Authors: Xiaoming Zhai, Matthew Nyaaba, Wenchao Ma
This study aimed to examine an assumption that generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools can overcome the cognitive intensity that humans suffer when solving problems. We compared the performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on 2019 NAEP science assessments with students by cognitive demands of the items. Fifty-four tasks were coded by experts using a two-dimensional cognitive load framework, including task cognitive complexity and dimensionality. ChatGPT and GPT-4 responses were scored using the scoring keys of NAEP. The analysis of the available data was based on the average student ability scores for students who answered each item correctly and the percentage of students who responded to individual items. Results showed that both ChatGPT and GPT-4 consistently outperformed most students who answered the NAEP science assessments. As the cognitive demand for NAEP tasks increases, statistically higher average student ability scores are required to correctly address the questions. This pattern was observed for students in grades 4, 8, and 12, respectively. However, ChatGPT and GPT-4 were not statistically sensitive to the increase in cognitive demands of the tasks, except for Grade 4. As the first study focusing on comparing GAI and K-12 students in problem-solving in science, this finding implies the need for changes to educational objectives to prepare students with competence to work with GAI tools in the future. Education ought to emphasize the cultivation of advanced cognitive skills rather than depending solely on tasks that demand cognitive intensity. This approach would foster critical thinking, analytical skills, and the application of knowledge in novel contexts. Findings also suggest the need for innovative assessment practices by moving away from cognitive intensity tasks toward creativity and analytical skills to avoid the negative effects of GAI on testing more efficiently.
Authors: Chaofan Pan, Xin Yang, Hao Wang, Wei Wei, Tianrui Li
Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) empowers RL agents with the ability to learn from a sequence of tasks, preserving previous knowledge and leveraging it to facilitate future learning. However, existing methods often focus on transferring low-level knowledge across similar tasks, which neglects the hierarchical structure of human cognitive control, resulting in insufficient knowledge transfer across diverse tasks. To enhance high-level knowledge transfer, we propose a novel framework named Hi-Core (Hierarchical knowledge transfer for Continual reinforcement learning), which is structured in two layers: 1) the high-level policy formulation which utilizes the powerful reasoning ability of the Large Language Model (LLM) to set goals and 2) the low-level policy learning through RL which is oriented by high-level goals. Moreover, the knowledge base (policy library) is constructed to store policies that can be retrieved for hierarchical knowledge transfer. Experiments conducted in MiniGrid have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hi-Core in handling diverse CRL tasks, outperforming popular baselines.
Authors: Min Wu, Weijun Li, Lina Yu, Wenqiang Li, Jingyi Liu, Yanjie Li, Meilan Hao
Symbolic regression aims to derive interpretable symbolic expressions from data in order to better understand and interpret data. %which plays an important role in knowledge discovery and interpretable machine learning.
In this study, a symbolic network called PruneSymNet is proposed for symbolic regression. This is a novel neural network whose activation function consists of common elementary functions and operators. The whole network is differentiable and can be trained by gradient descent method. Each subnetwork in the network corresponds to an expression, and our goal is to extract such subnetworks to get the desired symbolic expression.
Therefore, a greedy pruning algorithm is proposed to prune the network into a subnetwork while ensuring the accuracy of data fitting. The proposed greedy pruning algorithm preserves the edge with the least loss in each pruning, but greedy algorithm often can not get the optimal solution. In order to alleviate this problem, we combine beam search during pruning to obtain multiple candidate expressions each time, and finally select the expression with the smallest loss as the final result. It was tested on the public data set and compared with the current popular algorithms. The results showed that the proposed algorithm had better accuracy.
Authors: Jessica Hullman, Alex Kale, Jason Hartline
Decision-making with information displays is a key focus of research in areas like explainable AI, human-AI teaming, and data visualization. However, what constitutes a decision problem, and what is required for an experiment to be capable of concluding that human decisions are flawed in some way, remain open to speculation. We present a widely applicable definition of a decision problem synthesized from statistical decision theory and information economics. We argue that to attribute loss in human performance to forms of bias, an experiment must provide participants with the information that a rational agent would need to identify the normative decision. We evaluate the extent to which recent evaluations of decision-making from the literature on AI-assisted decisions achieve this criteria. We find that only 6 (17\%) of 35 studies that claim to identify biased behavior present participants with sufficient information to characterize their behavior as deviating from good decision-making. We motivate the value of studying well-defined decision problems by describing a characterization of performance losses they allow us to conceive. In contrast, the ambiguities of a poorly communicated decision problem preclude normative interpretation. We conclude with recommendations for practice.
Authors: Diwas Paudel, Tapas K. Das
Fast-charging hubs for electric vehicles will soon become part of the newly built infrastructure for transportation electrification across the world. These hubs are expected to host many DC fast-charging stations and will admit EVs only for charging. Like the gasoline refueling stations, fast-charging hubs in a neighborhood will dynamically vary their prices to compete for the same pool of EV owners. These hubs will interact with the electric power network by making purchase commitments for a significant part of their power needs in the day-ahead (DA) electricity market and meeting the difference from the real-time (RT) market. Hubs may have supplemental battery storage systems (BSS), which they will use for arbitrage. In this paper, we develop a two-step data-driven dynamic pricing methodology for hubs in price competition. We first obtain the DA commitment by solving a stochastic DA commitment model. Thereafter we obtain the hub pricing strategies by modeling the game as a competitive Markov decision process (CMDP) and solving it using a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) approach. We develop a numerical case study for a pricing game between two charging hubs. We solve the case study with our methodology by using combinations of two different DRL algorithms, DQN and SAC, and two different neural networks (NN) architectures, a feed-forward (FF) neural network, and a multi-head attention (MHA) neural network. We construct a measure of collusion (index) using the hub profits. A value of zero for this index indicates no collusion (perfect competition) and a value of one indicates full collusion (monopolistic behavior). Our results show that the collusion index varies approximately between 0.14 and 0.45 depending on the combinations of the algorithms and the architectures chosen by the hubs.
Authors: Louis Rosenberg, Gregg Willcox, Hans Schumann, Ganesh Mani
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is a natural phenomenon that enables biological groups to amplify their combined intellect by forming real-time systems. Artificial Swarm Intelligence (or Swarm AI) is a technology that enables networked human groups to amplify their combined intelligence by forming similar systems. In the past, swarm-based methods were constrained to narrowly defined tasks like probabilistic forecasting and multiple-choice decision making. A new technology called Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) was developed in 2023 that amplifies the decision-making accuracy of networked human groups through natural conversational deliberations. The current study evaluated the ability of real-time groups using a CSI platform to take a common IQ test known as Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM). First, a baseline group of participants took the Raven's IQ test by traditional survey. This group averaged 45.6% correct. Then, groups of approximately 35 individuals answered IQ test questions together using a CSI platform called Thinkscape. These groups averaged 80.5% correct. This places the CSI groups in the 97th percentile of IQ test-takers and corresponds to an effective IQ increase of 28 points (p<0.001). This is an encouraging result and suggests that CSI is a powerful method for enabling conversational collective intelligence in large, networked groups. In addition, because CSI is scalable across groups of potentially any size, this technology may provide a viable pathway to building a Collective Superintelligence.
Authors: Feng Qi, Mian Dai, Zixian Zheng, Chao Wang
This paper presents GeoDecoder, a dedicated multimodal model designed for processing geospatial information in maps. Built on the BeitGPT architecture, GeoDecoder incorporates specialized expert modules for image and text processing. On the image side, GeoDecoder utilizes GaoDe Amap as the underlying base map, which inherently encompasses essential details about road and building shapes, relative positions, and other attributes. Through the utilization of rendering techniques, the model seamlessly integrates external data and features such as symbol markers, drive trajectories, heatmaps, and user-defined markers, eliminating the need for extra feature engineering. The text module of GeoDecoder accepts various context texts and question prompts, generating text outputs in the style of GPT. Furthermore, the GPT-based model allows for the training and execution of multiple tasks within the same model in an end-to-end manner. To enhance map cognition and enable GeoDecoder to acquire knowledge about the distribution of geographic entities in Beijing, we devised eight fundamental geospatial tasks and conducted pretraining of the model using large-scale text-image samples. Subsequently, rapid fine-tuning was performed on three downstream tasks, resulting in significant performance improvements. The GeoDecoder model demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of map elements and their associated operations, enabling efficient and high-quality application of diverse geospatial tasks in different business scenarios.
Authors: Md Khairul Islam, Tyler Valentine, Timothy Joowon Sue, Ayush Karmacharya, Luke Neil Benham, Zhengguang Wang, Kingsley Kim, Judy Fox
Interpreting deep learning time series models is crucial in understanding the model's behavior and learning patterns from raw data for real-time decision-making. However, the complexity inherent in transformer-based time series models poses challenges in explaining the impact of individual features on predictions. In this study, we leverage recent local interpretation methods to interpret state-of-the-art time series models. To use real-world datasets, we collected three years of daily case data for 3,142 US counties. Firstly, we compare six transformer-based models and choose the best prediction model for COVID-19 infection. Using 13 input features from the last two weeks, we can predict the cases for the next two weeks. Secondly, we present an innovative way to evaluate the prediction sensitivity to 8 population age groups over highly dynamic multivariate infection data. Thirdly, we compare our proposed perturbation-based interpretation method with related work, including a total of eight local interpretation methods. Finally, we apply our framework to traffic and electricity datasets, demonstrating that our approach is generic and can be applied to other time-series domains.
Authors: Lizhen Zhu, James Z. Wang, Wonseuk Lee, Brad Wyble
Visual learning often occurs in a specific context, where an agent acquires skills through exploration and tracking of its location in a consistent environment. The historical spatial context of the agent provides a similarity signal for self-supervised contrastive learning. We present a unique approach, termed Environmental Spatial Similarity (ESS), that complements existing contrastive learning methods. Using images from simulated, photorealistic environments as an experimental setting, we demonstrate that ESS outperforms traditional instance discrimination approaches. Moreover, sampling additional data from the same environment substantially improves accuracy and provides new augmentations. ESS allows remarkable proficiency in room classification and spatial prediction tasks, especially in unfamiliar environments. This learning paradigm has the potential to enable rapid visual learning in agents operating in new environments with unique visual characteristics. Potentially transformative applications span from robotics to space exploration. Our proof of concept demonstrates improved efficiency over methods that rely on extensive, disconnected datasets.
Authors: Yeachan Park, Geonho Hwang, Wonyeol Lee, Sejun Park
The study of the expressive power of neural networks has investigated the fundamental limits of neural networks. Most existing results assume real-valued inputs and parameters as well as exact operations during the evaluation of neural networks. However, neural networks are typically executed on computers that can only represent a tiny subset of the reals and apply inexact operations. In this work, we analyze the expressive power of neural networks under a more realistic setup: when we use floating-point numbers and operations. Our first set of results assumes floating-point operations where the significand of a float is represented by finite bits but its exponent can take any integer value. Under this setup, we show that neural networks using a binary threshold unit or ReLU can memorize any finite input/output pairs and can approximate any continuous function within a small error. We also show similar results on memorization and universal approximation when floating-point operations use finite bits for both significand and exponent; these results are applicable to many popular floating-point formats such as those defined in the IEEE 754 standard (e.g., 32-bit single-precision format) and bfloat16.
Authors: Shengchao Liu, Weitao Du, Yanjing Li, Zhuoxinran Li, Vignesh Bhethanabotla, Nakul Rampal, Omar Yaghi, Christian Borgs, Anima Anandkumar, Hongyu Guo, Jennifer Chayes
In drug discovery, molecular dynamics (MD) simulation for protein-ligand binding provides a powerful tool for predicting binding affinities, estimating transport properties, and exploring pocket sites. There has been a long history of improving the efficiency of MD simulations through better numerical methods and, more recently, by augmenting them with machine learning (ML) methods. Yet, challenges remain, such as accurate modeling of extended-timescale simulations. To address this issue, we propose NeuralMD, the first ML surrogate that can facilitate numerical MD and provide accurate simulations of protein-ligand binding dynamics. We propose a principled approach that incorporates a novel physics-informed multi-grained group symmetric framework. Specifically, we propose (1) a BindingNet model that satisfies group symmetry using vector frames and captures the multi-level protein-ligand interactions, and (2) an augmented neural differential equation solver that learns the trajectory under Newtonian mechanics. For the experiment, we design ten single-trajectory and three multi-trajectory binding simulation tasks. We show the efficiency and effectiveness of NeuralMD, with a 2000$\times$ speedup over standard numerical MD simulation and outperforming all other ML approaches by up to 80\% under the stability metric. We further qualitatively show that NeuralMD reaches more stable binding predictions compared to other machine learning methods.
Authors: Chen Liu, Shibo He, Qihang Zhou, Shizhong Li, Wenchao Meng
Self-supervised methods have gained prominence in time series anomaly detection due to the scarcity of available annotations. Nevertheless, they typically demand extensive training data to acquire a generalizable representation map, which conflicts with scenarios of a few available samples, thereby limiting their performance. To overcome the limitation, we propose \textbf{AnomalyLLM}, a knowledge distillation-based time series anomaly detection approach where the student network is trained to mimic the features of the large language model (LLM)-based teacher network that is pretrained on large-scale datasets. During the testing phase, anomalies are detected when the discrepancy between the features of the teacher and student networks is large. To circumvent the student network from learning the teacher network's feature of anomalous samples, we devise two key strategies. 1) Prototypical signals are incorporated into the student network to consolidate the normal feature extraction. 2) We use synthetic anomalies to enlarge the representation gap between the two networks. AnomalyLLM demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on 15 datasets, improving accuracy by at least 14.5\% in the UCR dataset.
Authors: E. Wianto, H. Toba, M. Malinda, Chien-Hsu Chen
Maintaining a high quality of life through physical activities (PA) to prevent health decline is crucial. However, the relationship between individuals health status, PA preferences, and motion factors is complex. PA discussions consistently show a positive correlation with healthy aging experiences, but no explicit relation to specific types of musculoskeletal exercises. Taking advantage of the increasingly widespread existence of smartphones, especially in Indonesia, this research utilizes embedded sensors for Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Based on 25 participants data, performing nine types of selected motion, this study has successfully identified important sensor attributes that play important roles in the right and left hands for muscle strength motions as the basis for developing machine learning models with the LSTM algorithm.
Authors: Zhenliang Zhang, Zeyu Zhang, Ziyuan Jiao, Yao Su, Hangxin Liu, Wei Wang, Song-Chun Zhu
Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized human cognitive abilities and facilitated the development of new AI entities capable of interacting with humans in both physical and virtual environments. Despite the existence of virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality for several years, integrating these technical fields remains a formidable challenge due to their disparate application directions. The advent of AI agents, capable of autonomous perception and action, further compounds this issue by exposing the limitations of traditional human-centered research approaches. It is imperative to establish a comprehensive framework that accommodates the dual perceptual centers of humans and AI agents in both physical and virtual worlds. In this paper, we introduce the symmetrical reality framework, which offers a unified representation encompassing various forms of physical-virtual amalgamations. This framework enables researchers to better comprehend how AI agents can collaborate with humans and how distinct technical pathways of physical-virtual integration can be consolidated from a broader perspective. We then delve into the coexistence of humans and AI, demonstrating a prototype system that exemplifies the operation of symmetrical reality systems for specific tasks, such as pouring water. Subsequently, we propose an instance of an AI-driven active assistance service that illustrates the potential applications of symmetrical reality. This paper aims to offer beneficial perspectives and guidance for researchers and practitioners in different fields, thus contributing to the ongoing research about human-AI coexistence in both physical and virtual environments.
Authors: Zackary Okun Dunivin
Qualitative coding, or content analysis, extracts meaning from text to discern quantitative patterns across a corpus of texts. Recently, advances in the interpretive abilities of large language models (LLMs) offer potential for automating the coding process (applying category labels to texts), thereby enabling human researchers to concentrate on more creative research aspects, while delegating these interpretive tasks to AI. Our case study comprises a set of socio-historical codes on dense, paragraph-long passages representative of a humanistic study. We show that GPT-4 is capable of human-equivalent interpretations, whereas GPT-3.5 is not. Compared to our human-derived gold standard, GPT-4 delivers excellent intercoder reliability (Cohen's $\kappa \geq 0.79$) for 3 of 9 codes, and substantial reliability ($\kappa \geq 0.6$) for 8 of 9 codes. In contrast, GPT-3.5 greatly underperforms for all codes ($mean(\kappa) = 0.34$; $max(\kappa) = 0.55$). Importantly, we find that coding fidelity improves considerably when the LLM is prompted to give rationale justifying its coding decisions (chain-of-thought reasoning). We present these and other findings along with a set of best practices for adapting traditional codebooks for LLMs. Our results indicate that for certain codebooks, state-of-the-art LLMs are already adept at large-scale content analysis. Furthermore, they suggest the next generation of models will likely render AI coding a viable option for a majority of codebooks.
Authors: Sheng Yu, Narjes Nourzad, Randye J. Semple, Yixue Zhao, Emily Zhou, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the urgency for effective and accessible mental health interventions in people's daily lives. Mobile Health (mHealth) solutions, such as AI Chatbots and Mindfulness Apps, have gained traction as they expand beyond traditional clinical settings to support daily life. However, the effectiveness of current mHealth solutions is impeded by the lack of context-awareness, personalization, and modularity to foster their reusability. This paper introduces CAREForMe, a contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) recommendation framework for mental health. Designed with context-awareness, personalization, and modularity at its core, CAREForMe harnesses mobile sensing and integrates online learning algorithms with user clustering capability to deliver timely, personalized recommendations. With its modular design, CAREForMe serves as both a customizable recommendation framework to guide future research, and a collaborative platform to facilitate interdisciplinary contributions in mHealth research. We showcase CAREForMe's versatility through its implementation across various platforms (e.g., Discord, Telegram) and its customization to diverse recommendation features.
Authors: Jiachen Xi, Alfredo Garcia, Petar Momcilovic
Several successful reinforcement learning algorithms make use of regularization to promote multi-modal policies that exhibit enhanced exploration and robustness. With functional approximation, the convergence properties of some of these algorithms (e.g. soft Q-learning) are not well understood. In this paper, we consider a single-loop algorithm for minimizing the projected Bellman error with finite time convergence guarantees in the case of linear function approximation. The algorithm operates on two scales: a slower scale for updating the target network of the state-action values, and a faster scale for approximating the Bellman backups in the subspace of the span of basis vectors. We show that, under certain assumptions, the proposed algorithm converges to a stationary point in the presence of Markovian noise. In addition, we provide a performance guarantee for the policies derived from the proposed algorithm.
Authors: Zahra Kharazian, Tony Lindgren, Sindri Magnússon, Olof Steinert, Oskar Andersson Reyna
This paper presents a description of a real-world, multivariate time series dataset collected from an anonymized engine component (called Component X) of a fleet of trucks from SCANIA, Sweden. This dataset includes diverse variables capturing detailed operational data, repair records, and specifications of trucks while maintaining confidentiality by anonymization. It is well-suited for a range of machine learning applications, such as classification, regression, survival analysis, and anomaly detection, particularly when applied to predictive maintenance scenarios. The large population size and variety of features in the format of histograms and numerical counters, along with the inclusion of temporal information, make this real-world dataset unique in the field. The objective of releasing this dataset is to give a broad range of researchers the possibility of working with real-world data from an internationally well-known company and introduce a standard benchmark to the predictive maintenance field, fostering reproducible research.
Authors: Amin Kamali, Verena Kantere, Calisto Zuzarte, Vincent Corvinelli
Query optimizers in relational database management systems (RDBMSs) search for execution plans expected to be optimal for a given queries. They use parameter estimates, often inaccurate, and make assumptions that may not hold in practice. Consequently, they may select execution plans that are suboptimal at runtime, when these estimates and assumptions are not valid, which may result in poor query performance. Therefore, query optimizers do not sufficiently support robust query optimization. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning (ML) to improve efficiency of data systems and reduce their maintenance overheads, with promising results obtained in the area of query optimization in particular. In this paper, inspired by these advancements, and based on several years of experience of IBM Db2 in this journey, we propose Robust Optimization of Queries, (Roq), a holistic framework that enables robust query optimization based on a risk-aware learning approach. Roq includes a novel formalization of the notion of robustness in the context of query optimization and a principled approach for its quantification and measurement based on approximate probabilistic ML. It also includes novel strategies and algorithms for query plan evaluation and selection. Roq also includes a novel learned cost model that is designed to predict query execution cost and the associated risks and performs query optimization accordingly. We demonstrate experimentally that Roq provides significant improvements to robust query optimization compared to the state-of-the-art.
Authors: Abdullateef I. Almudaifer, Tobias O`Leary, Whitney Covington, JaMor Hairston, Zachary Deitch, Ankit Anand, Caleb M. Carroll, Estera Crisan, William Bradford, Lauren Walter, Eaton Ellen, Sue S. Feldman, John D. Osborne
Background: The semantics of entities extracted from a clinical text can be dramatically altered by modifiers, including entity negation, uncertainty, conditionality, severity, and subject. Existing models for determining modifiers of clinical entities involve regular expression or features weights that are trained independently for each modifier.
Methods: We develop and evaluate a multi-task transformer architecture design where modifiers are learned and predicted jointly using the publicly available SemEval 2015 Task 14 corpus and a new Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) data set that contains modifiers shared with SemEval as well as novel modifiers specific for OUD. We evaluate the effectiveness of our multi-task learning approach versus previously published systems and assess the feasibility of transfer learning for clinical entity modifiers when only a portion of clinical modifiers are shared.
Results: Our approach achieved state-of-the-art results on the ShARe corpus from SemEval 2015 Task 14, showing an increase of 1.1% on weighted accuracy, 1.7% on unweighted accuracy, and 10% on micro F1 scores.
Conclusions: We show that learned weights from our shared model can be effectively transferred to a new partially matched data set, validating the use of transfer learning for clinical text modifiers
Authors: Tirth Kiranbhai Vyas
We have described a novel approach for training tabular data using the TabTransformer model with self-supervised learning. Traditional machine learning models for tabular data, such as GBDT are being widely used though our paper examines the effectiveness of the TabTransformer which is a Transformer based model optimised specifically for tabular data. The TabTransformer captures intricate relationships and dependencies among features in tabular data by leveraging the self-attention mechanism of Transformers. We have used a self-supervised learning approach in this study, where the TabTransformer learns from unlabelled data by creating surrogate supervised tasks, eliminating the need for the labelled data. The aim is to find the most effective TabTransformer model representation of categorical and numerical features. To address the challenges faced during the construction of various input settings into the Transformers. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is also been conducted to examine performance of the TabTransformer model against baseline models such as MLP and supervised TabTransformer.
The research has presented with a novel approach by creating various variants of TabTransformer model namely, Binned-TT, Vanilla-MLP-TT, MLP- based-TT which has helped to increase the effective capturing of the underlying relationship between various features of the tabular dataset by constructing optimal inputs. And further we have employed a self-supervised learning approach in the form of a masking-based unsupervised setting for tabular data. The findings shed light on the best way to represent categorical and numerical features, emphasizing the TabTransormer performance when compared to established machine learning models and other self-supervised learning methods.
Authors: Masaru Isonuma, Ivan Titov
In order to enhance the performance of language models while mitigating the risks of generating harmful content, it is crucial to identify which training dataset affects the model's outputs. Ideally, we can measure the influence of each dataset by removing it from training; however, it is prohibitively expensive to retrain a model multiple times. This paper presents UnTrac, which estimates the influence of a training dataset by unlearning it from the trained model. UnTrac is extremely simple; each training dataset is unlearned by gradient ascent, and we evaluate how much the model's predictions change after unlearning. We empirically examine if our methods can assess the influence of pretraining datasets on generating toxic, biased, and untruthful content. Experimental results demonstrate that our method estimates their influence much more accurately than existing methods while requiring neither excessive memory space nor multiple model checkpoints.
Authors: Barış Yıldırım, Murat Kurt
This paper presents a plugin that adds a representation of homogeneous and heterogeneous, optically thick, translucent materials on the Blender 3D modeling tool. The working principle of this plugin is based on a combination of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based subsurface scattering method (GenSSS). The proposed plugin has been implemented using Mitsuba renderer, which is an open source rendering software. The proposed plugin has been validated on measured subsurface scattering data. It's shown that the proposed plugin visualizes homogeneous and heterogeneous subsurface scattering effects, accurately, compactly and computationally efficiently.
Authors: Haleema Sheraz, Stefan C. Kremer, Joshua August Skorburg, Graham Taylor, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Kyle Boerstler
In response to the pressing challenge of kidney allocation, characterized by growing demands for organs, this research sets out to develop a data-driven solution to this problem, which also incorporates stakeholder values. The primary objective of this study is to create a method for learning both individual and group-level preferences pertaining to kidney allocations. Drawing upon data from the 'Pairwise Kidney Patient Online Survey.' Leveraging two distinct datasets and evaluating across three levels - Individual, Group and Stability - we employ machine learning classifiers assessed through several metrics. The Individual level model predicts individual participant preferences, the Group level model aggregates preferences across participants, and the Stability level model, an extension of the Group level, evaluates the stability of these preferences over time. By incorporating stakeholder preferences into the kidney allocation process, we aspire to advance the ethical dimensions of organ transplantation, contributing to more transparent and equitable practices while promoting the integration of moral values into algorithmic decision-making.
Authors: Minbyul Jeong, Jiwoong Sohn, Mujeen Sung, Jaewoo Kang
Recent proprietary large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have achieved a milestone in tackling diverse challenges in the biomedical domain, ranging from multiple-choice questions to long-form generations. To address challenges that still cannot be handled with the encoded knowledge of LLMs, various retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods have been developed by searching documents from the knowledge corpus and appending them unconditionally or selectively to the input of LLMs for generation. However, when applying existing methods to different domain-specific problems, poor generalization becomes apparent, leading to fetching incorrect documents or making inaccurate judgments. In this paper, we introduce Self-BioRAG, a framework reliable for biomedical text that specializes in generating explanations, retrieving domain-specific documents, and self-reflecting generated responses. We utilize 84k filtered biomedical instruction sets to train Self-BioRAG that can assess its generated explanations with customized reflective tokens. Our work proves that domain-specific components, such as a retriever, domain-related document corpus, and instruction sets are necessary for adhering to domain-related instructions. Using three major medical question-answering benchmark datasets, experimental results of Self-BioRAG demonstrate significant performance gains by achieving a 7.2% absolute improvement on average over the state-of-the-art open-foundation model with a parameter size of 7B or less. Overall, we analyze that Self-BioRAG finds the clues in the question, retrieves relevant documents if needed, and understands how to answer with information from retrieved documents and encoded knowledge as a medical expert does. We release our data and code for training our framework components and model weights (7B and 13B) to enhance capabilities in biomedical and clinical domains.
Authors: Zhihao Wang, Yiqun Xie, Zhili Li, Xiaowei Jia, Zhe Jiang, Aolin Jia, Shuo Xu
Fairness-awareness has emerged as an essential building block for the responsible use of artificial intelligence in real applications. In many cases, inequity in performance is due to the change in distribution over different regions. While techniques have been developed to improve the transferability of fairness, a solution to the problem is not always feasible with no samples from the new regions, which is a bottleneck for pure data-driven attempts. Fortunately, physics-based mechanistic models have been studied for many problems with major social impacts. We propose SimFair, a physics-guided fairness-aware learning framework, which bridges the data limitation by integrating physical-rule-based simulation and inverse modeling into the training design. Using temperature prediction as an example, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SimFair in fairness preservation.
Authors: Zhicheng Lin
Generative artificial intelligence tools like large language models are rapidly transforming academic research and real world applications. However, discussions on ethical guidelines for generative AI in science remain fragmented, underscoring the urgent need for consensus based standards. This paper offers an initial framework by developing analyses and mitigation strategies across five key themes: understanding model limitations regarding truthfulness and bias; respecting privacy, confidentiality, and copyright; avoiding plagiarism and policy violations when incorporating model output; ensuring applications provide overall benefit; and using AI transparently and reproducibly. Common scenarios are outlined to demonstrate potential ethical violations. We argue that global consensus coupled with professional training and reasonable enforcement are critical to promoting the benefits of AI while safeguarding research integrity.
Authors: Foozhan Ataiefard, Walid Ahmed, Habib Hajimolahoseini, Saina Asani, Farnoosh Javadi, Mohammad Hassanpour, Omar Mohamed Awad, Austin Wen, Kangling Liu, Yang Liu
Vision transformers are known to be more computationally and data-intensive than CNN models. These transformer models such as ViT, require all the input image tokens to learn the relationship among them. However, many of these tokens are not informative and may contain irrelevant information such as unrelated background or unimportant scenery. These tokens are overlooked by the multi-head self-attention (MHSA), resulting in many redundant and unnecessary computations in MHSA and the feed-forward network (FFN). In this work, we propose a method to optimize the amount of unnecessary interactions between unimportant tokens by separating and sending them through a different low-cost computational path. Our method does not add any parameters to the ViT model and aims to find the best trade-off between training throughput and achieving a 0% loss in the Top-1 accuracy of the final model. Our experimental results on training ViT-small from scratch show that SkipViT is capable of effectively dropping 55% of the tokens while gaining more than 13% training throughput and maintaining classification accuracy at the level of the baseline model on Huawei Ascend910A.
Authors: Haocong Rao, Chunyan Miao
Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an important emerging research area that triggers great interest in the pattern recognition community. With distinctive advantages for many application scenarios, a great diversity of 3D skeleton based person re-identification (SRID) methods have been proposed in recent years, effectively addressing prominent problems in skeleton modeling and feature learning. Despite recent advances, to the best of our knowledge, little effort has been made to comprehensively summarize these studies and their challenges. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by providing a systematic survey on current SRID approaches, model designs, challenges, and future directions. Specifically, we first formulate the SRID problem, and propose a taxonomy of SRID research with a summary of benchmark datasets, commonly-used model architectures, and an analytical review of different methods' characteristics. Then, we elaborate on the design principles of SRID models from multiple aspects to offer key insights for model improvement. Finally, we identify critical challenges confronting current studies and discuss several promising directions for future research of SRID.
Authors: Azmine Toushik Wasi, MD Shafikul Islam, Adipto Raihan Akib
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained traction across different domains such as transportation, bio-informatics, language processing, and computer vision. However, there is a noticeable absence of research on applying GNNs to supply chain networks. Supply chain networks are inherently graph-like in structure, making them prime candidates for applying GNN methodologies. This opens up a world of possibilities for optimizing, predicting, and solving even the most complex supply chain problems. A major setback in this approach lies in the absence of real-world benchmark datasets to facilitate the research and resolution of supply chain problems using GNNs. To address the issue, we present a real-world benchmark dataset for temporal tasks, obtained from one of the leading FMCG companies in Bangladesh, focusing on supply chain planning for production purposes. The dataset includes temporal data as node features to enable sales predictions, production planning, and the identification of factory issues. By utilizing this dataset, researchers can employ GNNs to address numerous supply chain problems, thereby advancing the field of supply chain analytics and planning. Source: https://github.com/CIOL-SUST/SupplyGraph
Authors: Yutao Feng, Xiang Feng, Yintong Shang, Ying Jiang, Chang Yu, Zeshun Zong, Tianjia Shao, Hongzhi Wu, Kun Zhou, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yin Yang
We demonstrate the feasibility of integrating physics-based animations of solids and fluids with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to create novel effects in virtual scenes reconstructed using 3DGS. Leveraging the coherence of the Gaussian splatting and position-based dynamics (PBD) in the underlying representation, we manage rendering, view synthesis, and the dynamics of solids and fluids in a cohesive manner. Similar to Gaussian shader, we enhance each Gaussian kernel with an added normal, aligning the kernel's orientation with the surface normal to refine the PBD simulation. This approach effectively eliminates spiky noises that arise from rotational deformation in solids. It also allows us to integrate physically based rendering to augment the dynamic surface reflections on fluids. Consequently, our framework is capable of realistically reproducing surface highlights on dynamic fluids and facilitating interactions between scene objects and fluids from new views. For more information, please visit our project page at \url{https://amysteriouscat.github.io/GaussianSplashing/}.
Authors: Haesun Joung, Kyogu Lee
Music auto-tagging is crucial for enhancing music discovery and recommendation. Existing models in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) struggle with real-world noise such as environmental and speech sounds in multimedia content. This study proposes a method inspired by speech-related tasks to enhance music auto-tagging performance in noisy settings. The approach integrates Domain Adversarial Training (DAT) into the music domain, enabling robust music representations that withstand noise. Unlike previous research, this approach involves an additional pretraining phase for the domain classifier, to avoid performance degradation in the subsequent phase. Adding various synthesized noisy music data improves the model's generalization across different noise levels. The proposed architecture demonstrates enhanced performance in music auto-tagging by effectively utilizing unlabeled noisy music data. Additional experiments with supplementary unlabeled data further improves the model's performance, underscoring its robust generalization capabilities and broad applicability.
Authors: Ping Guo, Fei Liu, Xi Lin, Qingchuan Zhao, Qingfu Zhang
In the rapidly evolving field of machine learning, adversarial attacks present a significant challenge to model robustness and security. Decision-based attacks, which only require feedback on the decision of a model rather than detailed probabilities or scores, are particularly insidious and difficult to defend against. This work introduces L-AutoDA (Large Language Model-based Automated Decision-based Adversarial Attacks), a novel approach leveraging the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the design of these attacks. By iteratively interacting with LLMs in an evolutionary framework, L-AutoDA automatically designs competitive attack algorithms efficiently without much human effort. We demonstrate the efficacy of L-AutoDA on CIFAR-10 dataset, showing significant improvements over baseline methods in both success rate and computational efficiency. Our findings underscore the potential of language models as tools for adversarial attack generation and highlight new avenues for the development of robust AI systems.
Authors: Zenghui Lin, Xintong Liu, Nan Wang, Ruichen Li, Qingao Liu, Jingying Ma, Liwei Wang, Yan Wang, Shenda Hong
Long-term fetal heart rate (FHR) monitoring during the antepartum period, increasingly popularized by electronic FHR monitoring, represents a growing approach in FHR monitoring. This kind of continuous monitoring, in contrast to the short-term one, collects an extended period of fetal heart data. This offers a more comprehensive understanding of fetus's conditions. However, the interpretation of long-term antenatal fetal heart monitoring is still in its early stages, lacking corresponding clinical standards. Furthermore, the substantial amount of data generated by continuous monitoring imposes a significant burden on clinical work when analyzed manually. To address above challenges, this study develops an automatic analysis system named LARA (Long-term Antepartum Risk Analysis system) for continuous FHR monitoring, combining deep learning and information fusion methods. LARA's core is a well-established convolutional neural network (CNN) model. It processes long-term FHR data as input and generates a Risk Distribution Map (RDM) and Risk Index (RI) as the analysis results. We evaluate LARA on inner test dataset, the performance metrics are as follows: AUC 0.872, accuracy 0.816, specificity 0.811, sensitivity 0.806, precision 0.271, and F1 score 0.415. In our study, we observe that long-term FHR monitoring data with higher RI is more likely to result in adverse outcomes (p=0.0021). In conclusion, this study introduces LARA, the first automated analysis system for long-term FHR monitoring, initiating the further explorations into its clinical value in the future.
Authors: Seungcheol Park, Jaehyeon Choi, Sojin Lee, U Kang
How can we compress language models without sacrificing accuracy? The number of compression algorithms for language models is rapidly growing to benefit from remarkable advances of recent language models without side effects due to the gigantic size of language models, such as increased carbon emissions and expensive maintenance fees. While numerous compression algorithms have shown remarkable progress in compressing language models, it ironically becomes challenging to capture emerging trends and identify the fundamental concepts underlying them due to the excessive number of algorithms. In this paper, we survey and summarize diverse compression algorithms including pruning, quantization, knowledge distillation, low-rank approximation, parameter sharing, and efficient architecture design. We not only summarize the overall trend of diverse compression algorithms but also select representative algorithms and provide in-depth analyses of them. We discuss the value of each category of compression algorithms, and the desired properties of low-cost compression algorithms which have a significant impact due to the emergence of large language models. Finally, we introduce promising future research topics based on our survey results.
Authors: Xiaobao Wu, Thong Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu
Topic models have been prevalent for decades to discover latent topics and infer topic proportions of documents in an unsupervised fashion. They have been widely used in various applications like text analysis and context recommendation. Recently, the rise of neural networks has facilitated the emergence of a new research field -- Neural Topic Models (NTMs). Different from conventional topic models, NTMs directly optimize parameters without requiring model-specific derivations. This endows NTMs with better scalability and flexibility, resulting in significant research attention and plentiful new methods and applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on neural topic models concerning methods, applications, and challenges. Specifically, we systematically organize current NTM methods according to their network structures and introduce the NTMs for various scenarios like short texts and cross-lingual documents. We also discuss a wide range of popular applications built on NTMs. Finally, we highlight the challenges confronted by NTMs to inspire future research.
Authors: Ziyang Guo, Yifan Wu, Jason Hartline, Jessica Hullman
Humans frequently make decisions with the aid of artificially intelligent (AI) systems. A common pattern is for the AI to recommend an action to the human who retains control over the final decision. Researchers have identified ensuring that a human has appropriate reliance on an AI as a critical component of achieving complementary performance. We argue that the current definition of appropriate reliance used in such research lacks formal statistical grounding and can lead to contradictions. We propose a formal definition of reliance, based on statistical decision theory, which separates the concepts of reliance as the probability the decision-maker follows the AI's prediction from challenges a human may face in differentiating the signals and forming accurate beliefs about the situation. Our definition gives rise to a framework that can be used to guide the design and interpretation of studies on human-AI complementarity and reliance. Using recent AI-advised decision making studies from literature, we demonstrate how our framework can be used to separate the loss due to mis-reliance from the loss due to not accurately differentiating the signals. We evaluate these losses by comparing to a baseline and a benchmark for complementary performance defined by the expected payoff achieved by a rational agent facing the same decision task as the behavioral agents.
Authors: Ahmet Yusuf Alan, Enis Karaarslan, Omer Aydin
There exist challenges in learning and understanding religions as the presence of complexity and depth of religious doctrines and teachings. Chatbots as question-answering systems can help in solving these challenges. LLM chatbots use NLP techniques to establish connections between topics and accurately respond to complex questions. These capabilities make it perfect to be used in enlightenment on religion as a question answering chatbot. However, LLMs also have a tendency to generate false information, known as hallucination. The responses of the chatbots can include content that insults personal religious beliefs, interfaith conflicts, and controversial or sensitive topics. It needs to avoid such cases without promoting hate speech or offending certain groups of people or their beliefs. This study uses a vector database-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach to enhance the accuracy and transparency of LLMs. Our question-answering system is called as "MufassirQAS". We created a vector database with several open-access books that include Turkish context. These are Turkish translations, and interpretations on Islam. We worked on creating system prompts with care, ensuring they provide instructions that prevent harmful, offensive, or disrespectful responses. We also tested the MufassirQAS and ChatGPT with sensitive questions. We got better performance with our system. Study and enhancements are still in progress. Results and future works are given.
Authors: Guadalupe Ortiz, Juan Boubeta-Puig, Javier Criado, David Corral-Plaza, Alfonso Garcia-de-Prado, Inmaculada Medina-Bulo, Luis Iribarne
Major advances in telecommunications and the Internet of Things have given rise to numerous smart city scenarios in which smart services are provided. What was once a dream for the future has now become reality. However, the need to provide these smart services quickly, efficiently, in an interoperable manner and in real time is a cutting-edge technological challenge. Although some software architectures offer solutions in this area, these are often limited in terms of reusability and maintenance by independent modules, involving the need for system downtime when maintaining or evolving, as well as by a lack of standards in terms of the interoperability of their interface. In this paper, we propose a fully reusable microservice architecture, standardized through the use of the Web of things paradigm, and with high efficiency in real-time data processing, supported by complex event processing techniques. To illustrate the proposal, we present a fully reusable implementation of the microservices necessary for the deployment of the architecture in the field of air quality monitoring and alerting in smart ports. The performance evaluation of this architecture shows excellent results.
Authors: Zibin Dong, Jianye Hao, Yifu Yuan, Fei Ni, Yitian Wang, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng
Diffusion planning has been recognized as an effective decision-making paradigm in various domains. The high-quality conditional generation capability of long-horizon trajectories makes it a promising research direction. However, existing diffusion planning methods suffer from low decision-making frequencies because of the expensive iterative sampling cost. To address this issue, we introduce DiffuserLite, a fast and lightweight diffusion planning framework. DiffuserLite employs a planning refinement process (PRP) to generate coarse-to-fine-grained trajectories, which significantly reduces the modeling of redundant information and leads to notable increases in decision-making frequency. Our experimental results demonstrate that DiffuserLite incurs only $0.88\%$ of the runtime cost compared to previous frameworks, achieves an average decision-making frequency of $122$Hz, and reaches state-of-the-art performance on D4RL benchmarks. In addition, our clean DiffuserLite framework can serve as a flexible plugin to enhance decision frequency in other diffusion planning algorithms, providing a structural design reference for future works. More details and visualizations are available at [project website](https://diffuserlite.github.io/).
Authors: Arnab Maiti, Palash Dey
A directed graph where there is exactly one edge between every pair of vertices is called a {\em tournament}. Finding the "best" set of vertices of a tournament is a well studied problem in social choice theory. A {\em tournament solution} takes a tournament as input and outputs a subset of vertices of the input tournament. However, in many applications, for example, choosing the best set of drugs from a given set of drugs, the edges of the tournament are given only implicitly and knowing the orientation of an edge is costly. In such scenarios, we would like to know the best set of vertices (according to some tournament solution) by "querying" as few edges as possible. We, in this paper, precisely study this problem for commonly used tournament solutions: given an oracle access to the edges of a tournament T, find $f(T)$ by querying as few edges as possible, for a tournament solution f. We first show that the set of Condorcet non-losers in a tournament can be found by querying $2n-\lfloor \log n \rfloor -2$ edges only and this is tight in the sense that every algorithm for finding the set of Condorcet non-losers needs to query at least $2n-\lfloor \log n \rfloor -2$ edges in the worst case, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the input tournament. We then move on to study other popular tournament solutions and show that any algorithm for finding the Copeland set, the Slater set, the Markov set, the bipartisan set, the uncovered set, the Banks set, and the top cycle must query $\Omega(n^2)$ edges in the worst case. On the positive side, we are able to circumvent our strong query complexity lower bound results by proving that, if the size of the top cycle of the input tournament is at most $k$, then we can find all the tournament solutions mentioned above by querying $O(nk + \frac{n\log n}{\log(1-\frac{1}{k})})$ edges only.
Authors: Paolo Liberatore
Logical forgetting is \np-complete even in the simple case of propositional Horn formulae, and may exponentially increase their size. A way to forget is to replace each variable to forget with the body of each clause whose head is the variable. It takes polynomial time in the single-head case: each variable is at most the head of a clause. Some formulae are not single-head but can be made so to simplify forgetting. They are single-head equivalent. The first contribution of this article is the study of a semantical characterization of single-head equivalence. Two necessary conditions are given. They are sufficient when the formula is inequivalent: it makes two sets of variables equivalent only if they are also equivalent to their intersection. All acyclic formulae are inequivalent. The second contribution of this article is an incomplete algorithm for turning a formula single-head. In case of success, forgetting becomes possible in polynomial time and produces a polynomial-size formula, none of which is otherwise guaranteed. The algorithm is complete on inequivalent formulae.
Authors: Daesoo Lee, Erlend Aune
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has had great success in both computer vision. Most of the current mainstream computer vision SSL frameworks are based on Siamese network architecture. These approaches often rely on cleverly crafted loss functions and training setups to avoid feature collapse. In this study, we evaluate if those computer-vision SSL frameworks are also effective on a different modality (\textit{i.e.,} time series). The effectiveness is experimented and evaluated on the UCR and UEA archives, and we show that the computer vision SSL frameworks can be effective even for time series. In addition, we propose a new method that improves on the recently proposed VICReg method. Our method improves on a \textit{covariance} term proposed in VICReg, and in addition we augment the head of the architecture by an iterative normalization layer that accelerates the convergence of the model.
Authors: Vikram Singh, Vikram Singh
The enormous diversity of life forms thriving in drastically different environmental milieus involves a complex interplay among constituent proteins interacting with each other. However, the organizational principles characterizing the evolution of protein interaction networks (PINs) across the tree of life are largely unknown. Here we study 4,738 PINs belonging to 16 phyla to discover phyla-specific architectural features and examine if there are some evolutionary constraints imposed on the networks' topologies. We utilized positional information of a network's nodes by normalizing the frequencies of automorphism orbits appearing in graphlets of sizes 2-5. We report that orbit usage profiles (OUPs) of networks belonging to the three domains of life are contrastingly different not only at the domain level but also at the scale of phyla. Integrating the information related to protein families, domains, subcellular location, gene ontology, and pathways, our results indicate that wiring patterns of PINs in different phyla are not randomly generated rather they are shaped by evolutionary constraints imposed on them. There exist subtle but substantial variations in the wiring patterns of PINs that enable OUPs to differentiate among different superfamilies. A deep neural network was trained on differentially expressed orbits resulting in a prediction accuracy of 85%.
Authors: Andreas A. Haupt, Phillip J.K. Christoffersen, Mehul Damani, Dylan Hadfield-Menell
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a powerful tool for training autonomous agents acting independently in a common environment. However, it can lead to sub-optimal behavior when individual incentives and group incentives diverge. Humans are remarkably capable at solving these social dilemmas. It is an open problem in MARL to replicate such cooperative behaviors in selfish agents. In this work, we draw upon the idea of formal contracting from economics to overcome diverging incentives between agents in MARL. We propose an augmentation to a Markov game where agents voluntarily agree to binding transfers of reward, under pre-specified conditions. Our contributions are theoretical and empirical. First, we show that this augmentation makes all subgame-perfect equilibria of all Fully Observable Markov Games exhibit socially optimal behavior, given a sufficiently rich space of contracts. Next, we show that for general contract spaces, and even under partial observability, richer contract spaces lead to higher welfare. Hence, contract space design solves an exploration-exploitation tradeoff, sidestepping incentive issues. We complement our theoretical analysis with experiments. Issues of exploration in the contracting augmentation are mitigated using a training methodology inspired by multi-objective reinforcement learning: Multi-Objective Contract Augmentation Learning (MOCA). We test our methodology in static, single-move games, as well as dynamic domains that simulate traffic, pollution management and common pool resource management.
Authors: Peizhuo Lv, Pan Li, Shenchen Zhu, Shengzhi Zhang, Kai Chen, Ruigang Liang, Chang Yue, Fan Xiang, Yuling Cai, Hualong Ma, Yingjun Zhang, Guozhu Meng
Recent years have witnessed tremendous success in Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), which has been widely utilized to facilitate various downstream tasks in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) domains. However, attackers may steal such SSL models and commercialize them for profit, making it crucial to verify the ownership of the SSL models. Most existing ownership protection solutions (e.g., backdoor-based watermarks) are designed for supervised learning models and cannot be used directly since they require that the models' downstream tasks and target labels be known and available during watermark embedding, which is not always possible in the domain of SSL. To address such a problem, especially when downstream tasks are diverse and unknown during watermark embedding, we propose a novel black-box watermarking solution, named SSL-WM, for verifying the ownership of SSL models. SSL-WM maps watermarked inputs of the protected encoders into an invariant representation space, which causes any downstream classifier to produce expected behavior, thus allowing the detection of embedded watermarks. We evaluate SSL-WM on numerous tasks, such as CV and NLP, using different SSL models both contrastive-based and generative-based. Experimental results demonstrate that SSL-WM can effectively verify the ownership of stolen SSL models in various downstream tasks. Furthermore, SSL-WM is robust against model fine-tuning, pruning, and input preprocessing attacks. Lastly, SSL-WM can also evade detection from evaluated watermark detection approaches, demonstrating its promising application in protecting the ownership of SSL models.
Authors: Yanda Chen, Chen Zhao, Zhou Yu, Kathleen McKeown, He He
In-context learning (ICL) suffers from oversensitivity to the prompt, making it unreliable in real-world scenarios. We study the sensitivity of ICL with respect to multiple perturbation types. First, we find that label bias obscures the true sensitivity, and therefore prior work may have significantly underestimated ICL sensitivity. Second, we observe a strong negative correlation between ICL sensitivity and accuracy: predictions sensitive to perturbations are less likely to be correct. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textsc{SenSel}, a few-shot selective prediction method that abstains from sensitive predictions. Experiments on ten classification datasets show that \textsc{SenSel} consistently outperforms two commonly used confidence-based and entropy-based baselines on abstention decisions.
Authors: Christian Antić
Analogical proportions are expressions of the form ``$a$ is to $b$ what $c$ is to $d$'' at the core of analogical reasoning. This paper contributes to the mathematical foundations of analogical proportions in the axiomatic tradition as initiated by Yves Lepage two decades ago. For this we introduce proportoids as sets endowed with a 4-ary analogical proportion relation $a:b::c:d$ satisfying a suitable set of axioms and study different kinds of proportion-preserving mappings and relations and their properties.
Authors: Hanieh Naderi, Chinthaka Dinesh, Ivan V. Bajic, Shohreh Kasaei
Adversarial attacks pose serious challenges for deep neural network (DNN)-based analysis of various input signals. In the case of 3D point clouds, methods have been developed to identify points that play a key role in network decision, and these become crucial in generating existing adversarial attacks. For example, a saliency map approach is a popular method for identifying adversarial drop points, whose removal would significantly impact the network decision. Generally, methods for identifying adversarial points rely on the access to the DNN model itself to determine which points are critically important for the model's decision. This paper aims to provide a novel viewpoint on this problem, where adversarial points can be predicted without access to the target DNN model, which is referred to as a ``no-box'' attack. To this end, we define 14 point cloud features and use multiple linear regression to examine whether these features can be used for adversarial point prediction, and which combination of features is best suited for this purpose. Experiments show that a suitable combination of features is able to predict adversarial points of four different networks -- PointNet, PointNet++, DGCNN, and PointConv -- significantly better than a random guess and comparable to white-box attacks. Additionally, we show that no-box attack is transferable to unseen models. The results also provide further insight into DNNs for point cloud classification, by showing which features play key roles in their decision-making process.
Authors: Burcu Küçükoğlu, Walraaf Borkent, Bodo Rueckauer, Nasir Ahmad, Umut Güçlü, Marcel van Gerven
Advances in reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on massive compute resources and remain notoriously sample inefficient. In contrast, the human brain is able to efficiently learn effective control strategies using limited resources. This raises the question whether insights from neuroscience can be used to improve current RL methods. Predictive processing is a popular theoretical framework which maintains that the human brain is actively seeking to minimize surprise. We show that recurrent neural networks which predict their own sensory states can be leveraged to minimise surprise, yielding substantial gains in cumulative reward. Specifically, we present the Predictive Processing Proximal Policy Optimization (P4O) agent; an actor-critic reinforcement learning agent that applies predictive processing to a recurrent variant of the PPO algorithm by integrating a world model in its hidden state. Even without hyperparameter tuning, P4O significantly outperforms a baseline recurrent variant of the PPO algorithm on multiple Atari games using a single GPU. It also outperforms other state-of-the-art agents given the same wall-clock time and exceeds human gamer performance on multiple games including Seaquest, which is a particularly challenging environment in the Atari domain. Altogether, our work underscores how insights from the field of neuroscience may support the development of more capable and efficient artificial agents.
Authors: Han Zhou, Xingchen Wan, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen
Large pretrained language models are widely used in downstream NLP tasks via task-specific fine-tuning, but such procedures can be costly. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have achieved strong task performance while updating much fewer parameters than full model fine-tuning (FFT). However, it is non-trivial to make informed design choices on the PEFT configurations, such as their architecture, the number of tunable parameters, and even the layers in which the PEFT modules are inserted. Consequently, it is highly likely that the current, manually designed configurations are suboptimal in terms of their performance-efficiency trade-off. Inspired by advances in neural architecture search, we propose AutoPEFT for automatic PEFT configuration selection: we first design an expressive configuration search space with multiple representative PEFT modules as building blocks. Using multi-objective Bayesian optimisation in a low-cost setup, we then discover a Pareto-optimal set of configurations with strong performance-cost trade-offs across different numbers of parameters that are also highly transferable across different tasks. Empirically, on GLUE and SuperGLUE tasks, we show that AutoPEFT-discovered configurations significantly outperform existing PEFT methods and are on par or better than FFT without incurring substantial training efficiency costs.
Authors: Guoyang Xie, Jinbao Wang, Jiaqi Liu, Jiayi Lyu, Yong Liu, Chengjie Wang, Feng Zheng, Yaochu Jin
Image anomaly detection (IAD) is an emerging and vital computer vision task in industrial manufacturing (IM). Recently, many advanced algorithms have been reported, but their performance deviates considerably with various IM settings. We realize that the lack of a uniform IM benchmark is hindering the development and usage of IAD methods in real-world applications. In addition, it is difficult for researchers to analyze IAD algorithms without a uniform benchmark. To solve this problem, we propose a uniform IM benchmark, for the first time, to assess how well these algorithms perform, which includes various levels of supervision (unsupervised versus fully supervised), learning paradigms (few-shot, continual and noisy label), and efficiency (memory usage and inference speed). Then, we construct a comprehensive image anomaly detection benchmark (IM-IAD), which includes 19 algorithms on seven major datasets with a uniform setting. Extensive experiments (17,017 total) on IM-IAD provide in-depth insights into IAD algorithm redesign or selection. Moreover, the proposed IM-IAD benchmark challenges existing algorithms and suggests future research directions. To foster reproducibility and accessibility, the source code of IM-IAD is uploaded on the website, https://github.com/M-3LAB/IM-IAD.
Authors: Andreea Bobu, Andi Peng, Pulkit Agrawal, Julie Shah, Anca D. Dragan
To act in the world, robots rely on a representation of salient task aspects: for example, to carry a coffee mug, a robot may consider movement efficiency or mug orientation in its behavior. However, if we want robots to act for and with people, their representations must not be just functional but also reflective of what humans care about, i.e. they must be aligned. We observe that current learning approaches suffer from representation misalignment, where the robot's learned representation does not capture the human's representation. We suggest that because humans are the ultimate evaluator of robot performance, we must explicitly focus our efforts on aligning learned representations with humans, in addition to learning the downstream task. We advocate that current representation learning approaches in robotics should be studied from the perspective of how well they accomplish the objective of representation alignment. We mathematically define the problem, identify its key desiderata, and situate current methods within this formalism. We conclude by suggesting future directions for exploring open challenges.
Authors: Ziyi Chen, Ren Yang, Sunyang Fu, Nansu Zong, Hongfang Liu, Ming Huang
Depression is a widespread mental health issue, affecting an estimated 3.8% of the global population. It is also one of the main contributors to disability worldwide. Recently it is becoming popular for individuals to use social media platforms (e.g., Reddit) to express their difficulties and health issues (e.g., depression) and seek support from other users in online communities. It opens great opportunities to automatically identify social media users with depression by parsing millions of posts for potential interventions. Deep learning methods have begun to dominate in the field of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) because of their ease of use, efficient processing, and state-of-the-art results on many NLP tasks. In this work, we propose a hybrid deep learning model which combines a pretrained sentence BERT (SBERT) and convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect individuals with depression with their Reddit posts. The sentence BERT is used to learn the meaningful representation of semantic information in each post. CNN enables the further transformation of those embeddings and the temporal identification of behavioral patterns of users. We trained and evaluated the model performance to identify Reddit users with depression by utilizing the Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses (SMHD) data. The hybrid deep learning model achieved an accuracy of 0.86 and an F1 score of 0.86 and outperformed the state-of-the-art documented result (F1 score of 0.79) by other machine learning models in the literature. The results show the feasibility of the hybrid model to identify individuals with depression. Although the hybrid model is validated to detect depression with Reddit posts, it can be easily tuned and applied to other text classification tasks and different clinical applications.
Authors: Maciej P. Polak, Shrey Modi, Anna Latosinska, Jinming Zhang, Ching-Wen Wang, Shanonan Wang, Ayan Deep Hazra, Dane Morgan
Accurate and comprehensive material databases extracted from research papers are critical for materials science and engineering but require significant human effort to develop. In this paper we present a simple method of extracting materials data from full texts of research papers suitable for quickly developing modest-sized databases. The method requires minimal to no coding, prior knowledge about the extracted property, or model training, and provides high recall and almost perfect precision in the resultant database. The method is fully automated except for one human-assisted step, which typically requires just a few hours of human labor. The method builds on top of natural language processing and large general language models but can work with almost any such model. The language models GPT-3/3.5, bart and DeBERTaV3 are evaluated here for comparison. We provide a detailed detailed analysis of the methods performance in extracting bulk modulus data, obtaining up to 90% precision at 96% recall, depending on the amount of human effort involved. We then demonstrate the methods broader effectiveness by developing a database of critical cooling rates for metallic glasses.
Authors: Mithun Goutham, Meghna Menon, Sarah Garrow, Stephanie Stockar
The convex hull cheapest insertion heuristic is known to generate good solutions to the Traveling Salesperson Problem in Euclidean spaces, but it has not been extended to the non-Euclidean case. To address the difficulty of dealing with obstacles in the non-Euclidean space, the proposed adaptation uses multidimensional scaling to first approximate these points in a Euclidean space, thereby enabling the generation of the convex hull that initializes the algorithm. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, the TSPLIB benchmark data-set is modified by adding impassable separators that produce non-Euclidean spaces. The algorithm is demonstrated to outperform the commonly used Nearest Neighbor algorithm in 96% of the cases studied.
Authors: Christian Antić
Detecting and exploiting similarities between seemingly distant objects is without doubt an important human ability. This paper develops \textit{from the ground up} an abstract algebraic and qualitative justification-based notion of similarity based on the observation that sets of generalizations encode important properties of elements. We show that similarity defined in this way has appealing mathematical properties. As we construct our notion of similarity from first principles using only elementary concepts of universal algebra, to convince the reader of its plausibility, we show that it can be naturally embedded into first-order logic via model-theoretic types.
Authors: Cristian Munoz, Kleyton da Costa, Bernardo Modenesi, Adriano Koshiyama
Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have brought about a plethora of new challenges in terms of governance and regulation. AI systems are being integrated into various industries and sectors, creating a demand from decision-makers to possess a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the capabilities and limitations of these systems. One critical aspect of this demand is the ability to explain the results of machine learning models, which is crucial to promoting transparency and trust in AI systems, as well as fundamental in helping machine learning models to be trained ethically. In this paper, we present novel metrics to quantify the degree of which AI model predictions can be easily explainable by its features. Our metrics summarize different aspects of explainability into scalars, providing a more comprehensive understanding of model predictions and facilitating communication between decision-makers and stakeholders, thereby increasing the overall transparency and accountability of AI systems.
Authors: Maciej Mikuła, Szymon Antoniak, Szymon Tworkowski, Albert Qiaochu Jiang, Jin Peng Zhou, Christian Szegedy, Łukasz Kuciński, Piotr Miłoś, Yuhuai Wu
Premise selection is a fundamental problem of automated theorem proving. Previous works often use intricate symbolic methods, rely on domain knowledge, and require significant engineering effort to solve this task. In this work, we show that Magnushammer, a neural transformer-based approach, can outperform traditional symbolic systems by a large margin. Tested on the PISA benchmark, Magnushammer achieves $59.5\%$ proof rate compared to a $38.3\%$ proof rate of Sledgehammer, the most mature and popular symbolic-based solver. Furthermore, by combining Magnushammer with a neural formal prover based on a language model, we significantly improve the previous state-of-the-art proof rate from $57.0\%$ to $71.0\%$.
Authors: Pu Zhang, Tianhua Chen, Bin Liu
Deep learning has become the dominating approach for object detection. To achieve accurate fine-grained detection, one needs to employ a large enough model and a vast amount of data annotations. In this paper, we propose a commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) which leverages commonsense knowledge to assist a lightweight deep neural network base coarse-grained object detector to achieve accurate fine-grained detection. Specifically, we focus on a scenario where a single image contains objects of similar categories but varying sizes, and we establish a size-related commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) that maps the coarse-grained labels produced by the DL detector to size-related fine-grained labels. Considering that rule-based systems are one of the popular methods of knowledge representation and reasoning, our experiments explored two types of rule-based CKIMs, implemented using crisp-rule and fuzzy-rule approaches, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with baseline methods, our approach achieves accurate fine-grained detection with a reduced amount of annotated data and smaller model size. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/CKIM.
Authors: Lifu Tu, Jin Qu, Semih Yavuz, Shafiq Joty, Wenhao Liu, Caiming Xiong, Yingbo Zhou
Cross-lingual transfer of language models trained on high-resource languages like English has been widely studied for many NLP tasks, but focus on conversational tasks has been rather limited. This is partly due to the high cost of obtaining non-English conversational data, which results in limited coverage. In this work, we introduce XSGD for cross-lingual alignment pretraining, a parallel and large-scale multilingual conversation dataset that we created by translating the English-only Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset (Rastogi et al., 2020) into 105 other languages. XSGD contains approximately 330k utterances per language. To facilitate aligned cross-lingual representations, we develop an efficient prompt-tuning-based method for learning alignment prompts. We also investigate two different classifiers: NLI-based and vanilla classifiers, and test cross-lingual capability enabled by the aligned prompts. We evaluate our model's cross-lingual generalization capabilities on two conversation tasks: slot-filling and intent classification. Our results demonstrate the strong and efficient modeling ability of NLI-based classifiers and the large cross-lingual transfer improvements achieved by our aligned prompts, particularly in few-shot settings. In addition, we highlight the nice results of our approach compared to LLMs such as text-davinci-003 and ChatGPT in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. While LLMs exhibit impressive performance in English, their cross-lingual capabilities in other languages, particularly low-resource languages, are limited.
Authors: Xiaomei Zhang, Zhaoxi Zhang, Qi Zhong, Xufei Zheng, Yanjun Zhang, Shengshan Hu, Leo Yu Zhang
Adversarial attacks are a serious threat to the reliable deployment of machine learning models in safety-critical applications. They can misguide current models to predict incorrectly by slightly modifying the inputs. Recently, substantial work has shown that adversarial examples tend to deviate from the underlying data manifold of normal examples, whereas pre-trained masked language models can fit the manifold of normal NLP data. To explore how to use the masked language model in adversarial detection, we propose a novel textual adversarial example detection method, namely Masked Language Model-based Detection (MLMD), which can produce clearly distinguishable signals between normal examples and adversarial examples by exploring the changes in manifolds induced by the masked language model. MLMD features a plug and play usage (i.e., no need to retrain the victim model) for adversarial defense and it is agnostic to classification tasks, victim model's architectures, and to-be-defended attack methods. We evaluate MLMD on various benchmark textual datasets, widely studied machine learning models, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) adversarial attacks (in total $3*4*4 = 48$ settings). Experimental results show that MLMD can achieve strong performance, with detection accuracy up to 0.984, 0.967, and 0.901 on AG-NEWS, IMDB, and SST-2 datasets, respectively. Additionally, MLMD is superior, or at least comparable to, the SOTA detection defenses in detection accuracy and F1 score. Among many defenses based on the off-manifold assumption of adversarial examples, this work offers a new angle for capturing the manifold change. The code for this work is openly accessible at \url{https://github.com/mlmddetection/MLMDdetection}.
Authors: Gyugeun Yoon, Joseph Y. J. Chow
Mobility service route design requires demand information to operate in a service region. Transit planners and operators can access various data sources including household travel survey data and mobile device location logs. However, when implementing a mobility system with emerging technologies, estimating demand becomes harder because of limited data resulting in uncertainty. This study proposes an artificial intelligence-driven algorithm that combines sequential transit network design with optimal learning to address the operation under limited data. An operator gradually expands its route system to avoid risks from inconsistency between designed routes and actual travel demand. At the same time, observed information is archived to update the knowledge that the operator currently uses. Three learning policies are compared within the algorithm: multi-armed bandit, knowledge gradient, and knowledge gradient with correlated beliefs. For validation, a new route system is designed on an artificial network based on public use microdata areas in New York City. Prior knowledge is reproduced from the regional household travel survey data. The results suggest that exploration considering correlations can achieve better performance compared to greedy choices in general. In future work, the problem may incorporate more complexities such as demand elasticity to travel time, no limitations to the number of transfers, and costs for expansion.
Authors: Jiageng Wu, Xian Wu, Zhaopeng Qiu, Minghui Li, Yingying Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Jie Yang
Objectives: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Med-PaLM have excelled in various medical question-answering tasks. However, these English-centric models encounter challenges in non-English clinical settings, primarily due to limited clinical knowledge in respective languages, a consequence of imbalanced training corpora. We systematically evaluate LLMs in the Chinese medical context and develop a novel in-context learning framework to enhance their performance.
Materials and Methods: The latest China National Medical Licensing Examination (CNMLE-2022) served as the benchmark. We collected 53 medical books and 381,149 medical questions to construct the medical knowledge base and question bank. The proposed Knowledge and Few-shot Enhancement In-context Learning (KFE) framework leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs to integrate diverse external clinical knowledge sources. We evaluated KFE with ChatGPT(GPT3.5), GPT4, Baichuan2-7b, and Baichuan2-13B in CNMLE-2022 and further investigated the effectiveness of different pathways for incorporating LLMs with medical knowledge from seven distinct perspectives.
Results: Directly applying ChatGPT failed to qualify for the CNMLE-2022 at a score of 51. Cooperated with the KFE framework, the LLMs with varying sizes yielded consistent and significant improvements. The ChatGPT's performance surged to 70.04 and GPT-4 achieved the highest score of 82.59. This surpasses the qualification threshold (60) and exceeds the average human score of 68.70, affirming the effectiveness and robustness of the framework. It also enabled a smaller Baichuan2-13B to pass the examination, showcasing the great potential in low-resource settings. This study shed light on the optimal practices to enhance the capabilities of LLMs in non-English medical scenarios.
Authors: James Stovold
Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are a model of morphogenesis, capable of growing two-dimensional artificial organisms from a single seed cell. In this paper, we show that NCAs can be trained to respond to signals. Two types of signal are used: internal (genomically-coded) signals, and external (environmental) signals. Signals are presented to a single pixel for a single timestep.
Results show NCAs are able to grow into multiple distinct forms based on internal signals, and are able to change colour based on external signals. Overall these contribute to the development of NCAs as a model of artificial morphogenesis, and pave the way for future developments embedding dynamic behaviour into the NCA model.
Code and target images are available through GitHub: https://github.com/jstovold/ALIFE2023
Authors: Jesse Zhang, Karl Pertsch, Jiahui Zhang, Joseph J. Lim
Pre-training robot policies with a rich set of skills can substantially accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Prior works have defined pre-training tasks via natural language instructions, but doing so requires tedious human annotation of hundreds of thousands of instructions. Thus, we propose SPRINT, a scalable offline policy pre-training approach which substantially reduces the human effort needed for pre-training a diverse set of skills. Our method uses two core ideas to automatically expand a base set of pre-training tasks: instruction relabeling via large language models and cross-trajectory skill chaining through offline reinforcement learning. As a result, SPRINT pre-training equips robots with a much richer repertoire of skills. Experimental results in a household simulator and on a real robot kitchen manipulation task show that SPRINT leads to substantially faster learning of new long-horizon tasks than previous pre-training approaches. Website at https://clvrai.com/sprint.
Authors: Fabrizio Ottati, Chang Gao, Qinyu Chen, Giovanni Brignone, Mario R. Casu, Jason K. Eshraghian, Luciano Lavagno
As deep learning models scale, they become increasingly competitive from domains spanning from computer vision to natural language processing; however, this happens at the expense of efficiency since they require increasingly more memory and computing power. The power efficiency of the biological brain outperforms any large-scale deep learning ( DL ) model; thus, neuromorphic computing tries to mimic the brain operations, such as spike-based information processing, to improve the efficiency of DL models. Despite the benefits of the brain, such as efficient information transmission, dense neuronal interconnects, and the co-location of computation and memory, the available biological substrate has severely constrained the evolution of biological brains. Electronic hardware does not have the same constraints; therefore, while modeling spiking neural networks ( SNNs) might uncover one piece of the puzzle, the design of efficient hardware backends for SNN s needs further investigation, potentially taking inspiration from the available work done on the artificial neural networks ( ANNs) side. As such, when is it wise to look at the brain while designing new hardware, and when should it be ignored? To answer this question, we quantitatively compare the digital hardware acceleration techniques and platforms of ANNs and SNN s. As a result, we provide the following insights: (i) ANNs currently process static data more efficiently, (ii) applications targeting data produced by neuromorphic sensors, such as event-based cameras and silicon cochleas, need more investigation since the behavior of these sensors might naturally fit the SNN paradigm, and (iii) hybrid approaches combining SNN s and ANNs might lead to the best solutions and should be investigated further at the hardware level, accounting for both efficiency and loss optimization.
Authors: Zhenlin Xu, Yi Zhu, Tiffany Deng, Abhay Mittal, Yanbei Chen, Manchen Wang, Paolo Favaro, Joseph Tighe, Davide Modolo
This paper introduces innovative benchmarks to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world zero-shot recognition tasks, focusing on the granularity and specificity of prompting text. We propose a unique evaluation protocol using adapted ImageNet and MS-COCO datasets to assess models' consistency in recognizing concepts at varying granularity levels and their sensitivity to the specificity of language inputs. Our extensive evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs, including contrastive models like CLIP, struggle with granularity and are sensitive to text specificity, impacting their effectiveness in open-world settings. This comprehensive study, a first in evaluating VLMs from these perspectives, provides valuable insights and tools for the community, highlighting the limitations and paving the way for enhanced models with better generalization in zero-shot recognition.
Authors: Sakina Fatima, Hadi Hemmati, Lionel Briand
Flaky tests are problematic because they non-deterministically pass or fail for the same software version under test, causing confusion and wasting development effort. While machine learning models have been used to predict flakiness and its root causes, there is much less work on providing support to fix the problem. To address this gap, in this paper, we focus on predicting the type of fix that is required to remove flakiness and then repair the test code on that basis. We do this for a subset of flaky test cases where the root cause of flakiness is in the test case itself and not in the production code. Our key idea is to guide the repair process with additional knowledge about the test's flakiness in the form of its predicted fix category. Thus, we first propose a framework that automatically generates labeled datasets for 13 fix categories and trains models to predict the fix category of a flaky test by analyzing the test code only. Our experimental results using code models and few-shot learning show that we can correctly predict most of the fix categories. To show the usefulness of such fix category labels for automatically repairing flakiness, in addition to informing testers, we augment a Large Language Model (LLM) like GPT with such extra knowledge to ask the LLM for repair suggestions. The results show that our suggested fix category labels significantly enhance the capability of GPT 3.5 Turbo, in generating fixes for flaky tests.
Authors: Rithesh Murthy, Shelby Heinecke, Juan Carlos Niebles, Zhiwei Liu, Le Xue, Weiran Yao, Yihao Feng, Zeyuan Chen, Akash Gokul, Devansh Arpit, Ran Xu, Phil Mui, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese
In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach for Rapid Exploration and eXploitation for AI Agents called REX. Existing AutoGPT-style techniques have inherent limitations, such as a heavy reliance on precise descriptions for decision-making, and the lack of a systematic approach to leverage try-and-fail procedures akin to traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL). REX introduces an additional layer of rewards and integrates concepts similar to Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) scores, leading to more robust and efficient AI agent performance. This approach has the advantage of enabling the utilization of offline behaviors from logs and allowing seamless integration with existing foundation models while it does not require any model fine-tuning. Through comparative analysis with existing methods such as Chain-of-Thoughts(CoT) and Reasoning viA Planning(RAP), REX-based methods demonstrate comparable performance and, in certain cases, even surpass the results achieved by these existing techniques. Notably, REX-based methods exhibit remarkable reductions in execution time, enhancing their practical applicability across a diverse set of scenarios.
Authors: Devin White, Mingkang Wu, Ellen Novoseller, Vernon J. Lawhern, Nicholas Waytowich, Yongcan Cao
This paper develops a novel rating-based reinforcement learning approach that uses human ratings to obtain human guidance in reinforcement learning. Different from the existing preference-based and ranking-based reinforcement learning paradigms, based on human relative preferences over sample pairs, the proposed rating-based reinforcement learning approach is based on human evaluation of individual trajectories without relative comparisons between sample pairs. The rating-based reinforcement learning approach builds on a new prediction model for human ratings and a novel multi-class loss function. We conduct several experimental studies based on synthetic ratings and real human ratings to evaluate the effectiveness and benefits of the new rating-based reinforcement learning approach.
Authors: Mark Stefik, Robert Price
Developmental AI is a bootstrapping approach where embodied AIs start with innate competences and learn by interacting with the world. They develop abilities in small steps along a bio-inspired trajectory. However, developmental AIs have not yet reached the abilities of young children. In contrast, mainstream approaches for creating AIs have led to valuable AI systems and impressive feats. These approaches include deep learning and generative approaches (e.g., large language models) and manually constructed symbolic approaches. Manually constructed AIs are brittle even in circumscribed domains. Generative AIs can make strange mistakes and not notice them. Taken together, mainstream approaches lack common sense, curiosity, and social alignment. This position paper lays out prospects, gaps, and challenges for augmenting the AI mainstream approaches with developmental AI. The ambition is to create data-rich experientially based foundation models for human-compatible, resilient, and trustworthy AIs. This research aims to produce developmental AIs that learn to communicate, establish common ground, read critically, consider the provenance of information, test hypotheses, and collaborate. A virtuous multidisciplinary research cycle has led to developmental AIs with capabilities for multimodal perception, object recognition, and manipulation. Computational models for hierarchical planning, abstraction discovery, curiosity, and language acquisition exist but need to be adapted to an embodied learning approach. They need to bridge competence gaps involving nonverbal communication, speech, reading, and writing. Aspirationally, developmental AIs would learn, share what they learn, and collaborate to achieve high standards. The approach would make the creation of AIs more democratic, enabling more people to train, test, build on, and replicate AIs.
Authors: Céline Hocquette, Sebastijan Dumančić, Andrew Cropper
We introduce the higher-order refactoring problem, where the goal is to compress a logic program by discovering higher-order abstractions, such as map, filter, and fold. We implement our approach in Stevie, which formulates the refactoring problem as a constraint optimisation problem. Our experiments on multiple domains, including program synthesis and visual reasoning, show that refactoring can improve the learning performance of an inductive logic programming system, specifically improving predictive accuracies by 27% and reducing learning times by 47%. We also show that Stevie can discover abstractions that transfer to multiple domains.
Authors: Li Zhong, Zilong Wang
Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and align the code with the intended semantics, the reliability and robustness of the code generationfrom LLMs have not yet been thoroughly studied. The executable code is not equivalent to the reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development. The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes. To make things worse, the users of LLM code generation services are actually the developers that are most vulnerable to these code that seems right -- They are always novice developers that are not familiar with the APIs that LLMs generate code for them. Therefore, they could hardly tell the misuse in the code generated by LLMs, which further facilitates the incorrect code applied in real-world software. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, in this work, we propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.
Authors: Yanjie Song, Yutong Wu, Yangyang Guo, Ran Yan, P. N. Suganthan, Yue Zhang, Witold Pedrycz, Swagatam Das, Rammohan Mallipeddi, Oladayo Solomon Ajani. Qiang Feng
Evolutionary algorithms (EA), a class of stochastic search methods based on the principles of natural evolution, have received widespread acclaim for their exceptional performance in various real-world optimization problems. While researchers worldwide have proposed a wide variety of EAs, certain limitations remain, such as slow convergence speed and poor generalization capabilities. Consequently, numerous scholars actively explore improvements to algorithmic structures, operators, search patterns, etc., to enhance their optimization performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) integrated as a component in the EA framework has demonstrated superior performance in recent years. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on integrating reinforcement learning into the evolutionary algorithm, referred to as reinforcement learning-assisted evolutionary algorithm (RL-EA). We begin with the conceptual outlines of reinforcement learning and the evolutionary algorithm. We then provide a taxonomy of RL-EA. Subsequently, we discuss the RL-EA integration method, the RL-assisted strategy adopted by RL-EA, and its applications according to the existing literature. The RL-assisted procedure is divided according to the implemented functions including solution generation, learnable objective function, algorithm/operator/sub-population selection, parameter adaptation, and other strategies. Additionally, different attribute settings of RL in RL-EA are discussed. In the applications of RL-EA section, we also demonstrate the excellent performance of RL-EA on several benchmarks and a range of public datasets to facilitate a quick comparative study. Finally, we analyze potential directions for future research.
Authors: Haochun Wang, Sendong Zhao, Chi Liu, Nuwa Xi, Muzhen Cai, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
Prompt-based classification adapts tasks to a cloze question format utilizing the [MASK] token and the filled tokens are then mapped to labels through pre-defined verbalizers. Recent studies have explored the use of verbalizer embeddings to reduce labor in this process. However, all existing studies require a tuning process for either the pre-trained models or additional trainable embeddings. Meanwhile, the distance between high-dimensional verbalizer embeddings should not be measured by Euclidean distance due to the potential for non-linear manifolds in the representation space. In this study, we propose a tuning-free manifold-based space re-embedding method called Locally Linear Embedding with Intra-class Neighborhood Constraint (LLE-INC) for verbalizer embeddings, which preserves local properties within the same class as guidance for classification. Experimental results indicate that even without tuning any parameters, our LLE-INC is on par with automated verbalizers with parameter tuning. And with the parameter updating, our approach further enhances prompt-based tuning by up to 3.2%. Furthermore, experiments with the LLaMA-7B&13B indicate that LLE-INC is an efficient tuning-free classification approach for the hyper-scale language models.
Authors: Linfeng Zhao, Hongyu Li, Taskin Padir, Huaizu Jiang, Lawson L.S. Wong
Learning for robot navigation presents a critical and challenging task. The scarcity and costliness of real-world datasets necessitate efficient learning approaches. In this letter, we exploit Euclidean symmetry in planning for 2D navigation, which originates from Euclidean transformations between reference frames and enables parameter sharing. To address the challenges of unstructured environments, we formulate the navigation problem as planning on a geometric graph and develop an equivariant message passing network to perform value iteration. Furthermore, to handle multi-camera input, we propose a learnable equivariant layer to lift features to a desired space. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across five diverse tasks encompassing structured and unstructured environments, along with maps of known and unknown, given point goals or semantic goals. Our experiments confirm the substantial benefits on training efficiency, stability, and generalization. More details can be found at the project website: https://lhy.xyz/e2-planning/.
Authors: Amrita Bhattacharjee, Raha Moraffah, Joshua Garland, Huan Liu
With the advent of larger and more complex deep learning models, such as in Natural Language Processing (NLP), model qualities like explainability and interpretability, albeit highly desirable, are becoming harder challenges to tackle and solve. For example, state-of-the-art models in text classification are black-box by design. Although standard explanation methods provide some degree of explainability, these are mostly correlation-based methods and do not provide much insight into the model. The alternative of causal explainability is more desirable to achieve but extremely challenging in NLP due to a variety of reasons. Inspired by recent endeavors to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) as experts, in this work, we aim to leverage the instruction-following and textual understanding capabilities of recent state-of-the-art LLMs to facilitate causal explainability via counterfactual explanation generation for black-box text classifiers. To do this, we propose a three-step pipeline via which, we use an off-the-shelf LLM to: (1) identify the latent or unobserved features in the input text, (2) identify the input features associated with the latent features, and finally (3) use the identified input features to generate a counterfactual explanation. We experiment with our pipeline on multiple NLP text classification datasets, with several recent LLMs, and present interesting and promising findings.
Authors: Lin Ni, Sijie Wang, Zeyu Zhang, Xiaoxuan Li, Xianda Zheng, Paul Denny, Jiamou Liu
Learnersourcing offers great potential for scalable education through student content creation. However, predicting student performance on learnersourced questions, which is essential for personalizing the learning experience, is challenging due to the inherent noise in student-generated data. Moreover, while conventional graph-based methods can capture the complex network of student and question interactions, they often fall short under cold start conditions where limited student engagement with questions yields sparse data. To address both challenges, we introduce an innovative strategy that synergizes the potential of integrating Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) and Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings. Our methodology employs a signed bipartite graph to comprehensively model student answers, complemented by a contrastive learning framework that enhances noise resilience. Furthermore, LLM's contribution lies in generating foundational question embeddings, proving especially advantageous in addressing cold start scenarios characterized by limited graph data. Validation across five real-world datasets sourced from the PeerWise platform underscores our approach's effectiveness. Our method outperforms baselines, showcasing enhanced predictive accuracy and robustness.
Authors: Khoi Do, Duong Nguyen, Hoa Nguyen, Long Tran-Thanh, Quoc-Viet Pham
This paper explores Large Batch Training techniques using layer-wise adaptive scaling ratio (LARS) across diverse settings, uncovering insights. LARS algorithms with warm-up tend to be trapped in sharp minimizers early on due to redundant ratio scaling. Additionally, a fixed steep decline in the latter phase restricts deep neural networks from effectively navigating early-phase sharp minimizers. Building on these findings, we propose Time Varying LARS (TVLARS), a novel algorithm that replaces warm-up with a configurable sigmoid-like function for robust training in the initial phase. TVLARS promotes gradient exploration early on, surpassing sharp optimizers and gradually transitioning to LARS for robustness in later phases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TVLARS consistently outperforms LARS and LAMB in most cases, with up to 2\% improvement in classification scenarios. Notably, in all self-supervised learning cases, TVLARS dominates LARS and LAMB with performance improvements of up to 10\%.
Authors: Mouxiang Chen, Chenghao Liu, Zemin Liu, Zhuo Li, Jianling Sun
Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) aims to train unbiased ranking models from biased click logs, by explicitly modeling a generation process for user behavior and fitting click data based on examination hypothesis. Previous research found empirically that the true latent relevance is mostly recoverable through perfect click fitting. However, we demonstrate that this is not always achievable, resulting in a significant reduction in ranking performance. This research investigates the conditions under which relevance can be recovered from click data at a foundational level. We initially characterize a ranking model as identifiable if it can recover the true relevance up to a scaling transformation, a criterion sufficient for the pairwise ranking objective. Subsequently, we investigate an equivalent condition for identifiability, articulated as a graph connectivity test problem: the recovery of relevance is feasible if and only if the identifiability graph (IG), derived from the underlying structure of the dataset, is connected. The presence of a disconnected IG may lead to degenerate cases and suboptimal ranking performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce two methods, namely node intervention and node merging, designed to modify the dataset and restore the connectivity of the IG. Empirical results derived from a simulated dataset and two real-world LTR benchmark datasets not only validate our proposed theorems but also demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in alleviating data bias when the relevance model is unidentifiable.
Authors: Arief Purnama Muharram, Dicky Levenus Tahapary, Yeni Dwi Lestari, Randy Sarayar, Valerie Josephine Dirjayanto
Diabetes, especially T2DM, continues to be a significant health problem. One of the major concerns associated with diabetes is the development of its complications. Diabetic nephropathy, one of the chronic complication of diabetes, adversely affects the kidneys, leading to kidney damage. Diagnosing diabetic nephropathy involves considering various criteria, one of which is the presence of a pathologically significant quantity of albumin in urine, known as albuminuria. Thus, early prediction of albuminuria in diabetic patients holds the potential for timely preventive measures. This study aimed to develop a supervised learning model to predict the risk of developing albuminuria in T2DM patients. The selected supervised learning algorithms included Na\"ive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), decision tree, random forest, AdaBoost, XGBoost, and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Our private dataset, comprising 184 entries of diabetes complications risk factors, was used to train the algorithms. It consisted of 10 attributes as features and 1 attribute as the target (albuminuria). Upon conducting the experiments, the MLP demonstrated superior performance compared to the other algorithms. It achieved accuracy and f1-score values as high as 0.74 and 0.75, respectively, making it suitable for screening purposes in predicting albuminuria in T2DM. Nonetheless, further studies are warranted to enhance the model's performance.
Authors: Zhe Zhang, Karol Lasocki, Yi Yu, Atsuhiro Takasu
The generation of lyrics tightly connected to accompanying melodies involves establishing a mapping between musical notes and syllables of lyrics. This process requires a deep understanding of music constraints and semantic patterns at syllable-level, word-level, and sentence-level semantic meanings. However, pre-trained language models specifically designed at the syllable level are publicly unavailable. To solve these challenging issues, we propose to exploit fine-tuning character-level language models for syllable-level lyrics generation from symbolic melody. In particular, our method endeavors to incorporate linguistic knowledge of the language model into the beam search process of a syllable-level Transformer generator network. Additionally, by exploring ChatGPT-based evaluation for generated lyrics, along with human subjective evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach enhances the coherence and correctness of the generated lyrics, eliminating the need to train expensive new language models.
Authors: Ming Jin, Shiyu Wang, Lintao Ma, Zhixuan Chu, James Y. Zhang, Xiaoming Shi, Pin-Yu Chen, Yuxuan Liang, Yuan-Fang Li, Shirui Pan, Qingsong Wen
Time series forecasting holds significant importance in many real-world dynamic systems and has been extensively studied. Unlike natural language process (NLP) and computer vision (CV), where a single large model can tackle multiple tasks, models for time series forecasting are often specialized, necessitating distinct designs for different tasks and applications. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in NLP and CV, their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. Recent studies have revealed that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the challenge remains in effectively aligning the modalities of time series data and natural language to leverage these capabilities. In this work, we present Time-LLM, a reprogramming framework to repurpose LLMs for general time series forecasting with the backbone language models kept intact. We begin by reprogramming the input time series with text prototypes before feeding it into the frozen LLM to align the two modalities. To augment the LLM's ability to reason with time series data, we propose Prompt-as-Prefix (PaP), which enriches the input context and directs the transformation of reprogrammed input patches. The transformed time series patches from the LLM are finally projected to obtain the forecasts. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that Time-LLM is a powerful time series learner that outperforms state-of-the-art, specialized forecasting models. Moreover, Time-LLM excels in both few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios.
Authors: Michael Xieyang Liu, Tongshuang Wu, Tianying Chen, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Aniket Kittur, Brad A. Myers
Sensemaking in unfamiliar domains can be challenging, demanding considerable user effort to compare different options with respect to various criteria. Prior research and our formative study found that people would benefit from reading an overview of an information space upfront, including the criteria others previously found useful. However, existing sensemaking tools struggle with the "cold-start" problem -- it not only requires significant input from previous users to generate and share these overviews, but such overviews may also turn out to be biased and incomplete. In this work, we introduce a novel system, Selenite, which leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as reasoning machines and knowledge retrievers to automatically produce a comprehensive overview of options and criteria to jumpstart users' sensemaking processes. Subsequently, Selenite also adapts as people use it, helping users find, read, and navigate unfamiliar information in a systematic yet personalized manner. Through three studies, we found that Selenite produced accurate and high-quality overviews reliably, significantly accelerated users' information processing, and effectively improved their overall comprehension and sensemaking experience.
Authors: Zheng-Xin Yong, Cristina Menghini, Stephen H. Bach
AI safety training and red-teaming of large language models (LLMs) are measures to mitigate the generation of unsafe content. Our work exposes the inherent cross-lingual vulnerability of these safety mechanisms, resulting from the linguistic inequality of safety training data, by successfully circumventing GPT-4's safeguard through translating unsafe English inputs into low-resource languages. On the AdvBenchmark, GPT-4 engages with the unsafe translated inputs and provides actionable items that can get the users towards their harmful goals 79% of the time, which is on par with or even surpassing state-of-the-art jailbreaking attacks. Other high-/mid-resource languages have significantly lower attack success rate, which suggests that the cross-lingual vulnerability mainly applies to low-resource languages. Previously, limited training on low-resource languages primarily affects speakers of those languages, causing technological disparities. However, our work highlights a crucial shift: this deficiency now poses a risk to all LLMs users. Publicly available translation APIs enable anyone to exploit LLMs' safety vulnerabilities. Therefore, our work calls for a more holistic red-teaming efforts to develop robust multilingual safeguards with wide language coverage.
Authors: Arief Purnama Muharram, Hollyana Puteri Haryono, Abassi Haji Juma, Ira Puspasari, Nugraha Priya Utama
Reading and interpreting chest X-ray images is one of the most radiologist's routines. However, it still can be challenging, even for the most experienced ones. Therefore, we proposed a multi-model deep learning-based automated chest X-ray report generator system designed to assist radiologists in their work. The basic idea of the proposed system is by utilizing multi binary-classification models for detecting multi abnormalities, with each model responsible for detecting one abnormality, in a single image. In this study, we limited the radiology abnormalities detection to only cardiomegaly, lung effusion, and consolidation. The system generates a radiology report by performing the following three steps: image pre-processing, utilizing deep learning models to detect abnormalities, and producing a report. The aim of the image pre-processing step is to standardize the input by scaling it to 128x128 pixels and slicing it into three segments, which covers the upper, lower, and middle parts of the lung. After pre-processing, each corresponding model classifies the image, resulting in a 0 (zero) for no abnormality detected and a 1 (one) for the presence of an abnormality. The prediction outputs of each model are then concatenated to form a 'result code'. The 'result code' is used to construct a report by selecting the appropriate pre-determined sentence for each detected abnormality in the report generation step. The proposed system is expected to reduce the workload of radiologists and increase the accuracy of chest X-ray diagnosis.
Authors: Qizhi Pei, Wei Zhang, Jinhua Zhu, Kehan Wu, Kaiyuan Gao, Lijun Wu, Yingce Xia, Rui Yan
Recent advancements in biological research leverage the integration of molecules, proteins, and natural language to enhance drug discovery. However, current models exhibit several limitations, such as the generation of invalid molecular SMILES, underutilization of contextual information, and equal treatment of structured and unstructured knowledge. To address these issues, we propose $\mathbf{BioT5}$, a comprehensive pre-training framework that enriches cross-modal integration in biology with chemical knowledge and natural language associations. $\mathbf{BioT5}$ utilizes SELFIES for $100%$ robust molecular representations and extracts knowledge from the surrounding context of bio-entities in unstructured biological literature. Furthermore, $\mathbf{BioT5}$ distinguishes between structured and unstructured knowledge, leading to more effective utilization of information. After fine-tuning, BioT5 shows superior performance across a wide range of tasks, demonstrating its strong capability of capturing underlying relations and properties of bio-entities. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/QizhiPei/BioT5}{Github}$.
Authors: Kamal Taha
This survey paper offers a comprehensive review of methodologies utilizing machine learning (ML) classification techniques for identifying wafer defects in semiconductor manufacturing. Despite the growing body of research demonstrating the effectiveness of ML in wafer defect identification, there is a noticeable absence of comprehensive reviews on this subject. This survey attempts to fill this void by amalgamating available literature and providing an in-depth analysis of the advantages, limitations, and potential applications of various ML classification algorithms in the realm of wafer defect detection. An innovative taxonomy of methodologies that we present provides a detailed classification of algorithms into more refined categories and techniques. This taxonomy follows a three-tier structure, starting from broad methodology categories and ending with specific techniques. It aids researchers in comprehending the complex relationships between different algorithms and their techniques. We employ a rigorous empirical and experimental evaluation to rank these varying techniques. For the empirical evaluation, we assess techniques based on a set of five criteria. The experimental evaluation ranks the algorithms employing the same techniques, sub-categories, and categories. Also the paper illuminates the future prospects of ML classification techniques for wafer defect identification, underscoring potential advancements and opportunities for further research in this field
Authors: Mufei Li, Eleonora Kreačić, Vamsi K. Potluru, Pan Li
Large-scale graphs with node attributes are increasingly common in various real-world applications. Creating synthetic, attribute-rich graphs that mirror real-world examples is crucial, especially for sharing graph data for analysis and developing learning models when original data is restricted to be shared. Traditional graph generation methods are limited in their capacity to handle these complex structures. Recent advances in diffusion models have shown potential in generating graph structures without attributes and smaller molecular graphs. However, these models face challenges in generating large attributed graphs due to the complex attribute-structure correlations and the large size of these graphs. This paper introduces a novel diffusion model, GraphMaker, specifically designed for generating large attributed graphs. We explore various combinations of node attribute and graph structure generation processes, finding that an asynchronous approach more effectively captures the intricate attribute-structure correlations. We also address scalability issues through edge mini-batching generation. To demonstrate the practicality of our approach in graph data dissemination, we introduce a new evaluation pipeline. The evaluation demonstrates that synthetic graphs generated by GraphMaker can be used to develop competitive graph machine learning models for the tasks defined over the original graphs without actually accessing these graphs, while many leading graph generation methods fall short in this evaluation.
Authors: Yunfan Zhao, Nikhil Behari, Edward Hughes, Edwin Zhang, Dheeraj Nagaraj, Karl Tuyls, Aparna Taneja, Milind Tambe
Restless multi-arm bandits (RMABs), a class of resource allocation problems with broad application in areas such as healthcare, online advertising, and anti-poaching, have recently been studied from a multi-agent reinforcement learning perspective. Prior RMAB research suffers from several limitations, e.g., it fails to adequately address continuous states, and requires retraining from scratch when arms opt-in and opt-out over time, a common challenge in many real world applications. We address these limitations by developing a neural network-based pre-trained model (PreFeRMAB) that has general zero-shot ability on a wide range of previously unseen RMABs, and which can be fine-tuned on specific instances in a more sample-efficient way than retraining from scratch. Our model also accommodates general multi-action settings and discrete or continuous state spaces. To enable fast generalization, we learn a novel single policy network model that utilizes feature information and employs a training procedure in which arms opt-in and out over time. We derive a new update rule for a crucial $\lambda$-network with theoretical convergence guarantees and empirically demonstrate the advantages of our approach on several challenging, real-world inspired problems.
Authors: Yucheng Li, Frank Guerin, Chenghua Lin
Data contamination in model evaluation has become increasingly prevalent with the growing popularity of large language models. It allows models to "cheat" via memorisation instead of displaying true capabilities. Therefore, contamination analysis has become an crucial part of reliable model evaluation to validate results. However, existing contamination analysis is usually conducted internally by large language model developers and often lacks transparency and completeness. This paper presents an extensive data contamination report for over 15 popular large language models across six popular multiple-choice QA benchmarks. We also introduce an open-source pipeline that enables the community to perform contamination analysis on customised data and models. Our experiments reveal varying contamination levels ranging from 1\% to 45\% across benchmarks, with the contamination degree increasing rapidly over time. Performance analysis of large language models indicates that data contamination does not necessarily lead to increased model metrics: while significant accuracy boosts of up to 14\% and 7\% are observed on contaminated C-Eval and Hellaswag benchmarks, only a minimal increase is noted on contaminated MMLU. We also find larger models seem able to gain more advantages than smaller models on contaminated test sets.
Authors: Xiaoyang Xu, Hu Ding
Optimal transport is a fundamental topic that has attracted a great amount of attention from the optimization community in the past decades. In this paper, we consider an interesting discrete dynamic optimal transport problem: can we efficiently update the optimal transport plan when the weights or the locations of the data points change? This problem is naturally motivated by several applications in machine learning. For example, we often need to compute the optimal transport cost between two different data sets; if some changes happen to a few data points, should we re-compute the high complexity cost function or update the cost by some efficient dynamic data structure? We are aware that several dynamic maximum flow algorithms have been proposed before, however, the research on dynamic minimum cost flow problem is still quite limited, to the best of our knowledge. We propose a novel 2D Skip Orthogonal List together with some dynamic tree techniques. Although our algorithm is based on the conventional simplex method, it can efficiently find the variable to pivot within expected $O(1)$ time, and complete each pivoting operation within expected $O(|V|)$ time where $V$ is the set of all supply and demand nodes. Since dynamic modifications typically do not introduce significant changes, our algorithm requires only a few simplex iterations in practice. So our algorithm is more efficient than re-computing the optimal transport cost that needs at least one traversal over all $|E| = O(|V|^2)$ variables, where $|E|$ denotes the number of edges in the network. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing algorithms in the dynamic scenarios.
Authors: Mianchu Wang, Rui Yang, Xi Chen, Hao Sun, Giovanni Montana, Meng Fang
Offline Goal-Conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a feasible paradigm for learning general-purpose policies from diverse and multi-task offline datasets. Despite notable recent progress, the predominant offline GCRL methods, mainly model-free, face constraints in handling limited data and generalizing to unseen goals. In this work, we propose Goal-conditioned Offline Planning (GOPlan), a novel model-based framework that contains two key phases: (1) pretraining a prior policy capable of capturing multi-modal action distribution within the multi-goal dataset; (2) employing the reanalysis method with planning to generate imagined trajectories for funetuning policies. Specifically, we base the prior policy on an advantage-weighted conditioned generative adversarial network, which facilitates distinct mode separation, mitigating the pitfalls of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. For further policy optimization, the reanalysis method generates high-quality imaginary data by planning with learned models for both intra-trajectory and inter-trajectory goals. With thorough experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that GOPlan achieves state-of-the-art performance on various offline multi-goal navigation and manipulation tasks. Moreover, our results highlight the superior ability of GOPlan to handle small data budgets and generalize to OOD goals.
Authors: Tobias Katsch
Linear Recurrence has proven to be a powerful tool for modeling long sequences efficiently. In this work, we show that existing models fail to take full advantage of its potential. Motivated by this finding, we develop GateLoop, a foundational sequence model that generalizes linear recurrent models such as S4, S5, LRU and RetNet, by employing data-controlled state transitions. Utilizing this theoretical advance, GateLoop empirically outperforms existing models for auto-regressive language modeling. Our method comes with a low-cost $O(l)$ recurrent mode and an efficient $O(l \log_{2} l)$ parallel mode making use of highly optimized associative scan implementations. Furthermore, we derive an $O(l^2)$ surrogate attention mode, revealing remarkable implications for Transformer and recently proposed architectures. Specifically, we prove that our approach can be interpreted as providing data-controlled relative-positional information to Attention. While many existing models solely rely on data-controlled cumulative sums for context aggregation, our findings suggest that incorporating data-controlled complex cumulative products may be a crucial step towards more powerful sequence models.
Authors: Idan Lev-Yehudi, Moran Barenboim, Vadim Indelman
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with high dimensional and continuous observations, such as camera images, is required for many real life robotics and planning problems. Recent researches suggested machine learned probabilistic models as observation models, but their use is currently too computationally expensive for online deployment. We deal with the question of what would be the implication of using simplified observation models for planning, while retaining formal guarantees on the quality of the solution. Our main contribution is a novel probabilistic bound based on a statistical total variation distance of the simplified model. We show that it bounds the theoretical POMDP value w.r.t. original model, from the empirical planned value with the simplified model, by generalizing recent results of particle-belief MDP concentration bounds. Our calculations can be separated into offline and online parts, and we arrive at formal guarantees without having to access the costly model at all during planning, which is also a novel result. Finally, we demonstrate in simulation how to integrate the bound into the routine of an existing continuous online POMDP solver.
Authors: George Chrysostomou, Zhixue Zhao, Miles Williams, Nikolaos Aletras
Despite the remarkable performance of generative large language models (LLMs) on abstractive summarization, they face two significant challenges: their considerable size and tendency to hallucinate. Hallucinations are concerning because they erode reliability and raise safety issues. Pruning is a technique that reduces model size by removing redundant weights, enabling more efficient sparse inference. Pruned models yield downstream task performance comparable to the original, making them ideal alternatives when operating on a limited budget. However, the effect that pruning has upon hallucinations in abstractive summarization with LLMs has yet to be explored. In this paper, we provide an extensive empirical study across five summarization datasets, two state-of-the-art pruning methods, and five instruction-tuned LLMs. Surprisingly, we find that hallucinations from pruned LLMs are less prevalent than the original models. Our analysis suggests that pruned models tend to depend more on the source document for summary generation. This leads to a higher lexical overlap between the generated summary and the source document, which could be a reason for the reduction in hallucination risk.
Authors: Callie C. Liao, Duoduo Liao, Jesse Guessford
There has recently been a sharp increase in interest in Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC). Despite this, musical components such as time signatures have not been studied sufficiently to form an algorithmic determination approach for new compositions, especially lyrical songs. This is likely because of the neglect of musical details, which is critical for constructing a robust framework. Specifically, time signatures establish the fundamental rhythmic structure for almost all aspects of a song, including the phrases and notes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that only uses lyrics as input to automatically generate a fitting time signature for lyrical songs and uncover the latent rhythmic structure utilizing explainable machine learning models. In particular, we devise multiple methods that are associated with discovering lyrical patterns and creating new features that simultaneously contain lyrical, rhythmic, and statistical information. In this approach, the best of our experimental results reveal a 97.6% F1 score and a 0.996 Area Under the Curve (AUC) of the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) score. In conclusion, our research directly generates time signatures from lyrics automatically for new scores utilizing machine learning, which is an innovative idea that approaches an understudied component of musicology and therefore contributes significantly to the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) music generation.
Authors: Sahil Tyagi, Martin Swany
Gradient compression alleviates expensive communication in distributed deep learning by sending fewer values and its corresponding indices, typically via Allgather (AG). Training with high compression ratio (CR) achieves high accuracy like DenseSGD, but has lower parallel scaling due to high communication cost (i.e., parallel efficiency). Using lower CRs improves parallel efficiency by lowering synchronization cost, but degrades model accuracy as well (statistical efficiency). Further, speedup attained with different models and CRs also varies with network latency, effective bandwidth and collective op used for aggregation. In many cases, collectives like Allreduce (AR) have lower cost than AG to exchange the same amount of data. In this paper, we propose an AR-compatible Topk compressor that is bandwidth-optimal and thus performs better than AG in certain network configurations. We develop a flexible communication strategy that switches between AG and AR based on which collective is optimal in the current settings, and model the pareto-relationship between parallel and statistical efficiency as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem to dynamically adjust CR and accelerate training while still converging to high accuracy.
Authors: Claudio Zeni, Robert Pinsler, Daniel Zügner, Andrew Fowler, Matthew Horton, Xiang Fu, Sasha Shysheya, Jonathan Crabbé, Lixin Sun, Jake Smith, Bichlien Nguyen, Hannes Schulz, Sarah Lewis, Chin-Wei Huang, Ziheng Lu, Yichi Zhou, Han Yang, Hongxia Hao, Jielan Li, Ryota Tomioka, Tian Xie
The design of functional materials with desired properties is essential in driving technological advances in areas like energy storage, catalysis, and carbon capture. Generative models provide a new paradigm for materials design by directly generating entirely novel materials given desired property constraints. Despite recent progress, current generative models have low success rate in proposing stable crystals, or can only satisfy a very limited set of property constraints. Here, we present MatterGen, a model that generates stable, diverse inorganic materials across the periodic table and can further be fine-tuned to steer the generation towards a broad range of property constraints. To enable this, we introduce a new diffusion-based generative process that produces crystalline structures by gradually refining atom types, coordinates, and the periodic lattice. We further introduce adapter modules to enable fine-tuning towards any given property constraints with a labeled dataset. Compared to prior generative models, structures produced by MatterGen are more than twice as likely to be novel and stable, and more than 15 times closer to the local energy minimum. After fine-tuning, MatterGen successfully generates stable, novel materials with desired chemistry, symmetry, as well as mechanical, electronic and magnetic properties. Finally, we demonstrate multi-property materials design capabilities by proposing structures that have both high magnetic density and a chemical composition with low supply-chain risk. We believe that the quality of generated materials and the breadth of MatterGen's capabilities represent a major advancement towards creating a universal generative model for materials design.
Authors: Kareem Ahmed, Kai-Wei Chang, Guy Van den Broeck
Neuro-symbolic AI bridges the gap between purely symbolic and neural approaches to learning. This often requires maximizing the likelihood of a symbolic constraint w.r.t the neural network's output distribution. Such output distributions are typically assumed to be fully-factorized. This limits the applicability of neuro-symbolic learning to the more expressive autoregressive distributions, e.g., transformers. Under such distributions, computing the likelihood of even simple constraints is #P-hard. Instead of attempting to enforce the constraint on the entire output distribution, we propose to do so on a random, local approximation thereof. More precisely, we optimize the likelihood of the constraint under a pseudolikelihood-based approximation centered around a model sample. Our approximation is factorized, allowing the reuse of solutions to sub-problems, a main tenet for efficiently computing neuro-symbolic losses. Moreover, it is a local, high-fidelity approximation of the likelihood, exhibiting low entropy and KL-divergence around the model sample. We evaluate our approach on Sudoku and shortest-path prediction cast as autoregressive generation, and observe that we greatly improve upon the base model's ability to predict logically-consistent outputs. We also evaluate on the task of detoxifying large language models. Using a simple constraint disallowing a list of toxic words, we are able to steer the model's outputs away from toxic generations, achieving SoTA detoxification compared to previous approaches.
Authors: Binghui Peng
Multi-distribution learning generalizes the classic PAC learning to handle data coming from multiple distributions. Given a set of $k$ data distributions and a hypothesis class of VC dimension $d$, the goal is to learn a hypothesis that minimizes the maximum population loss over $k$ distributions, up to $\epsilon$ additive error. In this paper, we settle the sample complexity of multi-distribution learning by giving an algorithm of sample complexity $\widetilde{O}((d+k)\epsilon^{-2}) \cdot (k/\epsilon)^{o(1)}$. This matches the lower bound up to sub-polynomial factor and resolves the COLT 2023 open problem of Awasthi, Haghtalab and Zhao [AHZ23].
Authors: Joonwoo Kwon, Sooyoung Kim, Yuewei Lin, Shinjae Yoo, Jiook Cha
Neural style transfer (NST) has evolved significantly in recent years. Yet, despite its rapid progress and advancement, existing NST methods either struggle to transfer aesthetic information from a style effectively or suffer from high computational costs and inefficiencies in feature disentanglement due to using pre-trained models. This work proposes a lightweight but effective model, AesFA -- Aesthetic Feature-Aware NST. The primary idea is to decompose the image via its frequencies to better disentangle aesthetic styles from the reference image while training the entire model in an end-to-end manner to exclude pre-trained models at inference completely. To improve the network's ability to extract more distinct representations and further enhance the stylization quality, this work introduces a new aesthetic feature: contrastive loss. Extensive experiments and ablations show the approach not only outperforms recent NST methods in terms of stylization quality, but it also achieves faster inference. Codes are available at https://github.com/Sooyyoungg/AesFA.
Authors: Corentin Léger, Gautier Hamon, Eleni Nisioti, Xavier Hinaut, Clément Moulin-Frier
Animals often demonstrate a remarkable ability to adapt to their environments during their lifetime. They do so partly due to the evolution of morphological and neural structures. These structures capture features of environments shared between generations to bias and speed up lifetime learning. In this work, we propose a computational model for studying a mechanism that can enable such a process. We adopt a computational framework based on meta reinforcement learning as a model of the interplay between evolution and development. At the evolutionary scale, we evolve reservoirs, a family of recurrent neural networks that differ from conventional networks in that one optimizes not the synaptic weights, but hyperparameters controlling macro-level properties of the resulting network architecture. At the developmental scale, we employ these evolved reservoirs to facilitate the learning of a behavioral policy through Reinforcement Learning (RL). Within an RL agent, a reservoir encodes the environment state before providing it to an action policy. We evaluate our approach on several 2D and 3D simulated environments. Our results show that the evolution of reservoirs can improve the learning of diverse challenging tasks. We study in particular three hypotheses: the use of an architecture combining reservoirs and reinforcement learning could enable (1) solving tasks with partial observability, (2) generating oscillatory dynamics that facilitate the learning of locomotion tasks, and (3) facilitating the generalization of learned behaviors to new tasks unknown during the evolution phase.
Authors: Yibo Li, Xiao Wang, Hongrui Liu, Chuan Shi
Recent studies reveal the connection between GNNs and the diffusion process, which motivates many diffusion-based GNNs to be proposed. However, since these two mechanisms are closely related, one fundamental question naturally arises: Is there a general diffusion framework that can formally unify these GNNs? The answer to this question can not only deepen our understanding of the learning process of GNNs, but also may open a new door to design a broad new class of GNNs. In this paper, we propose a general diffusion equation framework with the fidelity term, which formally establishes the relationship between the diffusion process with more GNNs. Meanwhile, with this framework, we identify one characteristic of graph diffusion networks, i.e., the current neural diffusion process only corresponds to the first-order diffusion equation. However, by an experimental investigation, we show that the labels of high-order neighbors actually exhibit monophily property, which induces the similarity based on labels among high-order neighbors without requiring the similarity among first-order neighbors. This discovery motives to design a new high-order neighbor-aware diffusion equation, and derive a new type of graph diffusion network (HiD-Net) based on the framework. With the high-order diffusion equation, HiD-Net is more robust against attacks and works on both homophily and heterophily graphs. We not only theoretically analyze the relation between HiD-Net with high-order random walk, but also provide a theoretical convergence guarantee. Extensive experimental results well demonstrate the effectiveness of HiD-Net over state-of-the-art graph diffusion networks.
Authors: Zain Alabedeen Ali, Konstantin Yakovlev
We consider an Anonymous Multi-Agent Path-Finding (AMAPF) problem where the set of agents is confined to a graph, a set of goal vertices is given and each of these vertices has to be reached by some agent. The problem is to find an assignment of the goals to the agents as well as the collision-free paths, and we are interested in finding the solution with the optimal makespan. A well-established approach to solve this problem is to reduce it to a special type of a graph search problem, i.e. to the problem of finding a maximum flow on an auxiliary graph induced by the input one. The size of the former graph may be very large and the search on it may become a bottleneck. To this end, we suggest a specific search algorithm that leverages the idea of exploring the search space not through considering separate search states but rather bulks of them simultaneously. That is, we implicitly compress, store and expand bulks of the search states as single states, which results in high reduction in runtime and memory. Empirically, the resultant AMAPF solver demonstrates superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art competitor and is able to solve all publicly available MAPF instances from the well-known MovingAI benchmark in less than 30 seconds.
Authors: Wei Xiong, Hanze Dong, Chenlu Ye, Ziqi Wang, Han Zhong, Heng Ji, Nan Jiang, Tong Zhang
This paper studies the theoretical framework of the alignment process of generative models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We consider a standard mathematical formulation, the reverse-KL regularized contextual bandit for RLHF. Despite its widespread practical application, a rigorous theoretical analysis of this formulation remains open. We investigate its behavior in three distinct settings -- offline, online, and hybrid -- and propose efficient algorithms with finite-sample theoretical guarantees.
Moving towards practical applications, our framework, with a robust approximation of the information-theoretical policy improvement oracle, naturally gives rise to several novel RLHF algorithms. This includes an iterative version of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm for online settings, and a multi-step rejection sampling strategy for offline scenarios. Our empirical evaluations on real-world alignment experiment of large language model demonstrate that these proposed methods significantly surpass existing strong baselines, such as DPO and Rejection Sampling Optimization (RSO), showcasing the connections between solid theoretical foundations and their powerful practical implementations.
Authors: Yuansan Liu, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Ang Li, Christofer Bester, Stephen O'Leary, James Bailey
Generating time series data is a promising approach to address data deficiency problems. However, it is also challenging due to the complex temporal properties of time series data, including local correlations as well as global dependencies. Most existing generative models have failed to effectively learn both the local and global properties of time series data. To address this open problem, we propose a novel time series generative model named 'Time-Transformer AAE', which consists of an adversarial autoencoder (AAE) and a newly designed architecture named 'Time-Transformer' within the decoder. The Time-Transformer first simultaneously learns local and global features in a layer-wise parallel design, combining the abilities of Temporal Convolutional Networks and Transformer in extracting local features and global dependencies respectively. Second, a bidirectional cross attention is proposed to provide complementary guidance across the two branches and achieve proper fusion between local and global features. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can outperform existing state-of-the-art models in 5 out of 6 datasets, specifically on those with data containing both global and local properties. Furthermore, we highlight our model's advantage on handling this kind of data via an artificial dataset. Finally, we show our model's ability to address a real-world problem: data augmentation to support learning with small datasets and imbalanced datasets.
Authors: Hanlin Gu, Xinyuan Zhao, Gongxi Zhu, Yuxing Han, Yan Kang, Lixin Fan, Qiang Yang
Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively learn a shared model without sharing their individual data. Concerns about utility, privacy, and training efficiency in FL have garnered significant research attention. Differential privacy has emerged as a prevalent technique in FL, safeguarding the privacy of individual user data while impacting utility and training efficiency. Within Differential Privacy Federated Learning (DPFL), previous studies have primarily focused on the utility-privacy trade-off, neglecting training efficiency, which is crucial for timely completion. Moreover, differential privacy achieves privacy by introducing controlled randomness (noise) on selected clients in each communication round. Previous work has mainly examined the impact of noise level ($\sigma$) and communication rounds ($T$) on the privacy-utility dynamic, overlooking other influential factors like the sample ratio ($q$, the proportion of selected clients). This paper systematically formulates an efficiency-constrained utility-privacy bi-objective optimization problem in DPFL, focusing on $\sigma$, $T$, and $q$. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis, yielding analytical solutions for the Pareto front. Extensive empirical experiments verify the validity and efficacy of our analysis, offering valuable guidance for low-cost parameter design in DPFL.
Authors: Weitao Du, Shengchao Liu, Xuecang Zhang
By conceiving physical systems as 3D many-body point clouds, geometric graph neural networks (GNNs), such as SE(3)/E(3) equivalent GNNs, have showcased promising performance. In particular, their effective message-passing mechanics make them adept at modeling molecules and crystalline materials. However, current geometric GNNs only offer a mean-field approximation of the many-body system, encapsulated within two-body message passing, thus falling short in capturing intricate relationships within these geometric graphs. To address this limitation, tensor networks, widely employed by computational physics to handle manybody systems using high-order tensors, have been introduced. Nevertheless, integrating these tensorized networks into the message-passing framework of GNNs faces scalability and symmetry conservation (e.g., permutation and rotation) challenges. In response, we introduce an innovative equivariant Matrix Product State (MPS)-based message-passing strategy, through achieving an efficient implementation of the tensor contraction operation. Our method effectively models complex many-body relationships, suppressing mean-field approximations, and captures symmetries within geometric graphs. Importantly, it seamlessly replaces the standard message-passing and layer-aggregation modules intrinsic to geometric GNNs. We empirically validate the superior accuracy of our approach on benchmark tasks, including predicting classical Newton systems and quantum tensor Hamiltonian matrices. To our knowledge, our approach represents the inaugural utilization of parameterized geometric tensor networks.
Authors: Cheng Chi
Controlling continuous-time dynamical systems is generally a two step process: first, identify or model the system dynamics with differential equations, then, minimize the control objectives to achieve optimal control function and optimal state trajectories. However, any inaccuracy in dynamics modeling will lead to sub-optimality in the resulting control function. To address this, we propose a neural ODE based method for controlling unknown dynamical systems, denoted as Neural Optimal Control (NOC), which combines dynamics identification and optimal control learning using a coupled neural ODE. Through an intriguing interplay between the two neural networks in coupled neural ODE structure, our model concurrently learns system dynamics as well as optimal controls that guides towards target states. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for learning optimal control of unknown dynamical systems.
The present study puts forward a novel biographical knowledge graph (KG) on Prof. S. R. Ranganathan, one of the pioneering figures in the Library and Information Science (LIS) domain. It has been found that most of the relevant facts about Ranganathan exist in a variety of resources (e.g., books, essays, journal articles, websites, blogs, etc.), offering information in a fragmented and piecemeal way. With this dedicated KG (henceforth known as RKG), we hope to furnish a 360-degree view of his life and achievements. To the best of our knowledge, such a dedicated representation is unparalleled in its scope and coverage: using state-of-the-art technology for anyone to openly access, use/re-use, and contribute. Inspired by Ranganathan's theories and ideas, the KG was developed using a "facet-based methodology" at two levels: in the identification of the vital biographical aspects and the development of the ontological model. Finally, with this study, we call for a community-driven effort to enhance the KG and pay homage to the Father of Library Science on the hundredth anniversary of his revitalizing the LIS domain through his enduring participation.
Authors: Artem Sukhobokov, Evgeny Belousov, Danila Gromozdov, Anna Zenger, Ilya Popov
The article identified 42 cognitive architectures for creating general artificial intelligence (AGI) and proposed a set of interrelated functional blocks that an agent approaching AGI in its capabilities should possess. Since the required set of blocks is not found in any of the existing architectures, the article proposes a new cognitive architecture for intelligent systems approaching AGI in their capabilities. As one of the key solutions within the framework of the architecture, a universal method of knowledge representation is proposed, which allows combining various non-formalized, partially and fully formalized methods of knowledge representation in a single knowledge base, such as texts in natural languages, images, audio and video recordings, graphs, algorithms, databases, neural networks, knowledge graphs, ontologies, frames, essence-property-relation models, production systems, predicate calculus models, conceptual models, and others. To combine and structure various fragments of knowledge, archigraph models are used, constructed as a development of annotated metagraphs. As components, the cognitive architecture being developed includes machine consciousness, machine subconsciousness, blocks of interaction with the external environment, a goal management block, an emotional control system, a block of social interaction, a block of reflection, an ethics block and a worldview block, a learning block, a monitoring block, blocks of statement and solving problems, self-organization and meta learning block.
Authors: Zichuan Liu, Yingying Zhang, Tianchun Wang, Zefan Wang, Dongsheng Luo, Mengnan Du, Min Wu, Yi Wang, Chunlin Chen, Lunting Fan, Qingsong Wen
Explaining multivariate time series is a compound challenge, as it requires identifying important locations in the time series and matching complex temporal patterns. Although previous saliency-based methods addressed the challenges, their perturbation may not alleviate the distribution shift issue, which is inevitable especially in heterogeneous samples. We present ContraLSP, a locally sparse model that introduces counterfactual samples to build uninformative perturbations but keeps distribution using contrastive learning. Furthermore, we incorporate sample-specific sparse gates to generate more binary-skewed and smooth masks, which easily integrate temporal trends and select the salient features parsimoniously. Empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that ContraLSP outperforms state-of-the-art models, demonstrating a substantial improvement in explanation quality for time series data. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zichuan-liu/ContraLSP}.
Authors: Xiaomin Li, Mykhailo Sakevych, Gentry Atkinson, Vangelis Metsis
Machine learning tasks involving biomedical signals frequently grapple with issues such as limited data availability, imbalanced datasets, labeling complexities, and the interference of measurement noise. These challenges often hinder the optimal training of machine learning algorithms. Addressing these concerns, we introduce BioDiffusion, a diffusion-based probabilistic model optimized for the synthesis of multivariate biomedical signals. BioDiffusion demonstrates excellence in producing high-fidelity, non-stationary, multivariate signals for a range of tasks including unconditional, label-conditional, and signal-conditional generation. Leveraging these synthesized signals offers a notable solution to the aforementioned challenges. Our research encompasses both qualitative and quantitative assessments of the synthesized data quality, underscoring its capacity to bolster accuracy in machine learning tasks tied to biomedical signals. Furthermore, when juxtaposed with current leading time-series generative models, empirical evidence suggests that BioDiffusion outperforms them in biomedical signal generation quality.
Authors: Haibo Wang, Chenghang Lai, Yixuan Sun, Weifeng Ge
Video Question Answering (VideoQA) aims to answer natural language questions based on the information observed in videos. Despite the recent success of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in image-language understanding and reasoning, they deal with VideoQA insufficiently by simply taking uniformly sampled frames as visual inputs, which ignores question-relevant visual clues. Moreover, there are no human annotations for question-critical timestamps in existing VideoQA datasets. In light of this, we propose a novel weakly supervised framework to enforce the LMMs to reason out the answers with question-critical moments as visual inputs. Specifically, we fuse the question and answer pairs as event descriptions to find multiple keyframes as target moments, which will be pseudo-labels. With these pseudo-labels as additionally weak supervision, we devise a lightweight Gaussian-based Contrastive Grounding (GCG) module. GCG learns multiple Gaussian functions to characterize the temporal structure of the video, and sample question-critical frames as positive moments to be the visual inputs of LMMs. Extensive experiments on several VideoQA benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our framework, and we achieve substantial improvements compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Maryam Khalid, Elizabeth B. Klerman, Andrew W. Mchill, Andrew J. K. Phillips, Akane Sano
Sleep behavior significantly impacts health and acts as an indicator of physical and mental well-being. Monitoring and predicting sleep behavior with ubiquitous sensors may therefore assist in both sleep management and tracking of related health conditions. While sleep behavior depends on, and is reflected in the physiology of a person, it is also impacted by external factors such as digital media usage, social network contagion, and the surrounding weather. In this work, we propose SleepNet, a system that exploits social contagion in sleep behavior through graph networks and integrates it with physiological and phone data extracted from ubiquitous mobile and wearable devices for predicting next-day sleep labels about sleep duration. Our architecture overcomes the limitations of large-scale graphs containing connections irrelevant to sleep behavior by devising an attention mechanism. The extensive experimental evaluation highlights the improvement provided by incorporating social networks in the model. Additionally, we conduct robustness analysis to demonstrate the system's performance in real-life conditions. The outcomes affirm the stability of SleepNet against perturbations in input data. Further analyses emphasize the significance of network topology in prediction performance revealing that users with higher eigenvalue centrality are more vulnerable to data perturbations.
Authors: Xuechen Liu, Md Sahidullah, Kong Aik Lee, Tomi Kinnunen
It is now well-known that automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems can be spoofed using various types of adversaries. The usual approach to counteract ASV systems against such attacks is to develop a separate spoofing countermeasure (CM) module to classify speech input either as a bonafide, or a spoofed utterance. Nevertheless, such a design requires additional computation and utilization efforts at the authentication stage. An alternative strategy involves a single monolithic ASV system designed to handle both zero-effort imposter (non-targets) and spoofing attacks. Such spoof-aware ASV systems have the potential to provide stronger protections and more economic computations. To this end, we propose to generalize the standalone ASV (G-SASV) against spoofing attacks, where we leverage limited training data from CM to enhance a simple backend in the embedding space, without the involvement of a separate CM module during the test (authentication) phase. We propose a novel yet simple backend classifier based on deep neural networks and conduct the study via domain adaptation and multi-task integration of spoof embeddings at the training stage. Experiments are conducted on the ASVspoof 2019 logical access dataset, where we improve the performance of statistical ASV backends on the joint (bonafide and spoofed) and spoofed conditions by a maximum of 36.2% and 49.8% in terms of equal error rates, respectively.
Authors: Tianyi Hu, Zhiqiang Pu, Xiaolin Ai, Tenghai Qiu, Jianqiang Yi
Diversity plays a crucial role in improving the performance of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Currently, many diversity-based methods have been developed to overcome the drawbacks of excessive parameter sharing in traditional MARL. However, there remains a lack of a general metric to quantify policy differences among agents. Such a metric would not only facilitate the evaluation of the diversity evolution in multi-agent systems, but also provide guidance for the design of diversity-based MARL algorithms. In this paper, we propose the multi-agent policy distance (MAPD), a general tool for measuring policy differences in MARL. By learning the conditional representations of agents' decisions, MAPD can computes the policy distance between any pair of agents. Furthermore, we extend MAPD to a customizable version, which can quantify differences among agent policies on specified aspects. Based on the online deployment of MAPD, we design a multi-agent dynamic parameter sharing (MADPS) algorithm as an example of the MAPD's applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is effective in measuring differences in agent policies and specific behavioral tendencies. Moreover, in comparison to other methods of parameter sharing, MADPS exhibits superior performance.
Authors: Zhiyuan Wu, Yi Feng, Chuang-Wei Liu, Fisher Yu, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan
Semantic segmentation and stereo matching are two essential components of 3D environmental perception systems for autonomous driving. Nevertheless, conventional approaches often address these two problems independently, employing separate models for each task. This approach poses practical limitations in real-world scenarios, particularly when computational resources are scarce or real-time performance is imperative. Hence, in this article, we introduce S$^3$M-Net, a novel joint learning framework developed to perform semantic segmentation and stereo matching simultaneously. Specifically, S$^3$M-Net shares the features extracted from RGB images between both tasks, resulting in an improved overall scene understanding capability. This feature sharing process is realized using a feature fusion adaption (FFA) module, which effectively transforms the shared features into semantic space and subsequently fuses them with the encoded disparity features. The entire joint learning framework is trained by minimizing a novel semantic consistency-guided (SCG) loss, which places emphasis on the structural consistency in both tasks. Extensive experimental results conducted on the vKITTI2 and KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed joint learning framework and its superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art single-task networks. Our project webpage is accessible at mias.group/S3M-Net.
Authors: Heejoon Koo
Predicting next visit diagnosis using Electronic Health Records (EHR) is an essential task in healthcare, critical for devising proactive future plans for both healthcare providers and patients. Nonetheless, many preceding studies have not sufficiently addressed the heterogeneous and hierarchical characteristics inherent in EHR data, inevitably leading to sub-optimal performance. To this end, we propose NECHO, a novel medical code-centric multimodal contrastive EHR learning framework with hierarchical regularisation. First, we integrate multifaceted information encompassing medical codes, demographics, and clinical notes using a tailored network design and a pair of bimodal contrastive losses, all of which pivot around a medical codes representation. We also regularise modality-specific encoders using a parental level information in medical ontology to learn hierarchical structure of EHR data. A series of experiments on MIMIC-III data demonstrates effectiveness of our approach.
Authors: Chao Liu, Boxi Chen, Wei Shao, Chris Zhang, Kelvin Wong, Yi Zhang
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought forth an era of unprecedented connectivity, with an estimated 80 billion smart devices expected to be in operation by the end of 2025. These devices facilitate a multitude of smart applications, enhancing the quality of life and efficiency across various domains. Machine Learning (ML) serves as a crucial technology, not only for analyzing IoT-generated data but also for diverse applications within the IoT ecosystem. For instance, ML finds utility in IoT device recognition, anomaly detection, and even in uncovering malicious activities. This paper embarks on a comprehensive exploration of the security threats arising from ML's integration into various facets of IoT, spanning various attack types including membership inference, adversarial evasion, reconstruction, property inference, model extraction, and poisoning attacks. Unlike previous studies, our work offers a holistic perspective, categorizing threats based on criteria such as adversary models, attack targets, and key security attributes (confidentiality, availability, and integrity). We delve into the underlying techniques of ML attacks in IoT environment, providing a critical evaluation of their mechanisms and impacts. Furthermore, our research thoroughly assesses 65 libraries, both author-contributed and third-party, evaluating their role in safeguarding model and data privacy. We emphasize the availability and usability of these libraries, aiming to arm the community with the necessary tools to bolster their defenses against the evolving threat landscape. Through our comprehensive review and analysis, this paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discourse on ML-based IoT security, offering valuable insights and practical solutions to secure ML models and data in the rapidly expanding field of artificial intelligence in IoT.
Authors: Zuojin Tang, Xiaoyu Chen, YongQiang Li, Jianyu Chen
An intelligent driving system should be capable of dynamically formulating appropriate driving strategies based on the current environment and vehicle status, while ensuring the security and reliability of the system. However, existing methods based on reinforcement learning and imitation learning suffer from low safety, poor generalization, and inefficient sampling. Additionally, they cannot accurately predict future driving trajectories, and the accurate prediction of future driving trajectories is a precondition for making optimal decisions. To solve these problems, in this paper, we introduce a Safe and Generalized end-to-end Autonomous Driving System (SGADS) for complex and various scenarios. Our SGADS incorporates variational inference with normalizing flows, enabling the intelligent vehicle to accurately predict future driving trajectories. Moreover, we propose the formulation of robust safety constraints. Furthermore, we combine reinforcement learning with demonstrations to augment search process of the agent. The experimental results demonstrate that our SGADS can significantly improve safety performance, exhibit strong generalization, and enhance the training efficiency of intelligent vehicles in complex urban scenarios compared to existing methods.
Authors: Mohammad Izadi, Mehran Safayani, Abdolreza Mirzaei
Efficient real-time traffic prediction is crucial for reducing transportation time. To predict traffic conditions, we employ a spatio-temporal graph neural network (ST-GNN) to model our real-time traffic data as temporal graphs. Despite its capabilities, it often encounters challenges in delivering efficient real-time predictions for real-world traffic data. Recognizing the significance of timely prediction due to the dynamic nature of real-time data, we employ knowledge distillation (KD) as a solution to enhance the execution time of ST-GNNs for traffic prediction. In this paper, We introduce a cost function designed to train a network with fewer parameters (the student) using distilled data from a complex network (the teacher) while maintaining its accuracy close to that of the teacher. We use knowledge distillation, incorporating spatial-temporal correlations from the teacher network to enable the student to learn the complex patterns perceived by the teacher. However, a challenge arises in determining the student network architecture rather than considering it inadvertently. To address this challenge, we propose an algorithm that utilizes the cost function to calculate pruning scores, addressing small network architecture search issues, and jointly fine-tunes the network resulting from each pruning stage using KD. Ultimately, we evaluate our proposed ideas on two real-world datasets, PeMSD7 and PeMSD8. The results indicate that our method can maintain the student's accuracy close to that of the teacher, even with the retention of only $3\%$ of network parameters.
Authors: Xunyu Zhu, Jian Li, Yong Liu, Can Ma, Weiping Wang
This work addresses the challenge of democratizing advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) by compressing their mathematical reasoning capabilities into sub-billion parameter Small Language Models (SLMs) without compromising performance. We introduce Equation-of-Thought Distillation (EoTD), a novel technique that encapsulates the reasoning process into equation-based representations to construct an EoTD dataset for fine-tuning SLMs. Additionally, we propose the Ensemble Thoughts Distillation (ETD) framework to enhance the reasoning performance of SLMs. This involves creating a reasoning dataset with multiple thought processes, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Program-of-Thought (PoT), and Equation-of-Thought (EoT), and using it for fine-tuning. Our experimental findings demonstrate that EoTD significantly boosts the reasoning abilities of SLMs, while ETD enables these models to achieve state-of-the-art reasoning performance.
Authors: Tao Wen, Elynn Chen, Yuzhou Chen
Graph classification is an important learning task for graph-structured data. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently gained growing attention in graph learning and have shown significant improvements in many important graph problems. Despite their state-of-the-art performances, existing GNNs only use local information from a very limited neighborhood around each node, suffering from loss of multi-modal information and overheads of excessive computation. To address these issues, we propose a novel Tensor-view Topological Graph Neural Network (TTG-NN), a class of simple yet effective topological deep learning built upon persistent homology, graph convolution, and tensor operations. This new method incorporates tensor learning to simultaneously capture Tensor-view Topological (TT), as well as Tensor-view Graph (TG) structural information on both local and global levels. Computationally, to fully exploit graph topology and structure, we propose two flexible TT and TG representation learning modules that disentangle feature tensor aggregation and transformation and learn to preserve multi-modal structure with less computation. Theoretically, we derive high probability bounds on both the out-of-sample and in-sample mean squared approximation errors for our proposed Tensor Transformation Layer (TTL). Real data experiments show that the proposed TTG-NN outperforms 20 state-of-the-art methods on various graph benchmarks.
Authors: Shengze Li, Jianjian Cao, Peng Ye, Yuhan Ding, Chongjun Tu, Tao Chen
Recently, foundational models such as CLIP and SAM have shown promising performance for the task of Zero-Shot Anomaly Segmentation (ZSAS). However, either CLIP-based or SAM-based ZSAS methods still suffer from non-negligible key drawbacks: 1) CLIP primarily focuses on global feature alignment across different inputs, leading to imprecise segmentation of local anomalous parts; 2) SAM tends to generate numerous redundant masks without proper prompt constraints, resulting in complex post-processing requirements. In this work, we innovatively propose a CLIP and SAM collaboration framework called ClipSAM for ZSAS. The insight behind ClipSAM is to employ CLIP's semantic understanding capability for anomaly localization and rough segmentation, which is further used as the prompt constraints for SAM to refine the anomaly segmentation results. In details, we introduce a crucial Unified Multi-scale Cross-modal Interaction (UMCI) module for interacting language with visual features at multiple scales of CLIP to reason anomaly positions. Then, we design a novel Multi-level Mask Refinement (MMR) module, which utilizes the positional information as multi-level prompts for SAM to acquire hierarchical levels of masks and merges them. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving the optimal segmentation performance on the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets.
Authors: Zichen Liu, Chao Du, Wee Sun Lee, Min Lin
Acquiring an accurate world model online for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is challenging due to data nonstationarity, which typically causes catastrophic forgetting for neural networks (NNs). From the online learning perspective, a Follow-The-Leader (FTL) world model is desirable, which optimally fits all previous experiences at each round. Unfortunately, NN-based models need re-training on all accumulated data at every interaction step to achieve FTL, which is computationally expensive for lifelong agents. In this paper, we revisit models that can achieve FTL with incremental updates. Specifically, our world model is a linear regression model supported by nonlinear random features. The linear part ensures efficient FTL update while the nonlinear random feature empowers the fitting of complex environments. To best trade off model capacity and computation efficiency, we introduce a locality sensitive sparse encoding, which allows us to conduct efficient sparse updates even with very high dimensional nonlinear features. We validate the representation power of our encoding and verify that it allows efficient online learning under data covariate shift. We also show, in the Dyna MBRL setting, that our world models learned online using a single pass of trajectory data either surpass or match the performance of deep world models trained with replay and other continual learning methods.
Authors: Ruixin Song, Gabriel Spadon, Ronald Pelot, Stan Matwin, Amilcar Soares
Invasive species in water bodies pose a major threat to the environment and biodiversity globally. Due to increased transportation and trade, non-native species have been introduced to new environments, causing damage to ecosystems and leading to economic losses in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Therefore, there is a pressing need for risk assessment and management techniques to mitigate the impact of these invasions. This study aims to develop a new physics-inspired model to forecast maritime shipping traffic and thus inform risk assessment of invasive species spread through global transportation networks. Inspired by the gravity model for international trades, our model considers various factors that influence the likelihood and impact of vessel activities, such as shipping flux density, distance between ports, trade flow, and centrality measures of transportation hubs. Additionally, by analyzing the risk network of invasive species, we provide a comprehensive framework for assessing the invasion threat level given a pair of origin and destination. Accordingly, this paper introduces transformers to gravity models to rebuild the short- and long-term dependencies that make the risk analysis feasible. Thus, we introduce a physics-inspired framework that achieves an 89% segmentation accuracy for existing and non-existing trajectories and an 84.8% accuracy for the number of vessels flowing between key port areas, representing more than 10% improvement over the traditional deep-gravity model. Along these lines, this research contributes to a better understanding of invasive species risk assessment. It allows policymakers, conservationists, and stakeholders to prioritize management actions by identifying high-risk invasion pathways. Besides, our model is versatile and can include new data sources, making it suitable for assessing species invasion risks in a changing global landscape.
Authors: Lei You, Lele Cao, Mattias Nilsson
Counterfactual Explanations (CE) is the de facto method for providing insight and interpretability in black-box decision-making models by identifying alternative input instances that lead to different outcomes. This paper extends the concept of CEs to a distributional context, broadening the scope from individual data points to entire input and output distributions, named Distributional Counterfactual Explanation (DCE). In DCE, our focus shifts to analyzing the distributional properties of the factual and counterfactual, drawing parallels to the classical approach of assessing individual instances and their resulting decisions. We leverage Optimal Transport (OT) to frame a chance-constrained optimization problem, aiming to derive a counterfactual distribution that closely aligns with its factual counterpart, substantiated by statistical confidence. Our proposed optimization method, DISCOUNT, strategically balances this confidence across both input and output distributions. This algorithm is accompanied by an analysis of its convergence rate. The efficacy of our proposed method is substantiated through a series of illustrative case studies, highlighting its potential in providing deep insights into decision-making models.
Authors: Qinyuan Cheng, Tianxiang Sun, Xiangyang Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Zhangyue Yin, Shimin Li, Linyang Li, Zhengfu He, Kai Chen, Xipeng Qiu
Recently, AI assistants based on large language models (LLMs) show surprising performance in many tasks, such as dialogue, solving math problems, writing code, and using tools. Although LLMs possess intensive world knowledge, they still make factual errors when facing some knowledge intensive tasks, like open-domain question answering. These untruthful responses from the AI assistant may cause significant risks in practical applications. We believe that an AI assistant's refusal to answer questions it does not know is a crucial method for reducing hallucinations and making the assistant truthful. Therefore, in this paper, we ask the question "Can AI assistants know what they don't know and express them through natural language?" To answer this question, we construct a model-specific "I don't know" (Idk) dataset for an assistant, which contains its known and unknown questions, based on existing open-domain question answering datasets. Then we align the assistant with its corresponding Idk dataset and observe whether it can refuse to answer its unknown questions after alignment. Experimental results show that after alignment with Idk datasets, the assistant can refuse to answer most its unknown questions. For questions they attempt to answer, the accuracy is significantly higher than before the alignment.
Authors: Timothée Schmude, Laura Koesten, Torsten Möller, Sebastian Tschiatschek
Explanations of AI systems rarely address the information needs of people affected by algorithmic decision-making (ADM). This gap between conveyed information and information that matters to affected stakeholders can impede understanding and adherence to regulatory frameworks such as the AI Act. To address this gap, we present the "XAI Novice Question Bank": A catalog of affected stakeholders' information needs in two ADM use cases (employment prediction and health monitoring), covering the categories data, system context, system usage, and system specifications. Information needs were gathered in an interview study where participants received explanations in response to their inquiries. Participants further reported their understanding and decision confidence, showing that while confidence tended to increase after receiving explanations, participants also met understanding challenges, such as being unable to tell why their understanding felt incomplete. Explanations further influenced participants' perceptions of the systems' risks and benefits, which they confirmed or changed depending on the use case. When risks were perceived as high, participants expressed particular interest in explanations about intention, such as why and to what end a system was put in place. With this work, we aim to support the inclusion of affected stakeholders into explainability by contributing an overview of information and challenges relevant to them when deciding on the adoption of ADM systems. We close by summarizing our findings in a list of six key implications that inform the design of future explanations for affected stakeholder audiences.
Authors: Mohamad Khajezade, Jie JW Wu, Fatemeh Hendijani Fard, Gema Rodríguez-Pérez, Mohamed Sami Shehata
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various natural language processing and software engineering tasks, such as code generation. The LLMs are mainly utilized in the prompt-based zero/few-shot paradigm to guide the model in accomplishing the task. GPT-based models are one of the popular ones studied for tasks such as code comment generation or test generation. These tasks are `generative' tasks. However, there is limited research on the usage of LLMs for `non-generative' tasks such as classification using the prompt-based paradigm. In this preliminary exploratory study, we investigated the applicability of LLMs for Code Clone Detection (CCD), a non-generative task. By building a mono-lingual and cross-lingual CCD dataset derived from CodeNet, we first investigated two different prompts using ChatGPT to detect Type-4 code clones in Java-Java and Java-Ruby pairs in a zero-shot setting. We then conducted an analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT in CCD. ChatGPT surpasses the baselines in cross-language CCD attaining an F1-score of 0.877 and achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned models for mono-lingual CCD, with an F1-score of 0.878. Also, the prompt and the difficulty level of the problems has an impact on the performance of ChatGPT. Finally we provide insights and future directions based on our initial analysis
Authors: Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Yong Dai, Hongming Zhang, Zhenzhong Lan, Dong Yu
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) leads to a new era marked by the development of autonomous applications in the real world, which drives innovation in the creation of advanced web-based agents. Existing web agents typically only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebVoyager, an innovative Large Multimodal Model (LMM) powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. Moreover, we propose a new evaluation protocol for web agents to address the challenges of automatic evaluation of open-ended web agent tasks, leveraging the robust multimodal comprehension capabilities of GPT-4V. We create a new benchmark by gathering real-world tasks from 15 widely used websites to evaluate our agents. We show that WebVoyager achieves a 55.7% task success rate, significantly surpassing the performance of both GPT-4 (All Tools) and the WebVoyager (text-only) setups, underscoring the exceptional capability of WebVoyager in practical applications. We found that our proposed automatic evaluation achieves 85.3% agreement with human judgment, paving the way for further development of web agents in a real-world setting.
Authors: Jiangmeng Li, Fei Song, Yifan Jin, Wenwen Qiang, Changwen Zheng, Fuchun Sun, Hui Xiong
As a novel and effective fine-tuning paradigm based on large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), prompt-tuning aims to reduce the gap between downstream tasks and pre-training objectives. While prompt-tuning has yielded continuous advancements in various tasks, such an approach still remains a persistent defect: prompt-tuning methods fail to generalize to specific few-shot patterns. From the perspective of distribution analyses, we disclose that the intrinsic issues behind the phenomenon are the over-multitudinous conceptual knowledge contained in PLMs and the abridged knowledge for target downstream domains, which jointly result in that PLMs mis-locate the knowledge distributions corresponding to the target domains in the universal knowledge embedding space. To this end, we intuitively explore to approximate the unabridged target domains of downstream tasks in a debiased manner, and then abstract such domains to generate discriminative prompts, thereby providing the de-ambiguous guidance for PLMs. Guided by such an intuition, we propose a simple yet effective approach, namely BayesPrompt, to learn prompts that contain the domain discriminative information against the interference from domain-irrelevant knowledge. BayesPrompt primitively leverages known distributions to approximate the debiased factual distributions of target domains and further uniformly samples certain representative features from the approximated distributions to generate the ultimate prompts for PLMs. We provide theoretical insights with the connection to domain adaptation. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks.
Authors: Hana Kim, Kai Tzu-iunn Ong, Seoyeon Kim, Dongha Lee, Jinyoung Yeo
Memorizing and utilizing speakers' personas is a common practice for response generation in long-term conversations. Yet, human-authored datasets often provide uninformative persona sentences that hinder response quality. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages commonsense-based persona expansion to address such issues in long-term conversation. While prior work focuses on not producing personas that contradict others, we focus on transforming contradictory personas into sentences that contain rich speaker information, by refining them based on their contextual backgrounds with designed strategies. As the pioneer of persona expansion in multi-session settings, our framework facilitates better response generation via human-like persona refinement. The supplementary video of our work is available at https://caffeine-15bbf.web.app/.
Authors: Minglin Chen, Weihao Yuan, Yukun Wang, Zhe Sheng, Yisheng He, Zilong Dong, Liefeng Bo, Yulan Guo
Recently, text-to-3D approaches have achieved high-fidelity 3D content generation using text description. However, the generated objects are stochastic and lack fine-grained control. Sketches provide a cheap approach to introduce such fine-grained control. Nevertheless, it is challenging to achieve flexible control from these sketches due to their abstraction and ambiguity. In this paper, we present a multi-view sketch-guided text-to-3D generation framework (namely, Sketch2NeRF) to add sketch control to 3D generation. Specifically, our method leverages pretrained 2D diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion and ControlNet) to supervise the optimization of a 3D scene represented by a neural radiance field (NeRF). We propose a novel synchronized generation and reconstruction method to effectively optimize the NeRF. In the experiments, we collected two kinds of multi-view sketch datasets to evaluate the proposed method. We demonstrate that our method can synthesize 3D consistent contents with fine-grained sketch control while being high-fidelity to text prompts. Extensive results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of sketch similarity and text alignment.
Authors: Haoyu Xiong, Russell Mendonca, Kenneth Shaw, Deepak Pathak
Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to pick-move-place, which is arguably just the tip of the iceberg in this area. In this paper, we introduce Open-World Mobile Manipulation System, a full-stack approach to tackle realistic articulated object operation, e.g. real-world doors, cabinets, drawers, and refrigerators in open-ended unstructured environments. The robot utilizes an adaptive learning framework to initially learns from a small set of data through behavior cloning, followed by learning from online practice on novel objects that fall outside the training distribution. We also develop a low-cost mobile manipulation hardware platform capable of safe and autonomous online adaptation in unstructured environments with a cost of around 20,000 USD. In our experiments we utilize 20 articulate objects across 4 buildings in the CMU campus. With less than an hour of online learning for each object, the system is able to increase success rate from 50% of BC pre-training to 95% using online adaptation. Video results at https://open-world-mobilemanip.github.io/
Authors: Yanjie Li, Weijun Li, Lina Yu, Min Wu, Jingyi Liu, Wenqiang Li, Meilan Hao, Shu Wei, Yusong Deng
Finding a concise and interpretable mathematical formula that accurately describes the relationship between each variable and the predicted value in the data is a crucial task in scientific research, as well as a significant challenge in artificial intelligence. This problem is referred to as symbolic regression, which is an NP-hard problem. Last year, a symbolic regression method based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) was proposed and sota was obtained on multiple datasets. While this algorithm has shown considerable improvement in recovering target expressions compared to previous methods, the lack of guidance during the MCTS process severely hampers its search efficiency. Recently, some algorithms have added a pre-trained policy network to guide the search of MCTS, but the pre-trained policy network generalizes poorly. To balance efficiency and generality, we propose SR-GPT combining ideas from AlphaZero. SR-GPT is a new symbolic regression algorithm that combines MCTS with a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT). By using GPT to guide the MCTS process, the search efficiency of MCTS is significantly improved. Next, we utilize the MCTS results to further refine the GPT, enhancing its capabilities and providing more accurate guidance for the MCTS process. MCTS and GPT are coupled together and optimize each other until the target expression is successfully determined. We conducted extensive evaluations of SR-GPT using 222 expressions sourced from over 10 different symbolic regression datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that SR-GPT outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms in accurately recovering symbolic expressions both with and without added noise.
Authors: Yuan-Heng Wang, Hoshin V. Gupta
We investigate the applicability of machine learning technologies to the development of parsimonious, interpretable, catchment-scale hydrologic models using directed-graph architectures based on the mass-conserving perceptron (MCP) as the fundamental computational unit. Here, we focus on architectural complexity (depth) at a single location, rather than universal applicability (breadth) across large samples of catchments. The goal is to discover a minimal representation (numbers of cell-states and flow paths) that represents the dominant processes that can explain the input-state-output behaviors of a given catchment, with particular emphasis given to simulating the full range (high, medium, and low) of flow dynamics. We find that a HyMod-like architecture with three cell-states and two major flow pathways achieves such a representation at our study location, but that the additional incorporation of an input-bypass mechanism significantly improves the timing and shape of the hydrograph, while the inclusion of bi-directional groundwater mass exchanges significantly enhances the simulation of baseflow. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of using multiple diagnostic metrics for model evaluation, while highlighting the need for designing training metrics that are better suited to extracting information across the full range of flow dynamics. Further, they set the stage for interpretable regional-scale MCP-based hydrological modeling (using large sample data) by using neural architecture search to determine appropriate minimal representations for catchments in different hydroclimatic regimes.
Authors: Chengbo Zheng, Kangyu Yuan, Bingcan Guo, Reza Hadi Mogavi, Zhenhui Peng, Shuai Ma, Xiaojuan Ma
The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by students in learning presents new challenges for assessing their learning outcomes in project-based learning (PBL). This paper introduces a co-design study to explore the potential of students' AI usage data as a novel material for PBL assessment. We conducted workshops with 18 college students, encouraging them to speculate an alternative world where they could freely employ AI in PBL while needing to report this process to assess their skills and contributions. Our workshops yielded various scenarios of students' use of AI in PBL and ways of analyzing these uses grounded by students' vision of education goal transformation. We also found students with different attitudes toward AI exhibited distinct preferences in how to analyze and understand the use of AI. Based on these findings, we discuss future research opportunities on student-AI interactions and understanding AI-enhanced learning.
Authors: Azmain Kabir, Shaowei Wang, Yuan Tian, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Muhammad Asaduzzaman, Wenbin Zhang
Technical question and answering (Q&A) sites such as Stack Overflow have become an important source for software developers to seek knowledge. However, code snippets on Q&A sites are usually uncompilable and semantically incomplete for compilation due to unresolved types and missing dependent libraries, which raises the obstacle for users to reuse or analyze Q&A code snippets. Prior approaches either are not designed for synthesizing compilable code or suffer from a low compilation success rate. To address this problem, we propose ZS4C, a lightweight approach to perform zero-shot synthesis of compilable code from incomplete code snippets using Large Language Model (LLM). ZS4C operates in two stages. In the first stage, ZS4C utilizes an LLM, i.e., ChatGPT, to identify missing import statements for a given code snippet, leveraging our designed task-specific prompt template. In the second stage, ZS4C fixes compilation errors caused by incorrect import statements and syntax errors through collaborative work between ChatGPT and a compiler. We thoroughly evaluated ZS4C on a widely used benchmark called StatType-SO against the SOTA approach SnR. Compared with SnR, ZS4C improves the compilation rate from 63% to 87.6%, with a 39.3% improvement. On average, ZS4C can infer more accurate import statements than SnR, with an improvement of 6.6% in the F1.