModel(https://wisemodel.cn/models/yuyijiong/Qwen-14b-chat-yarn-32k).
Authors: Jiankai Sun, Chuanyang Zheng, Enze Xie, Zhengying Liu, Ruihang Chu, Jianing Qiu, Jiaqi Xu, Mingyu Ding, Hongyang Li, Mengzhe Geng, Yue Wu, Wenhai Wang, Junsong Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Xiaozhe Ren, Jie Fu, Junxian He, Wu Yuan, Qi Liu, Xihui Liu, Yu Li, Hao Dong, Yu Cheng, Ming Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng, Jifeng Dai, Ping Luo, Jingdong Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Xipeng Qiu, Yike Guo, Hui Xiong, Qun Liu, Zhenguo Li
Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.
Authors: Christian Muise, Sheila A. McIlraith, J. Christopher Beck
Fully Observable Non-Deterministic (FOND) planning is a variant of classical symbolic planning in which actions are nondeterministic, with an action's outcome known only upon execution. It is a popular planning paradigm with applications ranging from robot planning to dialogue-agent design and reactive synthesis. Over the last 20 years, a number of approaches to FOND planning have emerged. In this work, we establish a new state of the art, following in the footsteps of some of the most powerful FOND planners to date. Our planner, PR2, decisively outperforms the four leading FOND planners, at times by a large margin, in 17 of 18 domains that represent a comprehensive benchmark suite. Ablation studies demonstrate the impact of various techniques we introduce, with the largest improvement coming from our novel FOND-aware heuristic.
Authors: Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin, Michelle S. Lam, Ranjay Krishna, Daniel S. Weld, Jeffrey Heer
LLM chains enable complex tasks by decomposing work into a sequence of sub-tasks. Crowdsourcing workflows similarly decompose complex tasks into smaller tasks for human crowdworkers. Chains address LLM errors analogously to the way crowdsourcing workflows address human error. To characterize opportunities for LLM chaining, we survey 107 papers across the crowdsourcing and chaining literature to construct a design space for chain development. The design space connects an LLM designer's objectives to strategies they can use to achieve those objectives, and tactics to implement each strategy. To explore how techniques from crowdsourcing may apply to chaining, we adapt crowdsourcing workflows to implement LLM chains across three case studies: creating a taxonomy, shortening text, and writing a short story. From the design space and our case studies, we identify which techniques transfer from crowdsourcing to LLM chaining and raise implications for future research and development.
Authors: Yacine Izza, Kuldeep S. Meel, Joao Marques-Silva
Formal abductive explanations offer crucial guarantees of rigor and so are of interest in high-stakes uses of machine learning (ML). One drawback of abductive explanations is explanation size, justified by the cognitive limits of human decision-makers. Probabilistic abductive explanations (PAXps) address this limitation, but their theoretical and practical complexity makes their exact computation most often unrealistic. This paper proposes novel efficient algorithms for the computation of locally-minimal PXAps, which offer high-quality approximations of PXAps in practice. The experimental results demonstrate the practical efficiency of the proposed algorithms.
Authors: Marcel Boersma, Krishna Manoorkar, Alessandra Palmigiano, Mattia Panettiere, Apostolos Tzimoulis, Nachoem Wijnberg
Categorization is one of the basic tasks in machine learning and data analysis. Building on formal concept analysis (FCA), the starting point of the present work is that different ways to categorize a given set of objects exist, which depend on the choice of the sets of features used to classify them, and different such sets of features may yield better or worse categorizations, relative to the task at hand. In their turn, the (a priori) choice of a particular set of features over another might be subjective and express a certain epistemic stance (e.g. interests, relevance, preferences) of an agent or a group of agents, namely, their interrogative agenda. In the present paper, we represent interrogative agendas as sets of features, and explore and compare different ways to categorize objects w.r.t. different sets of features (agendas). We first develop a simple unsupervised FCA-based algorithm for outlier detection which uses categorizations arising from different agendas. We then present a supervised meta-learning algorithm to learn suitable (fuzzy) agendas for categorization as sets of features with different weights or masses. We combine this meta-learning algorithm with the unsupervised outlier detection algorithm to obtain a supervised outlier detection algorithm. We show that these algorithms perform at par with commonly used algorithms for outlier detection on commonly used datasets in outlier detection. These algorithms provide both local and global explanations of their results.
Authors: Federico Ceola, Lorenzo Natale, Niko Sünderhauf, Krishan Rana
Instructing a robot to complete an everyday task within our homes has been a long-standing challenge for robotics. While recent progress in language-conditioned imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning has demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, they are typically limited to short-horizon tasks -- not reflective of those a home robot would be expected to complete. While existing architectures have the potential to learn these desired behaviours, the lack of the necessary long-horizon, multi-step datasets for real robotic systems poses a significant challenge. To this end, we present the Long-Horizon Manipulation (LHManip) dataset comprising 200 episodes, demonstrating 20 different manipulation tasks via real robot teleoperation. The tasks entail multiple sub-tasks, including grasping, pushing, stacking and throwing objects in highly cluttered environments. Each task is paired with a natural language instruction and multi-camera viewpoints for point-cloud or NeRF reconstruction. In total, the dataset comprises 176,278 observation-action pairs which form part of the Open X-Embodiment dataset. The full LHManip dataset is made publicly available at https://github.com/fedeceola/LHManip.
Authors: Sichao Xiong, Yigit Ihlamur
This research introduces an innovative evaluation method for the "founder-idea" fit in early-stage startups, utilizing advanced large language model techniques to assess founders' profiles against their startup ideas to enhance decision-making. Embeddings, self-play, tree-of-thought, and critique-based refinement techniques show early promising results that each idea's success patterns are unique and they should be evaluated based on the context of the founder's background.
Authors: Ziyi Chen, Heyi Tao, Daqian Zuo, Jize Jiang, Jun Yang, Yuxiang Wei
We introduce Efficient Title Reranker via Broadcasting Query Encoder, a novel title reranking technique to achieve efficient title reranking 20x-40x faster than vanilla passage reranker. However, one of the challenges with the training of Efficient Title Reranker is the instability. Analyzing the issue, we found some very difficult ground truths might act as noisy labels causing accuracy to drop as well as some extreme values in model probability output causing nan. To address these issues, we introduce the Sigmoid Trick, a novel technique that reduces the gradient update of both cases resulting in better retrieval efficacy. Experiments showed the effectiveness of ETR and sigmoid trick as we achieved four state-of-the-art positions on the kilt knowledge benchmark.
Authors: Chaoyou Fu, Renrui Zhang, Zihan Wang, Yubo Huang, Zhengye Zhang, Longtian Qiu, Gaoxiang Ye, Yunhang Shen, Mengdan Zhang, Peixian Chen, Sirui Zhao, Shaohui Lin, Deqiang Jiang, Di Yin, Peng Gao, Ke Li, Hongsheng Li, Xing Sun
The surge of interest towards Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), e.g., GPT-4V(ision) from OpenAI, has marked a significant trend in both academia and industry. They endow Large Language Models (LLMs) with powerful capabilities in visual understanding, enabling them to tackle diverse multi-modal tasks. Very recently, Google released Gemini, its newest and most capable MLLM built from the ground up for multi-modality. In light of the superior reasoning capabilities, can Gemini challenge GPT-4V's leading position in multi-modal learning? In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration of Gemini Pro's visual understanding proficiency, which comprehensively covers four domains: fundamental perception, advanced cognition, challenging vision tasks, and various expert capacities. We compare Gemini Pro with the state-of-the-art GPT-4V to evaluate its upper limits, along with the latest open-sourced MLLM, Sphinx, which reveals the gap between manual efforts and black-box systems. The qualitative samples indicate that, while GPT-4V and Gemini showcase different answering styles and preferences, they can exhibit comparable visual reasoning capabilities, and Sphinx still trails behind them concerning domain generalizability. Specifically, GPT-4V tends to elaborate detailed explanations and intermediate steps, and Gemini prefers to output a direct and concise answer. The quantitative evaluation on the popular MME benchmark also demonstrates the potential of Gemini to be a strong challenger to GPT-4V. Our early investigation of Gemini also observes some common issues of MLLMs, indicating that there still remains a considerable distance towards artificial general intelligence. Our project for tracking the progress of MLLM is released at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models.
Authors: Efi Papatheocharous, Harris Papadopoulos, Andreas S. Andreou
Software cost estimation is one of the prerequisite managerial activities carried out at the software development initiation stages and also repeated throughout the whole software life-cycle so that amendments to the total cost are made. In software cost estimation typically, a selection of project attributes is employed to produce effort estimations of the expected human resources to deliver a software product. However, choosing the appropriate project cost drivers in each case requires a lot of experience and knowledge on behalf of the project manager which can only be obtained through years of software engineering practice. A number of studies indicate that popular methods applied in the literature for software cost estimation, such as linear regression, are not robust enough and do not yield accurate predictions. Recently the dual variables Ridge Regression (RR) technique has been used for effort estimation yielding promising results. In this work we show that results may be further improved if an AI method is used to automatically select appropriate project cost drivers (inputs) for the technique. We propose a hybrid approach combining RR with a Genetic Algorithm, the latter evolving the subset of attributes for approximating effort more accurately. The proposed hybrid cost model has been applied on a widely known high-dimensional dataset of software project samples and the results obtained show that accuracy may be increased if redundant attributes are eliminated.
Authors: Efi Papatheocharous, Harris Papadopoulos, Andreas S. Andreou
Feature selection has been recently used in the area of software engineering for improving the accuracy and robustness of software cost models. The idea behind selecting the most informative subset of features from a pool of available cost drivers stems from the hypothesis that reducing the dimensionality of datasets will significantly minimise the complexity and time required to reach to an estimation using a particular modelling technique. This work investigates the appropriateness of attributes, obtained from empirical project databases and aims to reduce the cost drivers used while preserving performance. Finding suitable subset selections that may cater improved predictions may be considered as a pre-processing step of a particular technique employed for cost estimation (filter or wrapper) or an internal (embedded) step to minimise the fitting error. This paper compares nine relatively popular feature selection methods and uses the empirical values of selected attributes recorded in the ISBSG and Desharnais datasets to estimate software development effort.