new Is Complexity an Illusion?

Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett

Abstract: Simplicity is held by many to be the key to general intelligence. Simpler models tend to generalise, identifying the cause or generator of data with greater sample efficiency. The implications of the correlation between simplicity and generalisation extend far beyond computer science, addressing questions of physics and even biology. Yet simplicity is a property of form, while generalisation is of function. In interactive settings, any correlation between the two depends on interpretation. In theory there could be no correlation and yet in practice, there is. Previous theoretical work showed generalisation to be a consequence of weak constraints implied by function, not form. Experiments demonstrated choosing weak constraints over simple forms yielded a 110-500% improvement in generalisation rate. Here we show that if one does not presuppose an abstraction layer, then all forms have equal complexity. However, in the context of a spatially and temporally extended abstraction layer, efficiency demands weak constraints take simple forms, and simplicity becomes correlated with generalisation. Simplicity has no causal influence on generalisation, but appears to due to confounding.

new Learn from Failure: Fine-Tuning LLMs with Trial-and-Error Data for Intuitionistic Propositional Logic Proving

Authors: Chenyang An, Zhibo Chen, Qihao Ye, Emily First, Letian Peng, Jiayun Zhang, Zihan Wang, Sorin Lerner, Jingbo Shang

Abstract: Recent advances in Automated Theorem Proving have shown the effectiveness of leveraging a (large) language model that generates tactics (i.e. proof steps) to search through proof states. The current model, while trained solely on successful proof paths, faces a discrepancy at the inference stage, as it must sample and try various tactics at each proof state until finding success, unlike its training which does not incorporate learning from failed attempts. Intuitively, a tactic that leads to a failed search path would indicate that similar tactics should receive less attention during the following trials. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefit of training models that additionally learn from failed search paths. Facing the lack of such trial-and-error data in existing open-source theorem-proving datasets, we curate a dataset on intuitionistic propositional logic theorems and formalize it in Lean, such that we can reliably check the correctness of proofs. We compare our model trained on relatively short trial-and-error information (TrialMaster) with models trained only on the correct paths and discover that the former solves more unseen theorems with lower trial searches.

new Behavior Trees Enable Structured Programming of Language Model Agents

Authors: Richard Kelley

Abstract: Language models trained on internet-scale data sets have shown an impressive ability to solve problems in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. However, experience is showing that these models are frequently brittle in unexpected ways, and require significant scaffolding to ensure that they operate correctly in the larger systems that comprise "language-model agents." In this paper, we argue that behavior trees provide a unifying framework for combining language models with classical AI and traditional programming. We introduce Dendron, a Python library for programming language model agents using behavior trees. We demonstrate the approach embodied by Dendron in three case studies: building a chat agent, a camera-based infrastructure inspection agent for use on a mobile robot or vehicle, and an agent that has been built to satisfy safety constraints that it did not receive through instruction tuning or RLHF.

new WESE: Weak Exploration to Strong Exploitation for LLM Agents

Authors: Xu Huang, Weiwen Liu, Xiaolong Chen, Xingmei Wang, Defu Lian, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential as an intelligent agent. However, existing researches mainly focus on enhancing the agent's reasoning or decision-making abilities through well-designed prompt engineering or task-specific fine-tuning, ignoring the procedure of exploration and exploitation. When addressing complex tasks within open-world interactive environments, these methods exhibit limitations. Firstly, the lack of global information of environments leads to greedy decisions, resulting in sub-optimal solutions. On the other hand, irrelevant information acquired from the environment not only adversely introduces noise, but also incurs additional cost. This paper proposes a novel approach, Weak Exploration to Strong Exploitation (WESE), to enhance LLM agents in solving open-world interactive tasks. Concretely, WESE involves decoupling the exploration and exploitation process, employing a cost-effective weak agent to perform exploration tasks for global knowledge. A knowledge graph-based strategy is then introduced to store the acquired knowledge and extract task-relevant knowledge, enhancing the stronger agent in success rate and efficiency for the exploitation task. Our approach is flexible enough to incorporate diverse tasks, and obtains significant improvements in both success rates and efficiency across four interactive benchmarks.

new Generative Probabilistic Planning for Optimizing Supply Chain Networks

Authors: Hyung-il Ahn, Santiago Olivar, Hershel Mehta, Young Chol Song

Abstract: Supply chain networks in enterprises are typically composed of complex topological graphs involving various types of nodes and edges, accommodating numerous products with considerable demand and supply variability. However, as supply chain networks expand in size and complexity, traditional supply chain planning methods (e.g., those found in heuristic rule-based and operations research-based systems) tend to become locally optimal or lack computational scalability, resulting in substantial imbalances between supply and demand across nodes in the network. This paper introduces a novel Generative AI technique, which we call Generative Probabilistic Planning (GPP). GPP generates dynamic supply action plans that are globally optimized across all network nodes over the time horizon for changing objectives like maximizing profits or service levels, factoring in time-varying probabilistic demand, lead time, and production conditions. GPP leverages attention-based graph neural networks (GNN), offline deep reinforcement learning (Offline RL), and policy simulations to train generative policy models and create optimal plans through probabilistic simulations, effectively accounting for various uncertainties. Our experiments using historical data from a global consumer goods company with complex supply chain networks demonstrate that GPP accomplishes objective-adaptable, probabilistically resilient, and dynamic planning for supply chain networks, leading to significant improvements in performance and profitability for enterprises. Our work plays a pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of AI adoption within the supply chain domain.

new GNN-based Probabilistic Supply and Inventory Predictions in Supply Chain Networks

Authors: Hyung-il Ahn, Young Chol Song, Santiago Olivar, Hershel Mehta, Naveen Tewari

Abstract: Successful supply chain optimization must mitigate imbalances between supply and demand over time. While accurate demand prediction is essential for supply planning, it alone does not suffice. The key to successful supply planning for optimal and viable execution lies in maximizing predictability for both demand and supply throughout an execution horizon. Therefore, enhancing the accuracy of supply predictions is imperative to create an attainable supply plan that matches demand without overstocking or understocking. However, in complex supply chain networks with numerous nodes and edges, accurate supply predictions are challenging due to dynamic node interactions, cascading supply delays, resource availability, production and logistic capabilities. Consequently, supply executions often deviate from their initial plans. To address this, we present the Graph-based Supply Prediction (GSP) probabilistic model. Our attention-based graph neural network (GNN) model predicts supplies, inventory, and imbalances using graph-structured historical data, demand forecasting, and original supply plan inputs. The experiments, conducted using historical data from a global consumer goods company's large-scale supply chain, demonstrate that GSP significantly improves supply and inventory prediction accuracy, potentially offering supply plan corrections to optimize executions.

new Reframing the Mind-Body Picture: Applying Formal Systems to the Relationship of Mind and Matter

Authors: Ryan Williams

Abstract: This paper aims to show that a simple framework, utilizing basic formalisms from set theory and category theory, can clarify and inform our theories of the relation between mind and matter.

new Monte Carlo Tree Search with Boltzmann Exploration

Authors: Michael Painter, Mohamed Baioumy, Nick Hawes, Bruno Lacerda

Abstract: Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods, such as Upper Confidence Bound applied to Trees (UCT), are instrumental to automated planning techniques. However, UCT can be slow to explore an optimal action when it initially appears inferior to other actions. Maximum ENtropy Tree-Search (MENTS) incorporates the maximum entropy principle into an MCTS approach, utilising Boltzmann policies to sample actions, naturally encouraging more exploration. In this paper, we highlight a major limitation of MENTS: optimal actions for the maximum entropy objective do not necessarily correspond to optimal actions for the original objective. We introduce two algorithms, Boltzmann Tree Search (BTS) and Decaying ENtropy Tree-Search (DENTS), that address these limitations and preserve the benefits of Boltzmann policies, such as allowing actions to be sampled faster by using the Alias method. Our empirical analysis shows that our algorithms show consistent high performance across several benchmark domains, including the game of Go.

new DesignQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models' Understanding of Engineering Documentation

Authors: Anna C. Doris, Daniele Grandi, Ryan Tomich, Md Ferdous Alam, Hyunmin Cheong, Faez Ahmed

Abstract: This research introduces DesignQA, a novel benchmark aimed at evaluating the proficiency of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending and applying engineering requirements in technical documentation. Developed with a focus on real-world engineering challenges, DesignQA uniquely combines multimodal data-including textual design requirements, CAD images, and engineering drawings-derived from the Formula SAE student competition. Different from many existing MLLM benchmarks, DesignQA contains document-grounded visual questions where the input image and input document come from different sources. The benchmark features automatic evaluation metrics and is divided into segments-Rule Comprehension, Rule Compliance, and Rule Extraction-based on tasks that engineers perform when designing according to requirements. We evaluate state-of-the-art models like GPT4 and LLaVA against the benchmark, and our study uncovers the existing gaps in MLLMs' abilities to interpret complex engineering documentation. Key findings suggest that while MLLMs demonstrate potential in navigating technical documents, substantial limitations exist, particularly in accurately extracting and applying detailed requirements to engineering designs. This benchmark sets a foundation for future advancements in AI-supported engineering design processes. DesignQA is publicly available at: https://github.com/anniedoris/design_qa/.

URLs: https://github.com/anniedoris/design_qa/.

new Goal Recognition via Linear Programming

Authors: Felipe Meneguzzi, Lu\'isa R. de A. Santos, Ramon Fraga Pereira, Andr\'e G. Pereira

Abstract: Goal Recognition is the task by which an observer aims to discern the goals that correspond to plans that comply with the perceived behavior of subject agents given as a sequence of observations. Research on Goal Recognition as Planning encompasses reasoning about the model of a planning task, the observations, and the goals using planning techniques, resulting in very efficient recognition approaches. In this article, we design novel recognition approaches that rely on the Operator-Counting framework, proposing new constraints, and analyze their constraints' properties both theoretically and empirically. The Operator-Counting framework is a technique that efficiently computes heuristic estimates of cost-to-goal using Integer/Linear Programming (IP/LP). In the realm of theory, we prove that the new constraints provide lower bounds on the cost of plans that comply with observations. We also provide an extensive empirical evaluation to assess how the new constraints improve the quality of the solution, and we found that they are especially informed in deciding which goals are unlikely to be part of the solution. Our novel recognition approaches have two pivotal advantages: first, they employ new IP/LP constraints for efficiently recognizing goals; second, we show how the new IP/LP constraints can improve the recognition of goals under both partial and noisy observability.

new Content Knowledge Identification with Multi-Agent Large Language Models (LLMs)

Authors: Kaiqi Yang, Yucheng Chu, Taylor Darwin, Ahreum Han, Hang Li, Hongzhi Wen, Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, Jiliang Tang, Hui Liu

Abstract: Teachers' mathematical content knowledge (CK) is of vital importance and need in teacher professional development (PD) programs. Computer-aided asynchronous PD systems are the most recent proposed PD techniques, which aim to help teachers improve their PD equally with fewer concerns about costs and limitations of time or location. However, current automatic CK identification methods, which serve as one of the core techniques of asynchronous PD systems, face challenges such as diversity of user responses, scarcity of high-quality annotated data, and low interpretability of the predictions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Multi-Agent LLMs-based framework, LLMAgent-CK, to assess the user responses' coverage of identified CK learning goals without human annotations. By taking advantage of multi-agent LLMs in strong generalization ability and human-like discussions, our proposed LLMAgent-CK presents promising CK identifying performance on a real-world mathematical CK dataset MaCKT. Moreover, our case studies further demonstrate the working of the multi-agent framework.

new OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments

Authors: Tianbao Xie, Danyang Zhang, Jixuan Chen, Xiaochuan Li, Siheng Zhao, Ruisheng Cao, Toh Jing Hua, Zhoujun Cheng, Dongchan Shin, Fangyu Lei, Yitao Liu, Yiheng Xu, Shuyan Zhou, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Victor Zhong, Tao Yu

Abstract: Autonomous agents that accomplish complex computer tasks with minimal human interventions have the potential to transform human-computer interaction, significantly enhancing accessibility and productivity. However, existing benchmarks either lack an interactive environment or are limited to environments specific to certain applications or domains, failing to reflect the diverse and complex nature of real-world computer use, thereby limiting the scope of tasks and agent scalability. To address this issue, we introduce OSWorld, the first-of-its-kind scalable, real computer environment for multimodal agents, supporting task setup, execution-based evaluation, and interactive learning across various operating systems such as Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS. OSWorld can serve as a unified, integrated computer environment for assessing open-ended computer tasks that involve arbitrary applications. Building upon OSWorld, we create a benchmark of 369 computer tasks involving real web and desktop apps in open domains, OS file I/O, and workflows spanning multiple applications. Each task example is derived from real-world computer use cases and includes a detailed initial state setup configuration and a custom execution-based evaluation script for reliable, reproducible evaluation. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents on OSWorld reveals significant deficiencies in their ability to serve as computer assistants. While humans can accomplish over 72.36% of the tasks, the best model achieves only 12.24% success, primarily struggling with GUI grounding and operational knowledge. Comprehensive analysis using OSWorld provides valuable insights for developing multimodal generalist agents that were not possible with previous benchmarks. Our code, environment, baseline models, and data are publicly available at https://os-world.github.io.

URLs: https://os-world.github.io.

cross Uncertainty-guided annotation enhances segmentation with the human-in-the-loop

Authors: Nadieh Khalili, Joey Spronck, Francesco Ciompi, Jeroen van der Laak, Geert Litjens

Abstract: Deep learning algorithms, often critiqued for their 'black box' nature, traditionally fall short in providing the necessary transparency for trusted clinical use. This challenge is particularly evident when such models are deployed in local hospitals, encountering out-of-domain distributions due to varying imaging techniques and patient-specific pathologies. Yet, this limitation offers a unique avenue for continual learning. The Uncertainty-Guided Annotation (UGA) framework introduces a human-in-the-loop approach, enabling AI to convey its uncertainties to clinicians, effectively acting as an automated quality control mechanism. UGA eases this interaction by quantifying uncertainty at the pixel level, thereby revealing the model's limitations and opening the door for clinician-guided corrections. We evaluated UGA on the Camelyon dataset for lymph node metastasis segmentation which revealed that UGA improved the Dice coefficient (DC), from 0.66 to 0.76 by adding 5 patches, and further to 0.84 with 10 patches. To foster broader application and community contribution, we have made our code accessible at

cross A real-time Artificial Intelligence system for learning Sign Language

Authors: Elisa Cabana

Abstract: A primary challenge for the deaf and hearing-impaired community stems from the communication gap with the hearing society, which can greatly impact their daily lives and result in social exclusion. To foster inclusivity in society, our endeavor focuses on developing a cost-effective, resource-efficient, and open technology based on Artificial Intelligence, designed to assist people in learning and using Sign Language for communication. The analysis presented in this research paper intends to enrich the recent academic scientific literature on Sign Language solutions based on Artificial Intelligence, with a particular focus on American Sign Language (ASL). This research has yielded promising preliminary results and serves as a basis for further development.

cross Hybrid Training of Denoising Networks to Improve the Texture Acutance of Digital Cameras

Authors: Rapha\"el Achddou, Yann Gousseau, Sa\"id Ladjal

Abstract: In order to evaluate the capacity of a camera to render textures properly, the standard practice, used by classical scoring protocols, is to compute the frequential response to a dead leaves image target, from which is built a texture acutance metric. In this work, we propose a mixed training procedure for image restoration neural networks, relying on both natural and synthetic images, that yields a strong improvement of this acutance metric without impairing fidelity terms. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated both on the denoising of RGB images and the full development of RAW images, opening the path to a systematic improvement of the texture acutance of real imaging devices.

cross Evolving Genetic Programming Tree Models for Predicting the Mechanical Properties of Green Fibers for Better Biocomposite Materials

Authors: Faris M. AL-Oqla, Hossam Faris, Maria Habib, Pedro A. Castillo-Valdivieso

Abstract: Advanced modern technology and industrial sustainability theme have contributed implementing composite materials for various industrial applications. Green composites are among the desired alternatives for the green products. However, to properly control the performance of the green composites, predicting their constituents properties are of paramount importance. This work presents an innovative evolving genetic programming tree models for predicting the mechanical properties of natural fibers based upon several inherent chemical and physical properties. Cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin and moisture contents as well as the Microfibrillar angle of various natural fibers were considered to establish the prediction models. A one-hold-out methodology was applied for training/testing phases. Robust models were developed to predict the tensile strength, Young's modulus, and the elongation at break properties of the natural fibers. It was revealed that Microfibrillar angle was dominant and capable of determining the ultimate tensile strength of the natural fibers by 44.7% comparable to other considered properties, while the impact of cellulose content in the model was only 35.6%. This in order would facilitate utilizing artificial intelligence in predicting the overall mechanical properties of natural fibers without experimental efforts and cost to enhance developing better green composite materials for various industrial applications.

cross Exploring the Frontier of Vision-Language Models: A Survey of Current Methodologies and Future Directions

Authors: Akash Ghosh, Arkadeep Acharya, Sriparna Saha, Vinija Jain, Aman CHadha

Abstract: The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly reshaped the trajectory of the AI revolution. Nevertheless, these LLMs exhibit a notable limitation, as they are primarily adept at processing textual information. To address this constraint, researchers have endeavored to integrate visual capabilities with LLMs, resulting in the emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). These advanced models are instrumental in tackling more intricate tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. In our comprehensive survey paper, we delve into the key advancements within the realm of VLMs. Our classification organizes VLMs into three distinct categories: models dedicated to vision-language understanding, models that process multimodal inputs to generate unimodal (textual) outputs and models that both accept and produce multimodal inputs and outputs.This classification is based on their respective capabilities and functionalities in processing and generating various modalities of data.We meticulously dissect each model, offering an extensive analysis of its foundational architecture, training data sources, as well as its strengths and limitations wherever possible, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of its essential components. We also analyzed the performance of VLMs in various benchmark datasets. By doing so, we aim to offer a nuanced understanding of the diverse landscape of VLMs. Additionally, we underscore potential avenues for future research in this dynamic domain, anticipating further breakthroughs and advancements.

cross Computation Offloading for Multi-server Multi-access Edge Vehicular Networks: A DDQN-based Method

Authors: Siyu Wang, Bo Yang, Zhiwen Yu, Xuelin Cao, Yan Zhang, Chau Yuen

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a multi-user offloading problem in the overlapping domain of a multi-server mobile edge computing system. We divide the original problem into two stages: the offloading decision making stage and the request scheduling stage. To prevent the terminal from going out of service area during offloading, we consider the mobility parameter of the terminal according to the human behaviour model when making the offloading decision, and then introduce a server evaluation mechanism based on both the mobility parameter and the server load to select the optimal offloading server. In order to fully utilise the server resources, we design a double deep Q-network (DDQN)-based reward evaluation algorithm that considers the priority of tasks when scheduling offload requests. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to verify that our proposed method outperforms traditional mathematical computation methods as well as the DQN algorithm.

cross A Bio-Medical Snake Optimizer System Driven by Logarithmic Surviving Global Search for Optimizing Feature Selection and its application for Disorder Recognition

Authors: Ruba Abu Khurma, Esraa Alhenawi, Malik Braik, Fatma A. Hashim, Amit Chhabra, Pedro A. Castillo

Abstract: It is of paramount importance to enhance medical practices, given how important it is to protect human life. Medical therapy can be accelerated by automating patient prediction using machine learning techniques. To double the efficiency of classifiers, several preprocessing strategies must be adopted for their crucial duty in this field. Feature selection (FS) is one tool that has been used frequently to modify data and enhance classification outcomes by lowering the dimensionality of datasets. Excluded features are those that have a poor correlation coefficient with the label class, that is, they have no meaningful correlation with classification and do not indicate where the instance belongs. Along with the recurring features, which show a strong association with the remainder of the features. Contrarily, the model being produced during training is harmed, and the classifier is misled by their presence. This causes overfitting and increases algorithm complexity and processing time. These are used in exploration to allow solutions to be found more thoroughly and in relation to a chosen solution than at random. TLSO, PLSO, and LLSO stand for Tournament Logarithmic Snake Optimizer, Proportional Logarithmic Snake Optimizer, and Linear Order Logarithmic Snake Optimizer, respectively. A number of 22 reference medical datasets were used in experiments. The findings indicate that, among 86 % of the datasets, TLSO attained the best accuracy, and among 82 % of the datasets, the best feature reduction. In terms of the standard deviation, the TLSO also attained noteworthy reliability and stability. On the basis of running duration, it is, nonetheless, quite effective.

cross Attention-aware Semantic Communications for Collaborative Inference

Authors: Jiwoong Im, Nayoung Kwon, Taewoo Park, Jiheon Woo, Jaeho Lee, Yongjune Kim

Abstract: We propose a communication-efficient collaborative inference framework in the domain of edge inference, focusing on the efficient use of vision transformer (ViTs) models. The partitioning strategy of conventional collaborative inference fails to reduce communication cost because of the inherent architecture of ViTs maintaining consistent layer dimensions across the entire transformer encoder. Therefore, instead of employing the partitioning strategy, our framework utilizes a lightweight ViT model on the edge device, with the server deploying a complicated ViT model. To enhance communication efficiency and achieve the classification accuracy of the server model, we propose two strategies: 1) attention-aware patch selection and 2) entropy-aware image transmission. Attention-aware patch selection leverages the attention scores generated by the edge device's transformer encoder to identify and select the image patches critical for classification. This strategy enables the edge device to transmit only the essential patches to the server, significantly improving communication efficiency. Entropy-aware image transmission uses min-entropy as a metric to accurately determine whether to depend on the lightweight model on the edge device or to request the inference from the server model. In our framework, the lightweight ViT model on the edge device acts as a semantic encoder, efficiently identifying and selecting the crucial image information required for the classification task. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed collaborative inference framework can reduce communication overhead by 68% with only a minimal loss in accuracy compared to the server model.

cross Blended RAG: Improving RAG (Retriever-Augmented Generation) Accuracy with Semantic Search and Hybrid Query-Based Retrievers

Authors: Kunal Sawarkar, Abhilasha Mangal, Shivam Raj Solanki

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a prevalent approach to infuse a private knowledge base of documents with Large Language Models (LLM) to build Generative Q\&A (Question-Answering) systems. However, RAG accuracy becomes increasingly challenging as the corpus of documents scales up, with Retrievers playing an outsized role in the overall RAG accuracy by extracting the most relevant document from the corpus to provide context to the LLM. In this paper, we propose the 'Blended RAG' method of leveraging semantic search techniques, such as Dense Vector indexes and Sparse Encoder indexes, blended with hybrid query strategies. Our study achieves better retrieval results and sets new benchmarks for IR (Information Retrieval) datasets like NQ and TREC-COVID datasets. We further extend such a 'Blended Retriever' to the RAG system to demonstrate far superior results on Generative Q\&A datasets like SQUAD, even surpassing fine-tuning performance.

cross Stock Recommendations for Individual Investors: A Temporal Graph Network Approach with Diversification-Enhancing Contrastive Learning

Authors: Youngbin Lee, Yejin Kim, Yongjae Lee

Abstract: In complex financial markets, recommender systems can play a crucial role in empowering individuals to make informed decisions. Existing studies predominantly focus on price prediction, but even the most sophisticated models cannot accurately predict stock prices. Also, many studies show that most individual investors do not follow established investment theories because they have their own preferences. Hence, the tricky point in stock recommendation is that recommendations should give good investment performance but also should not ignore individual preferences. To develop effective stock recommender systems, it is essential to consider three key aspects: 1) individual preferences, 2) portfolio diversification, and 3) temporal aspect of both stock features and individual preferences. In response, we develop the portfolio temporal graph network recommender PfoTGNRec, which can handle time-varying collaborative signals and incorporates diversification-enhancing contrastive learning. As a result, our model demonstrated superior performance compared to various baselines, including cutting-edge dynamic embedding models and existing stock recommendation models, in a sense that our model exhibited good investment performance while maintaining competitive in capturing individual preferences. The source code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IJCAI2024-12F4.

URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IJCAI2024-12F4.

cross Unveiling the Impact of Macroeconomic Policies: A Double Machine Learning Approach to Analyzing Interest Rate Effects on Financial Markets

Authors: Anoop Kumar, Suresh Dodda, Navin Kamuni, Rajeev Kumar Arora

Abstract: This study examines the effects of macroeconomic policies on financial markets using a novel approach that combines Machine Learning (ML) techniques and causal inference. It focuses on the effect of interest rate changes made by the US Federal Reserve System (FRS) on the returns of fixed income and equity funds between January 1986 and December 2021. The analysis makes a distinction between actively and passively managed funds, hypothesizing that the latter are less susceptible to changes in interest rates. The study contrasts gradient boosting and linear regression models using the Double Machine Learning (DML) framework, which supports a variety of statistical learning techniques. Results indicate that gradient boosting is a useful tool for predicting fund returns; for example, a 1% increase in interest rates causes an actively managed fund's return to decrease by -11.97%. This understanding of the relationship between interest rates and fund performance provides opportunities for additional research and insightful, data-driven advice for fund managers and investors

cross Personality-affected Emotion Generation in Dialog Systems

Authors: Zhiyuan Wen, Jiannong Cao, Jiaxing Shen, Ruosong Yang, Shuaiqi Liu, Maosong Sun

Abstract: Generating appropriate emotions for responses is essential for dialog systems to provide human-like interaction in various application scenarios. Most previous dialog systems tried to achieve this goal by learning empathetic manners from anonymous conversational data. However, emotional responses generated by those methods may be inconsistent, which will decrease user engagement and service quality. Psychological findings suggest that the emotional expressions of humans are rooted in personality traits. Therefore, we propose a new task, Personality-affected Emotion Generation, to generate emotion based on the personality given to the dialog system and further investigate a solution through the personality-affected mood transition. Specifically, we first construct a daily dialog dataset, Personality EmotionLines Dataset (PELD), with emotion and personality annotations. Subsequently, we analyze the challenges in this task, i.e., (1) heterogeneously integrating personality and emotional factors and (2) extracting multi-granularity emotional information in the dialog context. Finally, we propose to model the personality as the transition weight by simulating the mood transition process in the dialog system and solve the challenges above. We conduct extensive experiments on PELD for evaluation. Results suggest that by adopting our method, the emotion generation performance is improved by 13% in macro-F1 and 5% in weighted-F1 from the BERT-base model.

cross Interval-valued fuzzy soft $\beta$-covering approximation spaces

Authors: Shizhan Lu

Abstract: The concept of interval-valued fuzzy soft $\beta$-covering approximation spaces (IFS$\beta$CASs) is introduced to combine the theories of soft sets, rough sets and interval-valued fuzzy sets, and some fundamental propositions concerning interval-valued fuzzy soft $\beta$-neighborhoods and soft $\beta$-neighborhoods of IFS$\beta$CASs are explored. And then four kinds of interval-valued fuzzy soft $\beta$-coverings based fuzzy rough sets are researched. Finally, the relationships of four kinds of interval-valued fuzzy soft $\beta$-coverings based fuzzy rough sets are investigated.

cross Goal-guided Generative Prompt Injection Attack on Large Language Models

Authors: Chong Zhang, Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Chengzhi Liu, Haochen Xue, Xiaobo Jin

Abstract: Current large language models (LLMs) provide a strong foundation for large-scale user-oriented natural language tasks. A large number of users can easily inject adversarial text or instructions through the user interface, thus causing LLMs model security challenges. Although there is currently a large amount of research on prompt injection attacks, most of these black-box attacks use heuristic strategies. It is unclear how these heuristic strategies relate to the success rate of attacks and thus effectively improve model robustness. To solve this problem, we redefine the goal of the attack: to maximize the KL divergence between the conditional probabilities of the clean text and the adversarial text. Furthermore, we prove that maximizing the KL divergence is equivalent to maximizing the Mahalanobis distance between the embedded representation $x$ and $x'$ of the clean text and the adversarial text when the conditional probability is a Gaussian distribution and gives a quantitative relationship on $x$ and $x'$. Then we designed a simple and effective goal-guided generative prompt injection strategy (G2PIA) to find an injection text that satisfies specific constraints to achieve the optimal attack effect approximately. It is particularly noteworthy that our attack method is a query-free black-box attack method with low computational cost. Experimental results on seven LLM models and four datasets show the effectiveness of our attack method.

cross Explaining EDA synthesis errors with LLMs

Authors: Siyu Qiu, Benjamin Tan, Hammond Pearce

Abstract: Training new engineers in digital design is a challenge, particularly when it comes to teaching the complex electronic design automation (EDA) tooling used in this domain. Learners will typically deploy designs in the Verilog and VHDL hardware description languages to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) from Altera (Intel) and Xilinx (AMD) via proprietary closed-source toolchains (Quartus Prime and Vivado, respectively). These tools are complex and difficult to use -- yet, as they are the tools used in industry, they are an essential first step in this space. In this work, we examine how recent advances in artificial intelligence may be leveraged to address aspects of this challenge. Specifically, we investigate if Large Language Models (LLMs), which have demonstrated text comprehension and question-answering capabilities, can be used to generate novice-friendly explanations of compile-time synthesis error messages from Quartus Prime and Vivado. To perform this study we generate 936 error message explanations using three OpenAI LLMs over 21 different buggy code samples. These are then graded for relevance and correctness, and we find that in approximately 71% of cases the LLMs give correct & complete explanations suitable for novice learners.

cross Advancements in Radiomics and Artificial Intelligence for Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis

Authors: Milad Yousefi, Shadi Farabi Maleki, Ali Jafarizadeh, Mahya Ahmadpour Youshanlui, Aida Jafari, Siamak Pedrammehr, Roohallah Alizadehsani, Ryszard Tadeusiewicz, Pawel Plawiak

Abstract: Thyroid cancer is an increasing global health concern that requires advanced diagnostic methods. The application of AI and radiomics to thyroid cancer diagnosis is examined in this review. A review of multiple databases was conducted in compliance with PRISMA guidelines until October 2023. A combination of keywords led to the discovery of an English academic publication on thyroid cancer and related subjects. 267 papers were returned from the original search after 109 duplicates were removed. Relevant studies were selected according to predetermined criteria after 124 articles were eliminated based on an examination of their abstract and title. After the comprehensive analysis, an additional six studies were excluded. Among the 28 included studies, radiomics analysis, which incorporates ultrasound (US) images, demonstrated its effectiveness in diagnosing thyroid cancer. Various results were noted, some of the studies presenting new strategies that outperformed the status quo. The literature has emphasized various challenges faced by AI models, including interpretability issues, dataset constraints, and operator dependence. The synthesized findings of the 28 included studies mentioned the need for standardization efforts and prospective multicenter studies to address these concerns. Furthermore, approaches to overcome these obstacles were identified, such as advances in explainable AI technology and personalized medicine techniques. The review focuses on how AI and radiomics could transform the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer. Despite challenges, future research on multidisciplinary cooperation, clinical applicability validation, and algorithm improvement holds the potential to improve patient outcomes and diagnostic precision in the treatment of thyroid cancer.

cross Sandwich attack: Multi-language Mixture Adaptive Attack on LLMs

Authors: Bibek Upadhayay, Vahid Behzadan

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being developed and applied, but their widespread use faces challenges. These include aligning LLMs' responses with human values to prevent harmful outputs, which is addressed through safety training methods. Even so, bad actors and malicious users have succeeded in attempts to manipulate the LLMs to generate misaligned responses for harmful questions such as methods to create a bomb in school labs, recipes for harmful drugs, and ways to evade privacy rights. Another challenge is the multilingual capabilities of LLMs, which enable the model to understand and respond in multiple languages. Consequently, attackers exploit the unbalanced pre-training datasets of LLMs in different languages and the comparatively lower model performance in low-resource languages than high-resource ones. As a result, attackers use a low-resource languages to intentionally manipulate the model to create harmful responses. Many of the similar attack vectors have been patched by model providers, making the LLMs more robust against language-based manipulation. In this paper, we introduce a new black-box attack vector called the \emph{Sandwich attack}: a multi-language mixture attack, which manipulates state-of-the-art LLMs into generating harmful and misaligned responses. Our experiments with five different models, namely Google's Bard, Gemini Pro, LLaMA-2-70-B-Chat, GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and Claude-3-OPUS, show that this attack vector can be used by adversaries to generate harmful responses and elicit misaligned responses from these models. By detailing both the mechanism and impact of the Sandwich attack, this paper aims to guide future research and development towards more secure and resilient LLMs, ensuring they serve the public good while minimizing potential for misuse.

cross Generative Resident Separation and Multi-label Classification for Multi-person Activity Recognition

Authors: Xi Chen (LIG), Julien Cumin (LIG), Fano Ramparany (LIG), Dominique Vaufreydaz (LIG)

Abstract: This paper presents two models to address the problem of multi-person activity recognition using ambient sensors in a home. The first model, Seq2Res, uses a sequence generation approach to separate sensor events from different residents. The second model, BiGRU+Q2L, uses a Query2Label multi-label classifier to predict multiple activities simultaneously. Performances of these models are compared to a state-of-the-art model in different experimental scenarios, using a state-of-the-art dataset of two residents in a home instrumented with ambient sensors. These results lead to a discussion on the advantages and drawbacks of resident separation and multi-label classification for multi-person activity recognition.

cross AI-Guided Defect Detection Techniques to Model Single Crystal Diamond Growth

Authors: Rohan Reddy Mekala, Elias Garratt, Matthias Muehle, Arjun Srinivasan, Adam Porter, Mikael Lindvall

Abstract: From a process development perspective, diamond growth via chemical vapor deposition has made significant strides. However, challenges persist in achieving high quality and large-area material production. These difficulties include controlling conditions to maintain uniform growth rates for the entire growth surface. As growth progresses, various factors or defect states emerge, altering the uniform conditions. These changes affect the growth rate and result in the formation of crystalline defects at the microscale. However, there is a distinct lack of methods to identify these defect states and their geometry using images taken during the growth process. This paper details seminal work on defect segmentation pipeline using in-situ optical images to identify features that indicate defective states that are visible at the macroscale. Using a semantic segmentation approach as applied in our previous work, these defect states and corresponding derivative features are isolated and classified by their pixel masks. Using an annotation focused human-in-the-loop software architecture to produce training datasets, with modules for selective data labeling using active learning, data augmentations, and model-assisted labeling, our approach achieves effective annotation accuracy and drastically reduces the time and cost of labeling by orders of magnitude. On the model development front, we found that deep learning-based algorithms are the most efficient. They can accurately learn complex representations from feature-rich datasets. Our best-performing model, based on the YOLOV3 and DeeplabV3plus architectures, achieved excellent accuracy for specific features of interest. Specifically, it reached 93.35% accuracy for center defects, 92.83% for polycrystalline defects, and 91.98% for edge defects.

cross Structured Reinforcement Learning for Media Streaming at the Wireless Edge

Authors: Archana Bura, Sarat Chandra Bobbili, Shreyas Rameshkumar, Desik Rengarajan, Dileep Kalathil, Srinivas Shakkottai

Abstract: Media streaming is the dominant application over wireless edge (access) networks. The increasing softwarization of such networks has led to efforts at intelligent control, wherein application-specific actions may be dynamically taken to enhance the user experience. The goal of this work is to develop and demonstrate learning-based policies for optimal decision making to determine which clients to dynamically prioritize in a video streaming setting. We formulate the policy design question as a constrained Markov decision problem (CMDP), and observe that by using a Lagrangian relaxation we can decompose it into single-client problems. Further, the optimal policy takes a threshold form in the video buffer length, which enables us to design an efficient constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) algorithm to learn it. Specifically, we show that a natural policy gradient (NPG) based algorithm that is derived using the structure of our problem converges to the globally optimal policy. We then develop a simulation environment for training, and a real-world intelligent controller attached to a WiFi access point for evaluation. We empirically show that the structured learning approach enables fast learning. Furthermore, such a structured policy can be easily deployed due to low computational complexity, leading to policy execution taking only about 15$\mu$s. Using YouTube streaming experiments in a resource constrained scenario, we demonstrate that the CRL approach can increase QoE by over 30%.

cross Interactive Learning of Physical Object Properties Through Robot Manipulation and Database of Object Measurements

Authors: Andrej Kruzliak, Jiri Hartvich, Shubhan P. Patni, Lukas Rustler, Jan Kristof Behrens, Fares J. Abu-Dakka, Krystian Mikolajczyk, Ville Kyrki, Matej Hoffmann

Abstract: This work presents a framework for automatically extracting physical object properties, such as material composition, mass, volume, and stiffness, through robot manipulation and a database of object measurements. The framework involves exploratory action selection to maximize learning about objects on a table. A Bayesian network models conditional dependencies between object properties, incorporating prior probability distributions and uncertainty associated with measurement actions. The algorithm selects optimal exploratory actions based on expected information gain and updates object properties through Bayesian inference. Experimental evaluation demonstrates effective action selection compared to a baseline and correct termination of the experiments if there is nothing more to be learned. The algorithm proved to behave intelligently when presented with trick objects with material properties in conflict with their appearance. The robot pipeline integrates with a logging module and an online database of objects, containing over 24,000 measurements of 63 objects with different grippers. All code and data are publicly available, facilitating automatic digitization of objects and their physical properties through exploratory manipulations.

cross Addressing the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus via Procedural Example Generation

Authors: Michael Hodel

Abstract: This work presents code to procedurally generate examples for the ARC training tasks. For each of the 400 tasks, an example generator following the transformation logic of the original examples was created. In effect, the assumed underlying distribution of examples for any given task was reverse engineered by implementing a means to sample from it. An attempt was made to cover an as large as reasonable space of possible examples for each task. That is, whenever the original examples of a given task may be limited in their diversity e.g. by having the dimensions of the grids, the set of symbols or number of objects constant or within tight bounds, even though the transformation does not require it, such constraints were lifted. Having access to not just a few examples per task, as the case for ARC, but instead very many, should enable a wide range of experiments that may be important stepping stones towards making leaps on the benchmark.

cross GANsemble for Small and Imbalanced Data Sets: A Baseline for Synthetic Microplastics Data

Authors: Daniel Platnick, Sourena Khanzadeh, Alireza Sadeghian, Richard Anthony Valenzano

Abstract: Microplastic particle ingestion or inhalation by humans is a problem of growing concern. Unfortunately, current research methods that use machine learning to understand their potential harms are obstructed by a lack of available data. Deep learning techniques in particular are challenged by such domains where only small or imbalanced data sets are available. Overcoming this challenge often involves oversampling underrepresented classes or augmenting the existing data to improve model performance. This paper proposes GANsemble: a two-module framework connecting data augmentation with conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) to generate class-conditioned synthetic data. First, the data chooser module automates augmentation strategy selection by searching for the best data augmentation strategy. Next, the cGAN module uses this strategy to train a cGAN for generating enhanced synthetic data. We experiment with the GANsemble framework on a small and imbalanced microplastics data set. A Microplastic-cGAN (MPcGAN) algorithm is introduced, and baselines for synthetic microplastics (SYMP) data are established in terms of Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and Inception Scores (IS). We also provide a synthetic microplastics filter (SYMP-Filter) algorithm to increase the quality of generated SYMP. Additionally, we show the best amount of oversampling with augmentation to fix class imbalance in small microplastics data sets. To our knowledge, this study is the first application of generative AI to synthetically create microplastics data.

cross Differentially Private GANs for Generating Synthetic Indoor Location Data

Authors: Vahideh Moghtadaiee, Mina Alishahi, Milad Rabiei

Abstract: The advent of location-based services has led to the widespread adoption of indoor localization systems, which enable location tracking of individuals within enclosed spaces such as buildings. While these systems provide numerous benefits such as improved security and personalized services, they also raise concerns regarding privacy violations. As such, there is a growing need for privacy-preserving solutions that can protect users' sensitive location information while still enabling the functionality of indoor localization systems. In recent years, Differentially Private Generative Adversarial Networks (DPGANs) have emerged as a powerful methodology that aims to protect the privacy of individual data points while generating realistic synthetic data similar to original data. DPGANs combine the power of generative adversarial networks (GANs) with the privacy-preserving technique of differential privacy (DP). In this paper, we introduce an indoor localization framework employing DPGANs in order to generate privacy-preserving indoor location data. We evaluate the performance of our framework on a real-world indoor localization dataset and demonstrate its effectiveness in preserving privacy while maintaining the accuracy of the localization system.

cross Deep Generative Sampling in the Dual Divergence Space: A Data-efficient & Interpretative Approach for Generative AI

Authors: Sahil Garg, Anderson Schneider, Anant Raj, Kashif Rasul, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Sneihil Gopal, Amit Dhurandhar, Guillermo Cecchi, Irina Rish

Abstract: Building on the remarkable achievements in generative sampling of natural images, we propose an innovative challenge, potentially overly ambitious, which involves generating samples of entire multivariate time series that resemble images. However, the statistical challenge lies in the small sample size, sometimes consisting of a few hundred subjects. This issue is especially problematic for deep generative models that follow the conventional approach of generating samples from a canonical distribution and then decoding or denoising them to match the true data distribution. In contrast, our method is grounded in information theory and aims to implicitly characterize the distribution of images, particularly the (global and local) dependency structure between pixels. We achieve this by empirically estimating its KL-divergence in the dual form with respect to the respective marginal distribution. This enables us to perform generative sampling directly in the optimized 1-D dual divergence space. Specifically, in the dual space, training samples representing the data distribution are embedded in the form of various clusters between two end points. In theory, any sample embedded between those two end points is in-distribution w.r.t. the data distribution. Our key idea for generating novel samples of images is to interpolate between the clusters via a walk as per gradients of the dual function w.r.t. the data dimensions. In addition to the data efficiency gained from direct sampling, we propose an algorithm that offers a significant reduction in sample complexity for estimating the divergence of the data distribution with respect to the marginal distribution. We provide strong theoretical guarantees along with an extensive empirical evaluation using many real-world datasets from diverse domains, establishing the superiority of our approach w.r.t. state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

cross Incorporating Explanations into Human-Machine Interfaces for Trust and Situation Awareness in Autonomous Vehicles

Authors: Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Randy Goebel

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles often make complex decisions via machine learning-based predictive models applied to collected sensor data. While this combination of methods provides a foundation for real-time actions, self-driving behavior primarily remains opaque to end users. In this sense, explainability of real-time decisions is a crucial and natural requirement for building trust in autonomous vehicles. Moreover, as autonomous vehicles still cause serious traffic accidents for various reasons, timely conveyance of upcoming hazards to road users can help improve scene understanding and prevent potential risks. Hence, there is also a need to supply autonomous vehicles with user-friendly interfaces for effective human-machine teaming. Motivated by this problem, we study the role of explainable AI and human-machine interface jointly in building trust in vehicle autonomy. We first present a broad context of the explanatory human-machine systems with the "3W1H" (what, whom, when, how) approach. Based on these findings, we present a situation awareness framework for calibrating users' trust in self-driving behavior. Finally, we perform an experiment on our framework, conduct a user study on it, and validate the empirical findings with hypothesis testing.

cross BISCUIT: Scaffolding LLM-Generated Code with Ephemeral UIs in Computational Notebooks

Authors: Ruijia Cheng, Titus Barik, Alan Leung, Fred Hohman, Jeffrey Nichols

Abstract: Novices frequently engage with machine learning tutorials in computational notebooks and have been adopting code generation technologies based on large language models (LLMs). However, they encounter difficulties in understanding and working with code produced by LLMs. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel workflow into computational notebooks that augments LLM-based code generation with an additional ephemeral UI step, offering users UI-based scaffolds as an intermediate stage between user prompts and code generation. We present this workflow in BISCUIT, an extension for JupyterLab that provides users with ephemeral UIs generated by LLMs based on the context of their code and intentions, scaffolding users to understand, guide, and explore with LLM-generated code. Through 10 user studies where novices used BISCUIT for machine learning tutorials, we discover that BISCUIT offers user semantic representation of code to aid their understanding, reduces the complexity of prompt engineering, and creates a playground for users to explore different variables and iterate on their ideas. We discuss the implications of our findings for UI-centric interactive paradigm in code generation LLMs.

cross ChatGPT Can Predict the Future when it Tells Stories Set in the Future About the Past

Authors: Van Pham, Scott Cunningham

Abstract: This study investigates whether OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 can accurately forecast future events using two distinct prompting strategies. To evaluate the accuracy of the predictions, we take advantage of the fact that the training data at the time of experiment stopped at September 2021, and ask about events that happened in 2022 using ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4. We employed two prompting strategies: direct prediction and what we call future narratives which ask ChatGPT to tell fictional stories set in the future with characters that share events that have happened to them, but after ChatGPT's training data had been collected. Concentrating on events in 2022, we prompted ChatGPT to engage in storytelling, particularly within economic contexts. After analyzing 100 prompts, we discovered that future narrative prompts significantly enhanced ChatGPT-4's forecasting accuracy. This was especially evident in its predictions of major Academy Award winners as well as economic trends, the latter inferred from scenarios where the model impersonated public figures like the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell. These findings indicate that narrative prompts leverage the models' capacity for hallucinatory narrative construction, facilitating more effective data synthesis and extrapolation than straightforward predictions. Our research reveals new aspects of LLMs' predictive capabilities and suggests potential future applications in analytical contexts.

cross JetMoE: Reaching Llama2 Performance with 0.1M Dollars

Authors: Yikang Shen, Zhen Guo, Tianle Cai, Zengyi Qin

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results, but their increasing resource demand has become a major obstacle to the development of powerful and accessible super-human intelligence. This report introduces JetMoE-8B, a new LLM trained with less than $0.1 million, using 1.25T tokens from carefully mixed open-source corpora and 30,000 H100 GPU hours. Despite its low cost, the JetMoE-8B demonstrates impressive performance, with JetMoE-8B outperforming the Llama2-7B model and JetMoE-8B-Chat surpassing the Llama2-13B-Chat model. These results suggest that LLM training can be much more cost-effective than generally thought. JetMoE-8B is based on an efficient Sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architecture, composed of attention and feedforward experts. Both layers are sparsely activated, allowing JetMoE-8B to have 8B parameters while only activating 2B for each input token, reducing inference computation by about 70% compared to Llama2-7B. Moreover, JetMoE-8B is highly open and academia-friendly, using only public datasets and training code. All training parameters and data mixtures have been detailed in this report to facilitate future efforts in the development of open foundation models. This transparency aims to encourage collaboration and further advancements in the field of accessible and efficient LLMs. The model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/myshell-ai/JetMoE.

URLs: https://github.com/myshell-ai/JetMoE.

cross Data-Driven Portfolio Management for Motion Pictures Industry: A New Data-Driven Optimization Methodology Using a Large Language Model as the Expert

Authors: Mohammad Alipour-Vaezi, Kwok-Leung Tsui

Abstract: Portfolio management is one of the unresponded problems of the Motion Pictures Industry (MPI). To design an optimal portfolio for an MPI distributor, it is essential to predict the box office of each project. Moreover, for an accurate box office prediction, it is critical to consider the effect of the celebrities involved in each MPI project, which was impossible with any precedent expert-based method. Additionally, the asymmetric characteristic of MPI data decreases the performance of any predictive algorithm. In this paper, firstly, the fame score of the celebrities is determined using a large language model. Then, to tackle the asymmetric character of MPI's data, projects are classified. Furthermore, the box office prediction takes place for each class of projects. Finally, using a hybrid multi-attribute decision-making technique, the preferability of each project for the distributor is calculated, and benefiting from a bi-objective optimization model, the optimal portfolio is designed.

cross Graph Attention Network for Lane-Wise and Topology-Invariant Intersection Traffic Simulation

Authors: Nooshin Yousefzadeh, Rahul Sengupta, Yashaswi Karnati, Anand Rangarajan, Sanjay Ranka

Abstract: Traffic congestion has significant economic, environmental, and social ramifications. Intersection traffic flow dynamics are influenced by numerous factors. While microscopic traffic simulators are valuable tools, they are computationally intensive and challenging to calibrate. Moreover, existing machine-learning approaches struggle to provide lane-specific waveforms or adapt to intersection topology and traffic patterns. In this study, we propose two efficient and accurate "Digital Twin" models for intersections, leveraging Graph Attention Neural Networks (GAT). These attentional graph auto-encoder digital twins capture temporal, spatial, and contextual aspects of traffic within intersections, incorporating various influential factors such as high-resolution loop detector waveforms, signal state records, driving behaviors, and turning-movement counts. Trained on diverse counterfactual scenarios across multiple intersections, our models generalize well, enabling the estimation of detailed traffic waveforms for any intersection approach and exit lanes. Multi-scale error metrics demonstrate that our models perform comparably to microsimulations. The primary application of our study lies in traffic signal optimization, a pivotal area in transportation systems research. These lightweight digital twins can seamlessly integrate into corridor and network signal timing optimization frameworks. Furthermore, our study's applications extend to lane reconfiguration, driving behavior analysis, and facilitating informed decisions regarding intersection safety and efficiency enhancements. A promising avenue for future research involves extending this approach to urban freeway corridors and integrating it with measures of effectiveness metrics.

cross RiskLabs: Predicting Financial Risk Using Large Language Model Based on Multi-Sources Data

Authors: Yupeng Cao, Zhi Chen, Qingyun Pei, Fabrizio Dimino, Lorenzo Ausiello, Prashant Kumar, K. P. Subbalakshmi, Papa Momar Ndiaye

Abstract: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly large language models (LLMs), in finance has garnered increasing academic attention. Despite progress, existing studies predominantly focus on tasks like financial text summarization, question-answering (Q$\&$A), and stock movement prediction (binary classification), with a notable gap in the application of LLMs for financial risk prediction. Addressing this gap, in this paper, we introduce \textbf{RiskLabs}, a novel framework that leverages LLMs to analyze and predict financial risks. RiskLabs uniquely combines different types of financial data, including textual and vocal information from Earnings Conference Calls (ECCs), market-related time series data, and contextual news data surrounding ECC release dates. Our approach involves a multi-stage process: initially extracting and analyzing ECC data using LLMs, followed by gathering and processing time-series data before the ECC dates to model and understand risk over different timeframes. Using multimodal fusion techniques, RiskLabs amalgamates these varied data features for comprehensive multi-task financial risk prediction. Empirical experiment results demonstrate RiskLab's effectiveness in forecasting both volatility and variance in financial markets. Through comparative experiments, we demonstrate how different data sources contribute to financial risk assessment and discuss the critical role of LLMs in this context. Our findings not only contribute to the AI in finance application but also open new avenues for applying LLMs in financial risk assessment.

cross "Confidently Nonsensical?'': A Critical Survey on the Perspectives and Challenges of 'Hallucinations' in NLP

Authors: Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Tatiana Chakravorti, Vipul Gupta, Heidi Biggs, Mukund Srinath, Koustava Goswami, Sarah Rajtmajer, Shomir Wilson

Abstract: We investigate how hallucination in large language models (LLM) is characterized in peer-reviewed literature using a critical examination of 103 publications across NLP research. Through a comprehensive review of sociological and technological literature, we identify a lack of agreement with the term `hallucination.' Additionally, we conduct a survey with 171 practitioners from the field of NLP and AI to capture varying perspectives on hallucination. Our analysis underscores the necessity for explicit definitions and frameworks outlining hallucination within NLP, highlighting potential challenges, and our survey inputs provide a thematic understanding of the influence and ramifications of hallucination in society.

cross Structure-aware Fine-tuning for Code Pre-trained Models

Authors: Jiayi Wu, Renyu Zhu, Nuo Chen, Qiushi Sun, Xiang Li, Ming Gao

Abstract: Over the past few years, we have witnessed remarkable advancements in Code Pre-trained Models (CodePTMs). These models achieved excellent representation capabilities by designing structure-based pre-training tasks for code. However, how to enhance the absorption of structural knowledge when fine-tuning CodePTMs still remains a significant challenge. To fill this gap, in this paper, we present Structure-aware Fine-tuning (SAT), a novel structure-enhanced and plug-and-play fine-tuning method for CodePTMs. We first propose a structure loss to quantify the difference between the information learned by CodePTMs and the knowledge extracted from code structure. Specifically, we use the attention scores extracted from Transformer layer as the learned structural information, and the shortest path length between leaves in abstract syntax trees as the structural knowledge. Subsequently, multi-task learning is introduced to improve the performance of fine-tuning. Experiments conducted on four pre-trained models and two generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method as a plug-and-play solution. Furthermore, we observed that SAT can benefit CodePTMs more with limited training data.

cross Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models

Authors: Evan Shieh, Faye-Marie Vassel, Cassidy Sugimoto, Thema Monroe-White

Abstract: The rapid deployment of generative language models (LMs) has raised concerns about social biases affecting the well-being of diverse consumers. The extant literature on generative LMs has primarily examined bias via explicit identity prompting. However, prior research on bias in earlier language-based technology platforms, including search engines, has shown that discrimination can occur even when identity terms are not specified explicitly. Studies of bias in LM responses to open-ended prompts (where identity classifications are left unspecified) are lacking and have not yet been grounded in end-consumer harms. Here, we advance studies of generative LM bias by considering a broader set of natural use cases via open-ended prompting. In this "laissez-faire" setting, we find that synthetically generated texts from five of the most pervasive LMs (ChatGPT3.5, ChatGPT4, Claude2.0, Llama2, and PaLM2) perpetuate harms of omission, subordination, and stereotyping for minoritized individuals with intersectional race, gender, and/or sexual orientation identities (AI/AN, Asian, Black, Latine, MENA, NH/PI, Female, Non-binary, Queer). We find widespread evidence of bias to an extent that such individuals are hundreds to thousands of times more likely to encounter LM-generated outputs that portray their identities in a subordinated manner compared to representative or empowering portrayals. We also document a prevalence of stereotypes (e.g. perpetual foreigner) in LM-generated outputs that are known to trigger psychological harms that disproportionately affect minoritized individuals. These include stereotype threat, which leads to impaired cognitive performance and increased negative self-perception. Our findings highlight the urgent need to protect consumers from discriminatory harms caused by language models and invest in critical AI education programs tailored towards empowering diverse consumers.

cross Multimodal Emotion Recognition by Fusing Video Semantic in MOOC Learning Scenarios

Authors: Yuan Zhang, Xiaomei Tao, Hanxu Ai, Tao Chen, Yanling Gan

Abstract: In the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) learning scenario, the semantic information of instructional videos has a crucial impact on learners' emotional state. Learners mainly acquire knowledge by watching instructional videos, and the semantic information in the videos directly affects learners' emotional states. However, few studies have paid attention to the potential influence of the semantic information of instructional videos on learners' emotional states. To deeply explore the impact of video semantic information on learners' emotions, this paper innovatively proposes a multimodal emotion recognition method by fusing video semantic information and physiological signals. We generate video descriptions through a pre-trained large language model (LLM) to obtain high-level semantic information about instructional videos. Using the cross-attention mechanism for modal interaction, the semantic information is fused with the eye movement and PhotoPlethysmoGraphy (PPG) signals to obtain the features containing the critical information of the three modes. The accurate recognition of learners' emotional states is realized through the emotion classifier. The experimental results show that our method has significantly improved emotion recognition performance, providing a new perspective and efficient method for emotion recognition research in MOOC learning scenarios. The method proposed in this paper not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the impact of instructional videos on learners' emotional states but also provides a beneficial reference for future research on emotion recognition in MOOC learning scenarios.

cross Characterizing the Influence of Topology on Graph Learning Tasks

Authors: Kailong Wu, Yule Xie, Jiaxin Ding, Yuxiang Ren, Luoyi Fu, Xinbing Wang, Chenghu Zhou

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNN) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of tasks by encoding features combined with topology to create effective representations. However, the fundamental problem of understanding and analyzing how graph topology influences the performance of learning models on downstream tasks has not yet been well understood. In this paper, we propose a metric, TopoInf, which characterizes the influence of graph topology by measuring the level of compatibility between the topological information of graph data and downstream task objectives. We provide analysis based on the decoupled GNNs on the contextual stochastic block model to demonstrate the effectiveness of the metric. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that TopoInf is an effective metric for measuring topological influence on corresponding tasks and can be further leveraged to enhance graph learning.

cross Interactive Prompt Debugging with Sequence Salience

Authors: Ian Tenney, Ryan Mullins, Bin Du, Shree Pandya, Minsuk Kahng, Lucas Dixon

Abstract: We present Sequence Salience, a visual tool for interactive prompt debugging with input salience methods. Sequence Salience builds on widely used salience methods for text classification and single-token prediction, and extends this to a system tailored for debugging complex LLM prompts. Our system is well-suited for long texts, and expands on previous work by 1) providing controllable aggregation of token-level salience to the word, sentence, or paragraph level, making salience over long inputs tractable; and 2) supporting rapid iteration where practitioners can act on salience results, refine prompts, and run salience on the new output. We include case studies showing how Sequence Salience can help practitioners work with several complex prompting strategies, including few-shot, chain-of-thought, and constitutional principles. Sequence Salience is built on the Learning Interpretability Tool, an open-source platform for ML model visualizations, and code, notebooks, and tutorials are available at http://goo.gle/sequence-salience.

URLs: http://goo.gle/sequence-salience.

cross Generating Counterfactual Explanations Using Cardinality Constraints

Authors: Rub\'en Ruiz-Torrubiano

Abstract: Providing explanations about how machine learning algorithms work and/or make particular predictions is one of the main tools that can be used to improve their trusworthiness, fairness and robustness. Among the most intuitive type of explanations are counterfactuals, which are examples that differ from a given point only in the prediction target and some set of features, presenting which features need to be changed in the original example to flip the prediction for that example. However, such counterfactuals can have many different features than the original example, making their interpretation difficult. In this paper, we propose to explicitly add a cardinality constraint to counterfactual generation limiting how many features can be different from the original example, thus providing more interpretable and easily understantable counterfactuals.

cross Mitigating Object Dependencies: Improving Point Cloud Self-Supervised Learning through Object Exchange

Authors: Yanhao Wu, Tong Zhang, Wei Ke, Congpei Qiu, Sabine Susstrunk, Mathieu Salzmann

Abstract: In the realm of point cloud scene understanding, particularly in indoor scenes, objects are arranged following human habits, resulting in objects of certain semantics being closely positioned and displaying notable inter-object correlations. This can create a tendency for neural networks to exploit these strong dependencies, bypassing the individual object patterns. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) strategy. Our approach leverages both object patterns and contextual cues to produce robust features. It begins with the formulation of an object-exchanging strategy, where pairs of objects with comparable sizes are exchanged across different scenes, effectively disentangling the strong contextual dependencies. Subsequently, we introduce a context-aware feature learning strategy, which encodes object patterns without relying on their specific context by aggregating object features across various scenes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing SSL techniques, further showing its better robustness to environmental changes. Moreover, we showcase the applicability of our approach by transferring pre-trained models to diverse point cloud datasets.

cross LATTE: Low-Precision Approximate Attention with Head-wise Trainable Threshold for Efficient Transformer

Authors: Jiing-Ping Wang (Andy), Ming-Guang Lin (Andy), An-Yeu (Andy), Wu

Abstract: With the rise of Transformer models in NLP and CV domain, Multi-Head Attention has been proven to be a game-changer. However, its expensive computation poses challenges to the model throughput and efficiency, especially for the long sequence tasks. Exploiting the sparsity in attention has been proven to be an effective way to reduce computation. Nevertheless, prior works do not consider the various distributions among different heads and lack a systematic method to determine the threshold. To address these challenges, we propose Low-Precision Approximate Attention with Head-wise Trainable Threshold for Efficient Transformer (LATTE). LATTE employs a headwise threshold-based filter with the low-precision dot product and computation reuse mechanism to reduce the computation of MHA. Moreover, the trainable threshold is introduced to provide a systematic method for adjusting the thresholds and enable end-to-end optimization. Experimental results indicate LATTE can smoothly adapt to both NLP and CV tasks, offering significant computation savings with only a minor compromise in performance. Also, the trainable threshold is shown to be essential for the leverage between the performance and the computation. As a result, LATTE filters up to 85.16% keys with only a 0.87% accuracy drop in the CV task and 89.91% keys with a 0.86 perplexity increase in the NLP task.

cross Bayesian Federated Model Compression for Communication and Computation Efficiency

Authors: Chengyu Xia, Danny H. K. Tsang, Vincent K. N. Lau

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate Bayesian model compression in federated learning (FL) to construct sparse models that can achieve both communication and computation efficiencies. We propose a decentralized Turbo variational Bayesian inference (D-Turbo-VBI) FL framework where we firstly propose a hierarchical sparse prior to promote a clustered sparse structure in the weight matrix. Then, by carefully integrating message passing and VBI with a decentralized turbo framework, we propose the D-Turbo-VBI algorithm which can (i) reduce both upstream and downstream communication overhead during federated training, and (ii) reduce the computational complexity during local inference. Additionally, we establish the convergence property for thr proposed D-Turbo-VBI algorithm. Simulation results show the significant gain of our proposed algorithm over the baselines in reducing communication overhead during federated training and computational complexity of final model.

cross IITP-VDLand: A Comprehensive Dataset on Decentraland Parcels

Authors: Ankit K. Bhagat, Dipika Jha, Raju Halder, Rajendra N. Paramanik, Chandra M. Kumar

Abstract: This paper presents IITP-VDLand, a comprehensive dataset of Decentraland parcels sourced from diverse platforms. Unlike existing datasets which have limited attributes and records, IITP-VDLand offers a rich array of attributes, encompassing parcel characteristics, trading history, past activities, transactions, and social media interactions. Alongside, we introduce a key attribute in the dataset, namely Rarity score, which measures the uniqueness of each parcel within the virtual world. Addressing the significant challenge posed by the dispersed nature of this data across various sources, we employ a systematic approach, utilizing both available APIs and custom scripts, to gather it. Subsequently, we meticulously curate and organize the information into four distinct segments: (1) Characteristics Data-Fragment, (2) OpenSea Trading History Data-Fragment, (3) Ethereum Activity Transactions Data-Fragment, and (4) Social Media Data-Fragment. We envisage that this dataset would serve as a robust resource for training machine- and deep-learning models specifically designed to address real-world challenges within the domain of Decentraland parcels. The performance benchmarking of more than 20 state-of-the-art price prediction models on our dataset yields promising results, achieving a maximum R2 score of 0.8251 and an accuracy of 74.23% in case of Extra Trees Regressor and Classifier. The key findings reveal that the ensemble models performs better than both deep learning and linear models for our dataset. We observe a significant impact of coordinates, geographical proximity, rarity score, and few other economic indicators on the prediction of parcel prices.

cross From Words to Numbers: Your Large Language Model Is Secretly A Capable Regressor When Given In-Context Examples

Authors: Robert Vacareanu, Vlad-Andrei Negru, Vasile Suciu, Mihai Surdeanu

Abstract: We analyze how well pre-trained large language models (e.g., Llama2, GPT-4, Claude 3, etc) can do linear and non-linear regression when given in-context examples, without any additional training or gradient updates. Our findings reveal that several large language models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude 3) are able to perform regression tasks with a performance rivaling (or even outperforming) that of traditional supervised methods such as Random Forest, Bagging, or Gradient Boosting. For example, on the challenging Friedman #2 regression dataset, Claude 3 outperforms many supervised methods such as AdaBoost, SVM, Random Forest, KNN, or Gradient Boosting. We then investigate how well the performance of large language models scales with the number of in-context exemplars. We borrow from the notion of regret from online learning and empirically show that LLMs are capable of obtaining a sub-linear regret.

cross CAT: Contrastive Adapter Training for Personalized Image Generation

Authors: Jae Wan Park, Sang Hyun Park, Jun Young Koh, Junha Lee, Min Song

Abstract: The emergence of various adapters, including Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) applied from the field of natural language processing, has allowed diffusion models to personalize image generation at a low cost. However, due to the various challenges including limited datasets and shortage of regularization and computation resources, adapter training often results in unsatisfactory outcomes, leading to the corruption of the backbone model's prior knowledge. One of the well known phenomena is the loss of diversity in object generation, especially within the same class which leads to generating almost identical objects with minor variations. This poses challenges in generation capabilities. To solve this issue, we present Contrastive Adapter Training (CAT), a simple yet effective strategy to enhance adapter training through the application of CAT loss. Our approach facilitates the preservation of the base model's original knowledge when the model initiates adapters. Furthermore, we introduce the Knowledge Preservation Score (KPS) to evaluate CAT's ability to keep the former information. We qualitatively and quantitatively compare CAT's improvement. Finally, we mention the possibility of CAT in the aspects of multi-concept adapter and optimization.

cross Differentially Private Reinforcement Learning with Self-Play

Authors: Dan Qiao, Yu-Xiang Wang

Abstract: We study the problem of multi-agent reinforcement learning (multi-agent RL) with differential privacy (DP) constraints. This is well-motivated by various real-world applications involving sensitive data, where it is critical to protect users' private information. We first extend the definitions of Joint DP (JDP) and Local DP (LDP) to two-player zero-sum episodic Markov Games, where both definitions ensure trajectory-wise privacy protection. Then we design a provably efficient algorithm based on optimistic Nash value iteration and privatization of Bernstein-type bonuses. The algorithm is able to satisfy JDP and LDP requirements when instantiated with appropriate privacy mechanisms. Furthermore, for both notions of DP, our regret bound generalizes the best known result under the single-agent RL case, while our regret could also reduce to the best known result for multi-agent RL without privacy constraints. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first line of results towards understanding trajectory-wise privacy protection in multi-agent RL.

cross Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare

Authors: Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Angus Addlesee, Daniel Hern\'andez Garc\'ia, Chris Reinke, Soraya Arias, Federica Arrigoni, Alex Auternaud, Lauriane Blavette, Cigdem Beyan, Luis Gomez Camara, Ohad Cohen, Alessandro Conti, S\'ebastien Dacunha, Christian Dondrup, Yoav Ellinson, Francesco Ferro, Sharon Gannot, Florian Gras, Nancie Gunson, Radu Horaud, Moreno D'Inc\`a, Imad Kimouche, S\'everin Lemaignan, Oliver Lemon, Cyril Liotard, Luca Marchionni, Mordehay Moradi, Tomas Pajdla, Maribel Pino, Michal Polic, Matthieu Py, Ariel Rado, Bin Ren, Elisa Ricci, Anne-Sophie Rigaud, Paolo Rota, Marta Romeo, Nicu Sebe, Weronika Siei\'nska, Pinchas Tandeitnik, Francesco Tonini, Nicolas Turro, Timoth\'ee Wintz, Yanchao Yu

Abstract: Despite the many recent achievements in developing and deploying social robotics, there are still many underexplored environments and applications for which systematic evaluation of such systems by end-users is necessary. While several robotic platforms have been used in gerontological healthcare, the question of whether or not a social interactive robot with multi-modal conversational capabilities will be useful and accepted in real-life facilities is yet to be answered. This paper is an attempt to partially answer this question, via two waves of experiments with patients and companions in a day-care gerontological facility in Paris with a full-sized humanoid robot endowed with social and conversational interaction capabilities. The software architecture, developed during the H2020 SPRING project, together with the experimental protocol, allowed us to evaluate the acceptability (AES) and usability (SUS) with more than 60 end-users. Overall, the users are receptive to this technology, especially when the robot perception and action skills are robust to environmental clutter and flexible to handle a plethora of different interactions.

cross Can Vehicle Motion Planning Generalize to Realistic Long-tail Scenarios?

Authors: Marcel Hallgarten, Julian Zapata, Martin Stoll, Katrin Renz, Andreas Zell

Abstract: Real-world autonomous driving systems must make safe decisions in the face of rare and diverse traffic scenarios. Current state-of-the-art planners are mostly evaluated on real-world datasets like nuScenes (open-loop) or nuPlan (closed-loop). In particular, nuPlan seems to be an expressive evaluation method since it is based on real-world data and closed-loop, yet it mostly covers basic driving scenarios. This makes it difficult to judge a planner's capabilities to generalize to rarely-seen situations. Therefore, we propose a novel closed-loop benchmark interPlan containing several edge cases and challenging driving scenarios. We assess existing state-of-the-art planners on our benchmark and show that neither rule-based nor learning-based planners can safely navigate the interPlan scenarios. A recently evolving direction is the usage of foundation models like large language models (LLM) to handle generalization. We evaluate an LLM-only planner and introduce a novel hybrid planner that combines an LLM-based behavior planner with a rule-based motion planner that achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark.

cross Fragile Model Watermark for integrity protection: leveraging boundary volatility and sensitive sample-pairing

Authors: ZhenZhe Gao, Zhenjun Tang, Zhaoxia Yin, Baoyuan Wu, Yue Lu

Abstract: Neural networks have increasingly influenced people's lives. Ensuring the faithful deployment of neural networks as designed by their model owners is crucial, as they may be susceptible to various malicious or unintentional modifications, such as backdooring and poisoning attacks. Fragile model watermarks aim to prevent unexpected tampering that could lead DNN models to make incorrect decisions. They ensure the detection of any tampering with the model as sensitively as possible.However, prior watermarking methods suffered from inefficient sample generation and insufficient sensitivity, limiting their practical applicability. Our approach employs a sample-pairing technique, placing the model boundaries between pairs of samples, while simultaneously maximizing logits. This ensures that the model's decision results of sensitive samples change as much as possible and the Top-1 labels easily alter regardless of the direction it moves.

cross An Effective Automated Speaking Assessment Approach to Mitigating Data Scarcity and Imbalanced Distribution

Authors: Tien-Hong Lo, Fu-An Chao, Tzu-I Wu, Yao-Ting Sung, Berlin Chen

Abstract: Automated speaking assessment (ASA) typically involves automatic speech recognition (ASR) and hand-crafted feature extraction from the ASR transcript of a learner's speech. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown stellar performance compared to traditional methods. However, SSL-based ASA systems are faced with at least three data-related challenges: limited annotated data, uneven distribution of learner proficiency levels and non-uniform score intervals between different CEFR proficiency levels. To address these challenges, we explore the use of two novel modeling strategies: metric-based classification and loss reweighting, leveraging distinct SSL-based embedding features. Extensive experimental results on the ICNALE benchmark dataset suggest that our approach can outperform existing strong baselines by a sizable margin, achieving a significant improvement of more than 10% in CEFR prediction accuracy.

cross Contrastive-Based Deep Embeddings for Label Noise-Resilient Histopathology Image Classification

Authors: Lucas Dedieu, Nicolas Nerrienet, Adrien Nivaggioli, Clara Simmat, Marceau Clavel, Arnaud Gauthier, St\'ephane Sockeel, R\'emy Peyret

Abstract: Recent advancements in deep learning have proven highly effective in medical image classification, notably within histopathology. However, noisy labels represent a critical challenge in histopathology image classification, where accurate annotations are vital for training robust deep learning models. Indeed, deep neural networks can easily overfit label noise, leading to severe degradations in model performance. While numerous public pathology foundation models have emerged recently, none have evaluated their resilience to label noise. Through thorough empirical analyses across multiple datasets, we exhibit the label noise resilience property of embeddings extracted from foundation models trained in a self-supervised contrastive manner. We demonstrate that training with such embeddings substantially enhances label noise robustness when compared to non-contrastive-based ones as well as commonly used noise-resilient methods. Our results unequivocally underline the superiority of contrastive learning in effectively mitigating the label noise challenge. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LucasDedieu/NoiseResilientHistopathology.

URLs: https://github.com/LucasDedieu/NoiseResilientHistopathology.

cross NoticIA: A Clickbait Article Summarization Dataset in Spanish

Authors: Iker Garc\'ia-Ferrero, Bego\~na Altuna

Abstract: We present NoticIA, a dataset consisting of 850 Spanish news articles featuring prominent clickbait headlines, each paired with high-quality, single-sentence generative summarizations written by humans. This task demands advanced text understanding and summarization abilities, challenging the models' capacity to infer and connect diverse pieces of information to meet the user's informational needs generated by the clickbait headline. We evaluate the Spanish text comprehension capabilities of a wide range of state-of-the-art large language models. Additionally, we use the dataset to train ClickbaitFighter, a task-specific model that achieves near-human performance in this task.

cross Medical mT5: An Open-Source Multilingual Text-to-Text LLM for The Medical Domain

Authors: Iker Garc\'ia-Ferrero, Rodrigo Agerri, Aitziber Atutxa Salazar, Elena Cabrio, Iker de la Iglesia, Alberto Lavelli, Bernardo Magnini, Benjamin Molinet, Johana Ramirez-Romero, German Rigau, Jose Maria Villa-Gonzalez, Serena Villata, Andrea Zaninello

Abstract: Research on language technology for the development of medical applications is currently a hot topic in Natural Language Understanding and Generation. Thus, a number of large language models (LLMs) have recently been adapted to the medical domain, so that they can be used as a tool for mediating in human-AI interaction. While these LLMs display competitive performance on automated medical texts benchmarks, they have been pre-trained and evaluated with a focus on a single language (English mostly). This is particularly true of text-to-text models, which typically require large amounts of domain-specific pre-training data, often not easily accessible for many languages. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by compiling, to the best of our knowledge, the largest multilingual corpus for the medical domain in four languages, namely English, French, Italian and Spanish. This new corpus has been used to train Medical mT5, the first open-source text-to-text multilingual model for the medical domain. Additionally, we present two new evaluation benchmarks for all four languages with the aim of facilitating multilingual research in this domain. A comprehensive evaluation shows that Medical mT5 outperforms both encoders and similarly sized text-to-text models for the Spanish, French, and Italian benchmarks, while being competitive with current state-of-the-art LLMs in English.

cross PINNACLE: PINN Adaptive ColLocation and Experimental points selection

Authors: Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Apivich Hemachandra, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), which incorporate PDEs as soft constraints, train with a composite loss function that contains multiple training point types: different types of collocation points chosen during training to enforce each PDE and initial/boundary conditions, and experimental points which are usually costly to obtain via experiments or simulations. Training PINNs using this loss function is challenging as it typically requires selecting large numbers of points of different types, each with different training dynamics. Unlike past works that focused on the selection of either collocation or experimental points, this work introduces PINN Adaptive ColLocation and Experimental points selection (PINNACLE), the first algorithm that jointly optimizes the selection of all training point types, while automatically adjusting the proportion of collocation point types as training progresses. PINNACLE uses information on the interaction among training point types, which had not been considered before, based on an analysis of PINN training dynamics via the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). We theoretically show that the criterion used by PINNACLE is related to the PINN generalization error, and empirically demonstrate that PINNACLE is able to outperform existing point selection methods for forward, inverse, and transfer learning problems.

cross Interactive Ontology Matching with Cost-Efficient Learning

Authors: Bin Cheng, Jonathan F\"urst, Tobias Jacobs, Celia Garrido-Hidalgo

Abstract: The creation of high-quality ontologies is crucial for data integration and knowledge-based reasoning, specifically in the context of the rising data economy. However, automatic ontology matchers are often bound to the heuristics they are based on, leaving many matches unidentified. Interactive ontology matching systems involving human experts have been introduced, but they do not solve the fundamental issue of flexibly finding additional matches outside the scope of the implemented heuristics, even though this is highly demanded in industrial settings. Active machine learning methods appear to be a promising path towards a flexible interactive ontology matcher. However, off-the-shelf active learning mechanisms suffer from low query efficiency due to extreme class imbalance, resulting in a last-mile problem where high human effort is required to identify the remaining matches. To address the last-mile problem, this work introduces DualLoop, an active learning method tailored to ontology matching. DualLoop offers three main contributions: (1) an ensemble of tunable heuristic matchers, (2) a short-term learner with a novel query strategy adapted to highly imbalanced data, and (3) long-term learners to explore potential matches by creating and tuning new heuristics. We evaluated DualLoop on three datasets of varying sizes and domains. Compared to existing active learning methods, we consistently achieved better F1 scores and recall, reducing the expected query cost spent on finding 90% of all matches by over 50%. Compared to traditional interactive ontology matchers, we are able to find additional, last-mile matches. Finally, we detail the successful deployment of our approach within an actual product and report its operational performance results within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry sector, showcasing its practical value and efficiency.

cross Finding Dino: A plug-and-play framework for unsupervised detection of out-of-distribution objects using prototypes

Authors: Poulami Sinhamahapatra, Franziska Schwaiger, Shirsha Bose, Huiyu Wang, Karsten Roscher, Stephan Guennemann

Abstract: Detecting and localising unknown or Out-of-distribution (OOD) objects in any scene can be a challenging task in vision. Particularly, in safety-critical cases involving autonomous systems like automated vehicles or trains. Supervised anomaly segmentation or open-world object detection models depend on training on exhaustively annotated datasets for every domain and still struggle in distinguishing between background and OOD objects. In this work, we present a plug-and-play generalised framework - PRototype-based zero-shot OOD detection Without Labels (PROWL). It is an inference-based method that does not require training on the domain dataset and relies on extracting relevant features from self-supervised pre-trained models. PROWL can be easily adapted to detect OOD objects in any operational design domain by specifying a list of known classes from this domain. PROWL, as an unsupervised method, outperforms other supervised methods trained without auxiliary OOD data on the RoadAnomaly and RoadObstacle datasets provided in SegmentMeIfYouCan (SMIYC) benchmark. We also demonstrate its suitability for other domains such as rail and maritime scenes.

cross Model-based Cleaning of the QUILT-1M Pathology Dataset for Text-Conditional Image Synthesis

Authors: Marc Aubreville, Jonathan Ganz, Jonas Ammeling, Christopher C. Kaltenecker, Christof A. Bertram

Abstract: The QUILT-1M dataset is the first openly available dataset containing images harvested from various online sources. While it provides a huge data variety, the image quality and composition is highly heterogeneous, impacting its utility for text-conditional image synthesis. We propose an automatic pipeline that provides predictions of the most common impurities within the images, e.g., visibility of narrators, desktop environment and pathology software, or text within the image. Additionally, we propose to use semantic alignment filtering of the image-text pairs. Our findings demonstrate that by rigorously filtering the dataset, there is a substantial enhancement of image fidelity in text-to-image tasks.

cross ODA: Observation-Driven Agent for integrating LLMs and Knowledge Graphs

Authors: Lei Sun, Zhengwei Tao, Youdi Li, Hiroshi Arakawa

Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) has achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. However, existing methodologies that integrate LLMs and KGs often navigate the task-solving process solely based on the LLM's analysis of the question, overlooking the rich cognitive potential inherent in the vast knowledge encapsulated in KGs. To address this, we introduce Observation-Driven Agent (ODA), a novel AI agent framework tailored for tasks involving KGs. ODA incorporates KG reasoning abilities via global observation that enhances reasoning capabilities through a cyclical paradigm of observation, action, and reflection. Confronting the exponential explosion of knowledge during observation, we innovatively design a recursive observation mechanism. Subsequently, we integrate the observed knowledge into the action and reflection modules. Through extensive experiments, ODA demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on several datasets, notably achieving accuracy improvements of 12.87% and 8.9%.

cross Run-time Monitoring of 3D Object Detection in Automated Driving Systems Using Early Layer Neural Activation Patterns

Authors: Hakan Yekta Yatbaz, Mehrdad Dianati, Konstantinos Koufos, Roger Woodman

Abstract: Monitoring the integrity of object detection for errors within the perception module of automated driving systems (ADS) is paramount for ensuring safety. Despite recent advancements in deep neural network (DNN)-based object detectors, their susceptibility to detection errors, particularly in the less-explored realm of 3D object detection, remains a significant concern. State-of-the-art integrity monitoring (also known as introspection) mechanisms in 2D object detection mainly utilise the activation patterns in the final layer of the DNN-based detector's backbone. However, that may not sufficiently address the complexities and sparsity of data in 3D object detection. To this end, we conduct, in this article, an extensive investigation into the effects of activation patterns extracted from various layers of the backbone network for introspecting the operation of 3D object detectors. Through a comparative analysis using Kitti and NuScenes datasets with PointPillars and CenterPoint detectors, we demonstrate that using earlier layers' activation patterns enhances the error detection performance of the integrity monitoring system, yet increases computational complexity. To address the real-time operation requirements in ADS, we also introduce a novel introspection method that combines activation patterns from multiple layers of the detector's backbone and report its performance.

cross Depth Estimation using Weighted-loss and Transfer Learning

Authors: Muhammad Adeel Hafeez, Michael G. Madden, Ganesh Sistu, Ihsan Ullah

Abstract: Depth estimation from 2D images is a common computer vision task that has applications in many fields including autonomous vehicles, scene understanding and robotics. The accuracy of a supervised depth estimation method mainly relies on the chosen loss function, the model architecture, quality of data and performance metrics. In this study, we propose a simplified and adaptable approach to improve depth estimation accuracy using transfer learning and an optimized loss function. The optimized loss function is a combination of weighted losses to which enhance robustness and generalization: Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Edge Loss and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). We use a grid search and a random search method to find optimized weights for the losses, which leads to an improved model. We explore multiple encoder-decoder-based models including DenseNet121, DenseNet169, DenseNet201, and EfficientNet for the supervised depth estimation model on NYU Depth Dataset v2. We observe that the EfficientNet model, pre-trained on ImageNet for classification when used as an encoder, with a simple upsampling decoder, gives the best results in terms of RSME, REL and log10: 0.386, 0.113 and 0.049, respectively. We also perform a qualitative analysis which illustrates that our model produces depth maps that closely resemble ground truth, even in cases where the ground truth is flawed. The results indicate significant improvements in accuracy and robustness, with EfficientNet being the most successful architecture.

cross Point Cloud Geometry Scalable Coding with a Quality-Conditioned Latents Probability Estimator

Authors: Daniele Mari, Andr\'e F. R. Guarda, Nuno M. M. Rodrigues, Simone Milani, Fernando Pereira

Abstract: The widespread usage of point clouds (PC) for immersive visual applications has resulted in the use of very heterogeneous receiving conditions and devices, notably in terms of network, hardware, and display capabilities. In this scenario, quality scalability, i.e., the ability to reconstruct a signal at different qualities by progressively decoding a single bitstream, is a major requirement that has yet to be conveniently addressed, notably in most learning-based PC coding solutions. This paper proposes a quality scalability scheme, named Scalable Quality Hyperprior (SQH), adaptable to learning-based static point cloud geometry codecs, which uses a Quality-conditioned Latents Probability Estimator (QuLPE) to decode a high-quality version of a PC learning-based representation, based on an available lower quality base layer. SQH is integrated in the future JPEG PC coding standard, allowing to create a layered bitstream that can be used to progressively decode the PC geometry with increasing quality and fidelity. Experimental results show that SQH offers the quality scalability feature with very limited or no compression performance penalty at all when compared with the corresponding non-scalable solution, thus preserving the significant compression gains over other state-of-the-art PC codecs.

cross Applying Guidance in a Limited Interval Improves Sample and Distribution Quality in Diffusion Models

Authors: Tuomas Kynk\"a\"anniemi, Miika Aittala, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Timo Aila, Jaakko Lehtinen

Abstract: Guidance is a crucial technique for extracting the best performance out of image-generating diffusion models. Traditionally, a constant guidance weight has been applied throughout the sampling chain of an image. We show that guidance is clearly harmful toward the beginning of the chain (high noise levels), largely unnecessary toward the end (low noise levels), and only beneficial in the middle. We thus restrict it to a specific range of noise levels, improving both the inference speed and result quality. This limited guidance interval improves the record FID in ImageNet-512 significantly, from 1.81 to 1.40. We show that it is quantitatively and qualitatively beneficial across different sampler parameters, network architectures, and datasets, including the large-scale setting of Stable Diffusion XL. We thus suggest exposing the guidance interval as a hyperparameter in all diffusion models that use guidance.

cross Unraveling the Dilemma of AI Errors: Exploring the Effectiveness of Human and Machine Explanations for Large Language Models

Authors: Marvin Pafla, Kate Larson, Mark Hancock

Abstract: The field of eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has produced a plethora of methods (e.g., saliency-maps) to gain insight into artificial intelligence (AI) models, and has exploded with the rise of deep learning (DL). However, human-participant studies question the efficacy of these methods, particularly when the AI output is wrong. In this study, we collected and analyzed 156 human-generated text and saliency-based explanations collected in a question-answering task (N=40) and compared them empirically to state-of-the-art XAI explanations (integrated gradients, conservative LRP, and ChatGPT) in a human-participant study (N=136). Our findings show that participants found human saliency maps to be more helpful in explaining AI answers than machine saliency maps, but performance negatively correlated with trust in the AI model and explanations. This finding hints at the dilemma of AI errors in explanation, where helpful explanations can lead to lower task performance when they support wrong AI predictions.

cross Diffusing in Someone Else's Shoes: Robotic Perspective Taking with Diffusion

Authors: Josua Spisak, Matthias Kerzel, Stefan Wermter

Abstract: Humanoid robots can benefit from their similarity to the human shape by learning from humans. When humans teach other humans how to perform actions, they often demonstrate the actions and the learning human can try to imitate the demonstration. Being able to mentally transfer from a demonstration seen from a third-person perspective to how it should look from a first-person perspective is fundamental for this ability in humans. As this is a challenging task, it is often simplified for robots by creating a demonstration in the first-person perspective. Creating these demonstrations requires more effort but allows for an easier imitation. We introduce a novel diffusion model aimed at enabling the robot to directly learn from the third-person demonstrations. Our model is capable of learning and generating the first-person perspective from the third-person perspective by translating the size and rotations of objects and the environment between two perspectives. This allows us to utilise the benefits of easy-to-produce third-person demonstrations and easy-to-imitate first-person demonstrations. The model can either represent the first-person perspective in an RGB image or calculate the joint values. Our approach significantly outperforms other image-to-image models in this task.

cross ResearchAgent: Iterative Research Idea Generation over Scientific Literature with Large Language Models

Authors: Jinheon Baek, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Silviu Cucerzan, Sung Ju Hwang

Abstract: Scientific Research, vital for improving human life, is hindered by its inherent complexity, slow pace, and the need for specialized experts. To enhance its productivity, we propose a ResearchAgent, a large language model-powered research idea writing agent, which automatically generates problems, methods, and experiment designs while iteratively refining them based on scientific literature. Specifically, starting with a core paper as the primary focus to generate ideas, our ResearchAgent is augmented not only with relevant publications through connecting information over an academic graph but also entities retrieved from an entity-centric knowledge store based on their underlying concepts, mined and shared across numerous papers. In addition, mirroring the human approach to iteratively improving ideas with peer discussions, we leverage multiple ReviewingAgents that provide reviews and feedback iteratively. Further, they are instantiated with human preference-aligned large language models whose criteria for evaluation are derived from actual human judgments. We experimentally validate our ResearchAgent on scientific publications across multiple disciplines, showcasing its effectiveness in generating novel, clear, and valid research ideas based on human and model-based evaluation results.

cross Generating consistent PDDL domains with Large Language Models

Authors: Pavel Smirnov, Frank Joublin, Antonello Ceravola, Michael Gienger

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of transforming natural language domain descriptions into plausibly looking PDDL markup. However, ensuring that actions are consistent within domains still remains a challenging task. In this paper we present a novel concept to significantly improve the quality of LLM-generated PDDL models by performing automated consistency checking during the generation process. Although the proposed consistency checking strategies still can't guarantee absolute correctness of generated models, they can serve as valuable source of feedback reducing the amount of correction efforts expected from a human in the loop. We demonstrate the capabilities of our error detection approach on a number of classical and custom planning domains (logistics, gripper, tyreworld, household, pizza).

cross Generating Synthetic Satellite Imagery With Deep-Learning Text-to-Image Models -- Technical Challenges and Implications for Monitoring and Verification

Authors: Tuong Vy Nguyen, Alexander Glaser, Felix Biessmann

Abstract: Novel deep-learning (DL) architectures have reached a level where they can generate digital media, including photorealistic images, that are difficult to distinguish from real data. These technologies have already been used to generate training data for Machine Learning (ML) models, and large text-to-image models like DALL-E 2, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion are achieving remarkable results in realistic high-resolution image generation. Given these developments, issues of data authentication in monitoring and verification deserve a careful and systematic analysis: How realistic are synthetic images? How easily can they be generated? How useful are they for ML researchers, and what is their potential for Open Science? In this work, we use novel DL models to explore how synthetic satellite images can be created using conditioning mechanisms. We investigate the challenges of synthetic satellite image generation and evaluate the results based on authenticity and state-of-the-art metrics. Furthermore, we investigate how synthetic data can alleviate the lack of data in the context of ML methods for remote-sensing. Finally we discuss implications of synthetic satellite imagery in the context of monitoring and verification.

cross AnnoCTR: A Dataset for Detecting and Linking Entities, Tactics, and Techniques in Cyber Threat Reports

Authors: Lukas Lange, Marc M\"uller, Ghazaleh Haratinezhad Torbati, Dragan Milchevski, Patrick Grau, Subhash Pujari, Annemarie Friedrich

Abstract: Monitoring the threat landscape to be aware of actual or potential attacks is of utmost importance to cybersecurity professionals. Information about cyber threats is typically distributed using natural language reports. Natural language processing can help with managing this large amount of unstructured information, yet to date, the topic has received little attention. With this paper, we present AnnoCTR, a new CC-BY-SA-licensed dataset of cyber threat reports. The reports have been annotated by a domain expert with named entities, temporal expressions, and cybersecurity-specific concepts including implicitly mentioned techniques and tactics. Entities and concepts are linked to Wikipedia and the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base, the most widely-used taxonomy for classifying types of attacks. Prior datasets linking to MITRE ATT&CK either provide a single label per document or annotate sentences out-of-context; our dataset annotates entire documents in a much finer-grained way. In an experimental study, we model the annotations of our dataset using state-of-the-art neural models. In our few-shot scenario, we find that for identifying the MITRE ATT&CK concepts that are mentioned explicitly or implicitly in a text, concept descriptions from MITRE ATT&CK are an effective source for training data augmentation.

cross Discourse-Aware In-Context Learning for Temporal Expression Normalization

Authors: Akash Kumar Gautam, Lukas Lange, Jannik Str\"otgen

Abstract: Temporal expression (TE) normalization is a well-studied problem. However, the predominately used rule-based systems are highly restricted to specific settings, and upcoming machine learning approaches suffer from a lack of labeled data. In this work, we explore the feasibility of proprietary and open-source large language models (LLMs) for TE normalization using in-context learning to inject task, document, and example information into the model. We explore various sample selection strategies to retrieve the most relevant set of examples. By using a window-based prompt design approach, we can perform TE normalization across sentences, while leveraging the LLM knowledge without training the model. Our experiments show competitive results to models designed for this task. In particular, our method achieves large performance improvements for non-standard settings by dynamically including relevant examples during inference.

cross AUG: A New Dataset and An Efficient Model for Aerial Image Urban Scene Graph Generation

Authors: Yansheng Li, Kun Li, Yongjun Zhang, Linlin Wang, Dingwen Zhang

Abstract: Scene graph generation (SGG) aims to understand the visual objects and their semantic relationships from one given image. Until now, lots of SGG datasets with the eyelevel view are released but the SGG dataset with the overhead view is scarcely studied. By contrast to the object occlusion problem in the eyelevel view, which impedes the SGG, the overhead view provides a new perspective that helps to promote the SGG by providing a clear perception of the spatial relationships of objects in the ground scene. To fill in the gap of the overhead view dataset, this paper constructs and releases an aerial image urban scene graph generation (AUG) dataset. Images from the AUG dataset are captured with the low-attitude overhead view. In the AUG dataset, 25,594 objects, 16,970 relationships, and 27,175 attributes are manually annotated. To avoid the local context being overwhelmed in the complex aerial urban scene, this paper proposes one new locality-preserving graph convolutional network (LPG). Different from the traditional graph convolutional network, which has the natural advantage of capturing the global context for SGG, the convolutional layer in the LPG integrates the non-destructive initial features of the objects with dynamically updated neighborhood information to preserve the local context under the premise of mining the global context. To address the problem that there exists an extra-large number of potential object relationship pairs but only a small part of them is meaningful in AUG, we propose the adaptive bounding box scaling factor for potential relationship detection (ABS-PRD) to intelligently prune the meaningless relationship pairs. Extensive experiments on the AUG dataset show that our LPG can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods and the effectiveness of the proposed locality-preserving strategy.

cross Post-Hoc Reversal: Are We Selecting Models Prematurely?

Authors: Rishabh Ranjan, Saurabh Garg, Mrigank Raman, Carlos Guestrin, Zachary Chase Lipton

Abstract: Trained models are often composed with post-hoc transforms such as temperature scaling (TS), ensembling and stochastic weight averaging (SWA) to improve performance, robustness, uncertainty estimation, etc. However, such transforms are typically applied only after the base models have already been finalized by standard means. In this paper, we challenge this practice with an extensive empirical study. In particular, we demonstrate a phenomenon that we call post-hoc reversal, where performance trends are reversed after applying these post-hoc transforms. This phenomenon is especially prominent in high-noise settings. For example, while base models overfit badly early in training, both conventional ensembling and SWA favor base models trained for more epochs. Post-hoc reversal can also suppress the appearance of double descent and mitigate mismatches between test loss and test error seen in base models. Based on our findings, we propose post-hoc selection, a simple technique whereby post-hoc metrics inform model development decisions such as early stopping, checkpointing, and broader hyperparameter choices. Our experimental analyses span real-world vision, language, tabular and graph datasets from domains like satellite imaging, language modeling, census prediction and social network analysis. On an LLM instruction tuning dataset, post-hoc selection results in > 1.5x MMLU improvement compared to naive selection. Code is available at https://github.com/rishabh-ranjan/post-hoc-reversal.

URLs: https://github.com/rishabh-ranjan/post-hoc-reversal.

cross Calibration of Continual Learning Models

Authors: Lanpei Li, Elia Piccoli, Andrea Cossu, Davide Bacciu, Vincenzo Lomonaco

Abstract: Continual Learning (CL) focuses on maximizing the predictive performance of a model across a non-stationary stream of data. Unfortunately, CL models tend to forget previous knowledge, thus often underperforming when compared with an offline model trained jointly on the entire data stream. Given that any CL model will eventually make mistakes, it is of crucial importance to build calibrated CL models: models that can reliably tell their confidence when making a prediction. Model calibration is an active research topic in machine learning, yet to be properly investigated in CL. We provide the first empirical study of the behavior of calibration approaches in CL, showing that CL strategies do not inherently learn calibrated models. To mitigate this issue, we design a continual calibration approach that improves the performance of post-processing calibration methods over a wide range of different benchmarks and CL strategies. CL does not necessarily need perfect predictive models, but rather it can benefit from reliable predictive models. We believe our study on continual calibration represents a first step towards this direction.

cross On the Sample Efficiency of Abstractions and Potential-Based Reward Shaping in Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Giuseppe Canonaco, Leo Ardon, Alberto Pozanco, Daniel Borrajo

Abstract: The use of Potential Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) has shown great promise in the ongoing research effort to tackle sample inefficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, the choice of the potential function is critical for this technique to be effective. Additionally, RL techniques are usually constrained to use a finite horizon for computational limitations. This introduces a bias when using PBRS, thus adding an additional layer of complexity. In this paper, we leverage abstractions to automatically produce a "good" potential function. We analyse the bias induced by finite horizons in the context of PBRS producing novel insights. Finally, to asses sample efficiency and performance impact, we evaluate our approach on four environments including a goal-oriented navigation task and three Arcade Learning Environments (ALE) games demonstrating that we can reach the same level of performance as CNN-based solutions with a simple fully-connected network.

cross RecurrentGemma: Moving Past Transformers for Efficient Open Language Models

Authors: Aleksandar Botev, Soham De, Samuel L Smith, Anushan Fernando, George-Cristian Muraru, Ruba Haroun, Leonard Berrada, Razvan Pascanu, Pier Giuseppe Sessa, Robert Dadashi, L\'eonard Hussenot, Johan Ferret, Sertan Girgin, Olivier Bachem, Alek Andreev, Kathleen Kenealy, Thomas Mesnard, Cassidy Hardin, Surya Bhupatiraju, Shreya Pathak, Laurent Sifre, Morgane Rivi\`ere, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Juliette Love, Pouya Tafti, Armand Joulin, Noah Fiedel, Evan Senter, Yutian Chen, Srivatsan Srinivasan, Guillaume Desjardins, David Budden, Arnaud Doucet, Sharad Vikram, Adam Paszke, Trevor Gale, Sebastian Borgeaud, Charlie Chen, Andy Brock, Antonia Paterson, Jenny Brennan, Meg Risdal, Raj Gundluru, Nesh Devanathan, Paul Mooney, Nilay Chauhan, Phil Culliton, Luiz GUStavo Martins, Elisa Bandy, David Huntsperger, Glenn Cameron, Arthur Zucker, Tris Warkentin, Ludovic Peran, Minh Giang, Zoubin Ghahramani, Cl\'ement Farabet, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Demis Hassabis, Raia Hadsell, Yee Whye Teh, Nando de Frietas

Abstract: We introduce RecurrentGemma, an open language model which uses Google's novel Griffin architecture. Griffin combines linear recurrences with local attention to achieve excellent performance on language. It has a fixed-sized state, which reduces memory use and enables efficient inference on long sequences. We provide a pre-trained model with 2B non-embedding parameters, and an instruction tuned variant. Both models achieve comparable performance to Gemma-2B despite being trained on fewer tokens.

cross MindBridge: A Cross-Subject Brain Decoding Framework

Authors: Shizun Wang, Songhua Liu, Zhenxiong Tan, Xinchao Wang

Abstract: Brain decoding, a pivotal field in neuroscience, aims to reconstruct stimuli from acquired brain signals, primarily utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Currently, brain decoding is confined to a per-subject-per-model paradigm, limiting its applicability to the same individual for whom the decoding model is trained. This constraint stems from three key challenges: 1) the inherent variability in input dimensions across subjects due to differences in brain size; 2) the unique intrinsic neural patterns, influencing how different individuals perceive and process sensory information; 3) limited data availability for new subjects in real-world scenarios hampers the performance of decoding models. In this paper, we present a novel approach, MindBridge, that achieves cross-subject brain decoding by employing only one model. Our proposed framework establishes a generic paradigm capable of addressing these challenges by introducing biological-inspired aggregation function and novel cyclic fMRI reconstruction mechanism for subject-invariant representation learning. Notably, by cycle reconstruction of fMRI, MindBridge can enable novel fMRI synthesis, which also can serve as pseudo data augmentation. Within the framework, we also devise a novel reset-tuning method for adapting a pretrained model to a new subject. Experimental results demonstrate MindBridge's ability to reconstruct images for multiple subjects, which is competitive with dedicated subject-specific models. Furthermore, with limited data for a new subject, we achieve a high level of decoding accuracy, surpassing that of subject-specific models. This advancement in cross-subject brain decoding suggests promising directions for wider applications in neuroscience and indicates potential for more efficient utilization of limited fMRI data in real-world scenarios. Project page: https://littlepure2333.github.io/MindBridge

URLs: https://littlepure2333.github.io/MindBridge

cross Guiding Large Language Models to Post-Edit Machine Translation with Error Annotations

Authors: Dayeon Ki, Marine Carpuat

Abstract: Machine Translation (MT) remains one of the last NLP tasks where large language models (LLMs) have not yet replaced dedicated supervised systems. This work exploits the complementary strengths of LLMs and supervised MT by guiding LLMs to automatically post-edit MT with external feedback on its quality, derived from Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) annotations. Working with LLaMA-2 models, we consider prompting strategies varying the nature of feedback provided and then fine-tune the LLM to improve its ability to exploit the provided guidance. Through experiments on Chinese-English, English-German, and English-Russian MQM data, we demonstrate that prompting LLMs to post-edit MT improves TER, BLEU and COMET scores, although the benefits of fine-grained feedback are not clear. Fine-tuning helps integrate fine-grained feedback more effectively and further improves translation quality based on both automatic and human evaluation.

cross Apprentice Tutor Builder: A Platform For Users to Create and Personalize Intelligent Tutors

Authors: Glen Smith, Adit Gupta, Christopher MacLellan

Abstract: Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are effective for improving students' learning outcomes. However, their development is often complex, time-consuming, and requires specialized programming and tutor design knowledge, thus hindering their widespread application and personalization. We present the Apprentice Tutor Builder (ATB) , a platform that simplifies tutor creation and personalization. Instructors can utilize ATB's drag-and-drop tool to build tutor interfaces. Instructors can then interactively train the tutors' underlying AI agent to produce expert models that can solve problems. Training is achieved via using multiple interaction modalities including demonstrations, feedback, and user labels. We conducted a user study with 14 instructors to evaluate the effectiveness of ATB's design with end users. We found that users enjoyed the flexibility of the interface builder and ease and speed of agent teaching, but often desired additional time-saving features. With these insights, we identified a set of design recommendations for our platform and others that utilize interactive AI agents for tutor creation and customization.

cross High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models

Authors: Samuel Cahyawijaya, Delong Chen, Yejin Bang, Leila Khalatbari, Bryan Wilie, Ziwei Ji, Etsuko Ishii, Pascale Fung

Abstract: The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks and fields has necessitated the alignment of these models with human values and preferences. Given various approaches of human value alignment, ranging from Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), to constitutional learning, etc. there is an urgent need to understand the scope and nature of human values injected into these models before their release. There is also a need for model alignment without a costly large scale human annotation effort. We propose UniVaR, a high-dimensional representation of human value distributions in LLMs, orthogonal to model architecture and training data. Trained from the value-relevant output of eight multilingual LLMs and tested on the output from four multilingual LLMs, namely LlaMA2, ChatGPT, JAIS and Yi, we show that UniVaR is a powerful tool to compare the distribution of human values embedded in different LLMs with different langauge sources. Through UniVaR, we explore how different LLMs prioritize various values in different languages and cultures, shedding light on the complex interplay between human values and language modeling.

cross Low-rank Adaptation for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

Authors: Weilin Ruan, Wei Chen, Xilin Dang, Jianxiang Zhou, Weichuang Li, Xu Liu, Yuxuan Liang

Abstract: Spatio-temporal forecasting is crucial in real-world dynamic systems, predicting future changes using historical data from diverse locations. Existing methods often prioritize the development of intricate neural networks to capture the complex dependencies of the data, yet their accuracy fails to show sustained improvement. Besides, these methods also overlook node heterogeneity, hindering customized prediction modules from handling diverse regional nodes effectively. In this paper, our goal is not to propose a new model but to present a novel low-rank adaptation framework as an off-the-shelf plugin for existing spatial-temporal prediction models, termed ST-LoRA, which alleviates the aforementioned problems through node-level adjustments. Specifically, we first tailor a node adaptive low-rank layer comprising multiple trainable low-rank matrices. Additionally, we devise a multi-layer residual fusion stacking module, injecting the low-rank adapters into predictor modules of various models. Across six real-world traffic datasets and six different types of spatio-temporal prediction models, our approach minimally increases the parameters and training time of the original models by less than 4%, still achieving consistent and sustained performance enhancement.

cross Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to Support Collaborative Human-AI Online Risk Data Annotation

Authors: Jinkyung Park, Pamela Wisniewski, Vivek Singh

Abstract: In this position paper, we discuss the potential for leveraging LLMs as interactive research tools to facilitate collaboration between human coders and AI to effectively annotate online risk data at scale. Collaborative human-AI labeling is a promising approach to annotating large-scale and complex data for various tasks. Yet, tools and methods to support effective human-AI collaboration for data annotation are under-studied. This gap is pertinent because co-labeling tasks need to support a two-way interactive discussion that can add nuance and context, particularly in the context of online risk, which is highly subjective and contextualized. Therefore, we provide some of the early benefits and challenges of using LLMs-based tools for risk annotation and suggest future directions for the HCI research community to leverage LLMs as research tools to facilitate human-AI collaboration in contextualized online data annotation. Our research interests align very well with the purposes of the LLMs as Research Tools workshop to identify ongoing applications and challenges of using LLMs to work with data in HCI research. We anticipate learning valuable insights from organizers and participants into how LLMs can help reshape the HCI community's methods for working with data.

cross Parameter Hierarchical Optimization for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Authors: Zeng YU, Yunxiao Shi

Abstract: Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-reID) aims at matching cross-modality pedestrian images captured by disjoint visible or infrared cameras. Existing methods alleviate the cross-modality discrepancies via designing different kinds of network architectures. Different from available methods, in this paper, we propose a novel parameter optimizing paradigm, parameter hierarchical optimization (PHO) method, for the task of VI-ReID. It allows part of parameters to be directly optimized without any training, which narrows the search space of parameters and makes the whole network more easier to be trained. Specifically, we first divide the parameters into different types, and then introduce a self-adaptive alignment strategy (SAS) to automatically align the visible and infrared images through transformation. Considering that features in different dimension have varying importance, we develop an auto-weighted alignment learning (AAL) module that can automatically weight features according to their importance. Importantly, in the alignment process of SAS and AAL, all the parameters are immediately optimized with optimization principles rather than training the whole network, which yields a better parameter training manner. Furthermore, we establish the cross-modality consistent learning (CCL) loss to extract discriminative person representations with translation consistency. We provide both theoretical justification and empirical evidence that our proposed PHO method outperform existing VI-reID approaches.

cross SiGNN: A Spike-induced Graph Neural Network for Dynamic Graph Representation Learning

Authors: Dong Chen, Shuai Zheng, Muhao Xu, Zhenfeng Zhu, Yao Zhao

Abstract: In the domain of dynamic graph representation learning (DGRL), the efficient and comprehensive capture of temporal evolution within real-world networks is crucial. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), known as their temporal dynamics and low-power characteristic, offer an efficient solution for temporal processing in DGRL task. However, owing to the spike-based information encoding mechanism of SNNs, existing DGRL methods employed SNNs face limitations in their representational capacity. Given this issue, we propose a novel framework named Spike-induced Graph Neural Network (SiGNN) for learning enhanced spatialtemporal representations on dynamic graphs. In detail, a harmonious integration of SNNs and GNNs is achieved through an innovative Temporal Activation (TA) mechanism. Benefiting from the TA mechanism, SiGNN not only effectively exploits the temporal dynamics of SNNs but also adeptly circumvents the representational constraints imposed by the binary nature of spikes. Furthermore, leveraging the inherent adaptability of SNNs, we explore an in-depth analysis of the evolutionary patterns within dynamic graphs across multiple time granularities. This approach facilitates the acquisition of a multiscale temporal node representation.Extensive experiments on various real-world dynamic graph datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SiGNN in the node classification task.

cross On Unified Prompt Tuning for Request Quality Assurance in Public Code Review

Authors: Xinyu Chen, Lin Li, Rui Zhang, Peng Liang

Abstract: Public Code Review (PCR) can be implemented through a Software Question Answering (SQA) community, which facilitates high knowledge dissemination. Current methods mainly focus on the reviewer's perspective, including finding a capable reviewer, predicting comment quality, and recommending/generating review comments. Our intuition is that satisfying review necessity requests can increase their visibility, which in turn is a prerequisite for better review responses. To this end, we propose a unified framework called UniPCR to complete developer-based request quality assurance (i.e., predicting request necessity and recommending tags subtask) under a Masked Language Model (MLM). Specifically, we reformulate both subtasks via 1) text prompt tuning, which converts two subtasks into MLM by constructing prompt templates using hard prompt; 2) code prefix tuning, which optimizes a small segment of generated continuous vectors as the prefix of the code representation using soft prompt. Experimental results on the Public Code Review dataset for the time span 2011-2022 demonstrate that our UniPCR framework adapts to the two subtasks and outperforms comparable accuracy-based results with state-of-the-art methods for request quality assurance. These conclusions highlight the effectiveness of our unified framework from the developer's perspective in public code review.

cross Towards Faster Training of Diffusion Models: An Inspiration of A Consistency Phenomenon

Authors: Tianshuo Xu, Peng Mi, Ruilin Wang, Yingcong Chen

Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) are a powerful generative framework that have attracted significant attention in recent years. However, the high computational cost of training DMs limits their practical applications. In this paper, we start with a consistency phenomenon of DMs: we observe that DMs with different initializations or even different architectures can produce very similar outputs given the same noise inputs, which is rare in other generative models. We attribute this phenomenon to two factors: (1) the learning difficulty of DMs is lower when the noise-prediction diffusion model approaches the upper bound of the timestep (the input becomes pure noise), where the structural information of the output is usually generated; and (2) the loss landscape of DMs is highly smooth, which implies that the model tends to converge to similar local minima and exhibit similar behavior patterns. This finding not only reveals the stability of DMs, but also inspires us to devise two strategies to accelerate the training of DMs. First, we propose a curriculum learning based timestep schedule, which leverages the noise rate as an explicit indicator of the learning difficulty and gradually reduces the training frequency of easier timesteps, thus improving the training efficiency. Second, we propose a momentum decay strategy, which reduces the momentum coefficient during the optimization process, as the large momentum may hinder the convergence speed and cause oscillations due to the smoothness of the loss landscape. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies on various models and show that they can significantly reduce the training time and improve the quality of the generated images.

cross Usability and Performance Analysis of Embedded Development Environment for On-device Learning

Authors: Enzo Scaffi (DYNAMID), Antoine Bonneau (DYNAMID, EE), Fr\'ed\'eric Le Mou\"el (DYNAMID), Fabien Mieyeville (INL, EE)

Abstract: This research empirically examines embedded development tools viable for on-device TinyML implementation. The research evaluates various development tools with various abstraction levels on resource-constrained IoT devices, from basic hardware manipulation to deployment of minimalistic ML training. The analysis encompasses memory usage, energy consumption, and performance metrics during model training and inference and usability of the different solutions. Arduino Framework offers ease of implementation but with increased energy consumption compared to the native option, while RIOT OS exhibits efficient energy consumption despite higher memory utilization with equivalent ease of use. The absence of certain critical functionalities like DVFS directly integrated into the OS highlights limitations for fine hardware control.

cross Reinforcement Learning with Generalizable Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Jiaxu Wang, Qiang Zhang, Jingkai Sun, Jiahang Cao, Yecheng Shao, Renjing Xu

Abstract: An excellent representation is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) performance, especially in vision-based reinforcement learning tasks. The quality of the environment representation directly influences the achievement of the learning task. Previous vision-based RL typically uses explicit or implicit ways to represent environments, such as images, points, voxels, and neural radiance fields. However, these representations contain several drawbacks. They cannot either describe complex local geometries or generalize well to unseen scenes, or require precise foreground masks. Moreover, these implicit neural representations are akin to a ``black box", significantly hindering interpretability. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), with its explicit scene representation and differentiable rendering nature, is considered a revolutionary change for reconstruction and representation methods. In this paper, we propose a novel Generalizable Gaussian Splatting framework to be the representation of RL tasks, called GSRL. Through validation in the RoboMimic environment, our method achieves better results than other baselines in multiple tasks, improving the performance by 10%, 44%, and 15% compared with baselines on the hardest task. This work is the first attempt to leverage generalizable 3DGS as a representation for RL.

cross Lyapunov-stable Neural Control for State and Output Feedback: A Novel Formulation for Efficient Synthesis and Verification

Authors: Lujie Yang, Hongkai Dai, Zhouxing Shi, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Russ Tedrake, Huan Zhang

Abstract: Learning-based neural network (NN) control policies have shown impressive empirical performance in a wide range of tasks in robotics and control. However, formal (Lyapunov) stability guarantees over the region-of-attraction (ROA) for NN controllers with nonlinear dynamical systems are challenging to obtain, and most existing approaches rely on expensive solvers such as sums-of-squares (SOS), mixed-integer programming (MIP), or satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). In this paper, we demonstrate a new framework for learning NN controllers together with Lyapunov certificates using fast empirical falsification and strategic regularizations. We propose a novel formulation that defines a larger verifiable region-of-attraction (ROA) than shown in the literature, and refines the conventional restrictive constraints on Lyapunov derivatives to focus only on certifiable ROAs. The Lyapunov condition is rigorously verified post-hoc using branch-and-bound with scalable linear bound propagation-based NN verification techniques. The approach is efficient and flexible, and the full training and verification procedure is accelerated on GPUs without relying on expensive solvers for SOS, MIP, nor SMT. The flexibility and efficiency of our framework allow us to demonstrate Lyapunov-stable output feedback control with synthesized NN-based controllers and NN-based observers with formal stability guarantees, for the first time in literature. Source code at https://github.com/Verified-Intelligence/Lyapunov_Stable_NN_Controllers.

URLs: https://github.com/Verified-Intelligence/Lyapunov_Stable_NN_Controllers.

cross EduAgent: Generative Student Agents in Learning

Authors: Songlin Xu, Xinyu Zhang, Lianhui Qin

Abstract: Student simulation in online education is important to address dynamic learning behaviors of students with diverse backgrounds. Existing simulation models based on deep learning usually need massive training data, lacking prior knowledge in educational contexts. Large language models (LLMs) may contain such prior knowledge since they are pre-trained from a large corpus. However, because student behaviors are dynamic and multifaceted with individual differences, directly prompting LLMs is not robust nor accurate enough to capture fine-grained interactions among diverse student personas, learning behaviors, and learning outcomes. This work tackles this problem by presenting a newly annotated fine-grained large-scale dataset and proposing EduAgent, a novel generative agent framework incorporating cognitive prior knowledge (i.e., theoretical findings revealed in cognitive science) to guide LLMs to first reason correlations among various behaviors and then make simulations. Our two experiments show that EduAgent could not only mimic and predict learning behaviors of real students but also generate realistic learning behaviors of virtual students without real data.

cross Rho-1: Not All Tokens Are What You Need

Authors: Zhenghao Lin, Zhibin Gou, Yeyun Gong, Xiao Liu, Yelong Shen, Ruochen Xu, Chen Lin, Yujiu Yang, Jian Jiao, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen

Abstract: Previous language model pre-training methods have uniformly applied a next-token prediction loss to all training tokens. Challenging this norm, we posit that "Not all tokens in a corpus are equally important for language model training". Our initial analysis delves into token-level training dynamics of language model, revealing distinct loss patterns for different tokens. Leveraging these insights, we introduce a new language model called Rho-1. Unlike traditional LMs that learn to predict every next token in a corpus, Rho-1 employs Selective Language Modeling (SLM), which selectively trains on useful tokens that aligned with the desired distribution. This approach involves scoring pretraining tokens using a reference model, and then training the language model with a focused loss on tokens with higher excess loss. When continual pretraining on 15B OpenWebMath corpus, Rho-1 yields an absolute improvement in few-shot accuracy of up to 30% in 9 math tasks. After fine-tuning, Rho-1-1B and 7B achieved state-of-the-art results of 40.6% and 51.8% on MATH dataset, respectively - matching DeepSeekMath with only 3% of the pretraining tokens. Furthermore, when pretraining on 80B general tokens, Rho-1 achieves 6.8% average enhancement across 15 diverse tasks, increasing both efficiency and performance of the language model pre-training.

cross AD-NEv++ : The multi-architecture neuroevolution-based multivariate anomaly detection framework

Authors: Marcin Pietro\'n, Dominik \.Zurek, Kamil Faber, Roberto Corizzo

Abstract: Anomaly detection tools and methods enable key analytical capabilities in modern cyberphysical and sensor-based systems. Despite the fast-paced development in deep learning architectures for anomaly detection, model optimization for a given dataset is a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Neuroevolution could be an effective and efficient solution to this problem, as a fully automated search method for learning optimal neural networks, supporting both gradient and non-gradient fine tuning. However, existing frameworks incorporating neuroevolution lack of support for new layers and architectures and are typically limited to convolutional and LSTM layers. In this paper we propose AD-NEv++, a three-stage neuroevolution-based method that synergically combines subspace evolution, model evolution, and fine-tuning. Our method overcomes the limitations of existing approaches by optimizing the mutation operator in the neuroevolution process, while supporting a wide spectrum of neural layers, including attention, dense, and graph convolutional layers. Our extensive experimental evaluation was conducted with widely adopted multivariate anomaly detection benchmark datasets, and showed that the models generated by AD-NEv++ outperform well-known deep learning architectures and neuroevolution-based approaches for anomaly detection. Moreover, results show that AD-NEv++ can improve and outperform the state-of-the-art GNN (Graph Neural Networks) model architecture in all anomaly detection benchmarks.

cross An End-to-End Structure with Novel Position Mechanism and Improved EMD for Stock Forecasting

Authors: Chufeng Li, Jianyong Chen

Abstract: As a branch of time series forecasting, stock movement forecasting is one of the challenging problems for investors and researchers. Since Transformer was introduced to analyze financial data, many researchers have dedicated themselves to forecasting stock movement using Transformer or attention mechanisms. However, existing research mostly focuses on individual stock information but ignores stock market information and high noise in stock data. In this paper, we propose a novel method using the attention mechanism in which both stock market information and individual stock information are considered. Meanwhile, we propose a novel EMD-based algorithm for reducing short-term noise in stock data. Two randomly selected exchange-traded funds (ETFs) spanning over ten years from US stock markets are used to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed attention-based method. The experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed attention-based method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/DurandalLee/ACEFormer.

URLs: https://github.com/DurandalLee/ACEFormer.

cross Self-supervised Dataset Distillation: A Good Compression Is All You Need

Authors: Muxin Zhou, Zeyuan Yin, Shitong Shao, Zhiqiang Shen

Abstract: Dataset distillation aims to compress information from a large-scale original dataset to a new compact dataset while striving to preserve the utmost degree of the original data informational essence. Previous studies have predominantly concentrated on aligning the intermediate statistics between the original and distilled data, such as weight trajectory, features, gradient, BatchNorm, etc. In this work, we consider addressing this task through the new lens of model informativeness in the compression stage on the original dataset pretraining. We observe that with the prior state-of-the-art SRe$^2$L, as model sizes increase, it becomes increasingly challenging for supervised pretrained models to recover learned information during data synthesis, as the channel-wise mean and variance inside the model are flatting and less informative. We further notice that larger variances in BN statistics from self-supervised models enable larger loss signals to update the recovered data by gradients, enjoying more informativeness during synthesis. Building on this observation, we introduce SC-DD, a simple yet effective Self-supervised Compression framework for Dataset Distillation that facilitates diverse information compression and recovery compared to traditional supervised learning schemes, further reaps the potential of large pretrained models with enhanced capabilities. Extensive experiments are conducted on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet-1K datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach. The proposed SC-DD outperforms all previous state-of-the-art supervised dataset distillation methods when employing larger models, such as SRe$^2$L, MTT, TESLA, DC, CAFE, etc., by large margins under the same recovery and post-training budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/SRe2L/tree/main/SCDD/.

URLs: https://github.com/VILA-Lab/SRe2L/tree/main/SCDD/.

cross LLoCO: Learning Long Contexts Offline

Authors: Sijun Tan, Xiuyu Li, Shishir Patil, Ziyang Wu, Tianjun Zhang, Kurt Keutzer, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Raluca Ada Popa

Abstract: Processing long contexts remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the quadratic computational and memory overhead of the self-attention mechanism and the substantial KV cache sizes during generation. We propose a novel approach to address this problem by learning contexts offline through context compression and in-domain parameter-efficient finetuning. Our method enables an LLM to create a concise representation of the original context and efficiently retrieve relevant information to answer questions accurately. We introduce LLoCO, a technique that combines context compression, retrieval, and parameter-efficient finetuning using LoRA. Our approach extends the effective context window of a 4k token LLaMA2-7B model to handle up to 128k tokens. We evaluate our approach on several long-context question-answering datasets, demonstrating that LLoCO significantly outperforms in-context learning while using $30\times$ fewer tokens during inference. LLoCO achieves up to $7.62\times$ speed-up and substantially reduces the cost of long document question answering, making it a promising solution for efficient long context processing. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jeffreysijuntan/lloco.

URLs: https://github.com/jeffreysijuntan/lloco.

cross Manipulating Large Language Models to Increase Product Visibility

Authors: Aounon Kumar, Himabindu Lakkaraju

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into search engines to provide natural language responses tailored to user queries. Customers and end-users are also becoming more dependent on these models for quick and easy purchase decisions. In this work, we investigate whether recommendations from LLMs can be manipulated to enhance a product's visibility. We demonstrate that adding a strategic text sequence (STS) -- a carefully crafted message -- to a product's information page can significantly increase its likelihood of being listed as the LLM's top recommendation. To understand the impact of STS, we use a catalog of fictitious coffee machines and analyze its effect on two target products: one that seldom appears in the LLM's recommendations and another that usually ranks second. We observe that the strategic text sequence significantly enhances the visibility of both products by increasing their chances of appearing as the top recommendation. This ability to manipulate LLM-generated search responses provides vendors with a considerable competitive advantage and has the potential to disrupt fair market competition. Just as search engine optimization (SEO) revolutionized how webpages are customized to rank higher in search engine results, influencing LLM recommendations could profoundly impact content optimization for AI-driven search services. Code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/aounon/llm-rank-optimizer.

URLs: https://github.com/aounon/llm-rank-optimizer.

cross ControlNet++: Improving Conditional Controls with Efficient Consistency Feedback

Authors: Ming Li, Taojiannan Yang, Huafeng Kuang, Jie Wu, Zhaoning Wang, Xuefeng Xiao, Chen Chen

Abstract: To enhance the controllability of text-to-image diffusion models, existing efforts like ControlNet incorporated image-based conditional controls. In this paper, we reveal that existing methods still face significant challenges in generating images that align with the image conditional controls. To this end, we propose ControlNet++, a novel approach that improves controllable generation by explicitly optimizing pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images and conditional controls. Specifically, for an input conditional control, we use a pre-trained discriminative reward model to extract the corresponding condition of the generated images, and then optimize the consistency loss between the input conditional control and extracted condition. A straightforward implementation would be generating images from random noises and then calculating the consistency loss, but such an approach requires storing gradients for multiple sampling timesteps, leading to considerable time and memory costs. To address this, we introduce an efficient reward strategy that deliberately disturbs the input images by adding noise, and then uses the single-step denoised images for reward fine-tuning. This avoids the extensive costs associated with image sampling, allowing for more efficient reward fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that ControlNet++ significantly improves controllability under various conditional controls. For example, it achieves improvements over ControlNet by 7.9% mIoU, 13.4% SSIM, and 7.6% RMSE, respectively, for segmentation mask, line-art edge, and depth conditions.

cross Any2Point: Empowering Any-modality Large Models for Efficient 3D Understanding

Authors: Yiwen Tang, Jiaming Liu, Dong Wang, Zhigang Wang, Shanghang Zhang, Bin Zhao, Xuelong Li

Abstract: Large foundation models have recently emerged as a prominent focus of interest, attaining superior performance in widespread scenarios. Due to the scarcity of 3D data, many efforts have been made to adapt pre-trained transformers from vision to 3D domains. However, such 2D-to-3D approaches are still limited, due to the potential loss of spatial geometries and high computation cost. More importantly, their frameworks are mainly designed for 2D models, lacking a general any-to-3D paradigm. In this paper, we introduce Any2Point, a parameter-efficient method to empower any-modality large models (vision, language, audio) for 3D understanding. Given a frozen transformer from any source modality, we propose a 3D-to-any (1D or 2D) virtual projection strategy that correlates the input 3D points to the original 1D or 2D positions within the source modality. This mechanism enables us to assign each 3D token with a positional encoding paired with the pre-trained model, which avoids 3D geometry loss caused by the true projection and better motivates the transformer for 3D learning with 1D/2D positional priors. Then, within each transformer block, we insert an any-to-3D guided adapter module for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The adapter incorporates prior spatial knowledge from the source modality to guide the local feature aggregation of 3D tokens, compelling the semantic adaption of any-modality transformers. We conduct extensive experiments to showcase the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/Any2Point.

URLs: https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/Any2Point.

cross OpenBias: Open-set Bias Detection in Text-to-Image Generative Models

Authors: Moreno D'Inc\`a, Elia Peruzzo, Massimiliano Mancini, Dejia Xu, Vidit Goel, Xingqian Xu, Zhangyang Wang, Humphrey Shi, Nicu Sebe

Abstract: Text-to-image generative models are becoming increasingly popular and accessible to the general public. As these models see large-scale deployments, it is necessary to deeply investigate their safety and fairness to not disseminate and perpetuate any kind of biases. However, existing works focus on detecting closed sets of biases defined a priori, limiting the studies to well-known concepts. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of open-set bias detection in text-to-image generative models presenting OpenBias, a new pipeline that identifies and quantifies the severity of biases agnostically, without access to any precompiled set. OpenBias has three stages. In the first phase, we leverage a Large Language Model (LLM) to propose biases given a set of captions. Secondly, the target generative model produces images using the same set of captions. Lastly, a Vision Question Answering model recognizes the presence and extent of the previously proposed biases. We study the behavior of Stable Diffusion 1.5, 2, and XL emphasizing new biases, never investigated before. Via quantitative experiments, we demonstrate that OpenBias agrees with current closed-set bias detection methods and human judgement.

replace The Optimal Choice of Hypothesis Is the Weakest, Not the Shortest

Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett

Abstract: If $A$ and $B$ are sets such that $A \subset B$, generalisation may be understood as the inference from $A$ of a hypothesis sufficient to construct $B$. One might infer any number of hypotheses from $A$, yet only some of those may generalise to $B$. How can one know which are likely to generalise? One strategy is to choose the shortest, equating the ability to compress information with the ability to generalise (a proxy for intelligence). We examine this in the context of a mathematical formalism of enactive cognition. We show that compression is neither necessary nor sufficient to maximise performance (measured in terms of the probability of a hypothesis generalising). We formulate a proxy unrelated to length or simplicity, called weakness. We show that if tasks are uniformly distributed, then there is no choice of proxy that performs at least as well as weakness maximisation in all tasks while performing strictly better in at least one. In experiments comparing maximum weakness and minimum description length in the context of binary arithmetic, the former generalised at between $1.1$ and $5$ times the rate of the latter. We argue this demonstrates that weakness is a far better proxy, and explains why Deepmind's Apperception Engine is able to generalise effectively.

replace Computational Dualism and Objective Superintelligence

Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett

Abstract: The concept of intelligent software is flawed. The behaviour of software depends upon the hardware that interprets it. This undermines claims regarding the behaviour of theorised, software superintelligence. Here we characterise this problem as ``computational dualism'', where instead of mental and physical substance, we have software and hardware. We argue that to make objective claims regarding performance we must avoid computational dualism. We propose using an alternative based upon pancomputationalism, which defines all aspects of the environment as nothing more than relations between otherwise irreducible states. We formalise systems as behaviour (inputs and outputs, with policy being a causal intermediary), and cognition as embodied, embedded, extended and enactive. The result is cognition formalised as a part of the environment, rather than as a disembodied policy interacting with the environment though an interpreter. This allows us to make objective claims regarding intelligence, which we argue is the ability to ``generalise'', identify causes and adapt. We then propose objective upper bounds for intelligent behaviour.

replace Emergent Causality and the Foundation of Consciousness

Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett

Abstract: To make accurate inferences in an interactive setting, an agent must not confuse passive observation of events with having intervened to cause them. The $do$ operator formalises interventions so that we may reason about their effect. Yet there exist pareto optimal mathematical formalisms of general intelligence in an interactive setting which, presupposing no explicit representation of intervention, make maximally accurate inferences. We examine one such formalism. We show that in the absence of a $do$ operator, an intervention can be represented by a variable. We then argue that variables are abstractions, and that need to explicitly represent interventions in advance arises only because we presuppose these sorts of abstractions. The aforementioned formalism avoids this and so, initial conditions permitting, representations of relevant causal interventions will emerge through induction. These emergent abstractions function as representations of one`s self and of any other object, inasmuch as the interventions of those objects impact the satisfaction of goals. We argue that this explains how one might reason about one`s own identity and intent, those of others, of one`s own as perceived by others and so on. In a narrow sense this describes what it is to be aware, and is a mechanistic explanation of aspects of consciousness.

replace On the Computation of Meaning, Language Models and Incomprehensible Horrors

Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett

Abstract: We integrate foundational theories of meaning with a mathematical formalism of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to offer a comprehensive mechanistic explanation of meaning, communication, and symbol emergence. This synthesis holds significance for both AGI and broader debates concerning the nature of language, as it unifies pragmatics, logical truth conditional semantics, Peircean semiotics, and a computable model of enactive cognition, addressing phenomena that have traditionally evaded mechanistic explanation. By examining the conditions under which a machine can generate meaningful utterances or comprehend human meaning, we establish that the current generation of language models do not possess the same understanding of meaning as humans nor intend any meaning that we might attribute to their responses. To address this, we propose simulating human feelings and optimising models to construct weak representations. Our findings shed light on the relationship between meaning and intelligence, and how we can build machines that comprehend and intend meaning.

replace Optimal Task Assignment and Path Planning using Conflict-Based Search with Precedence and Temporal Constraints

Authors: Yu Quan Chong, Jiaoyang Li, Katia Sycara

Abstract: The Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem entails finding collision-free paths for a set of agents, guiding them from their start to goal locations. However, MAPF does not account for several practical task-related constraints. For example, agents may need to perform actions at goal locations with specific execution times, adhering to predetermined orders and timeframes. Moreover, goal assignments may not be predefined for agents, and the optimization objective may lack an explicit definition. To incorporate task assignment, path planning, and a user-defined objective into a coherent framework, this paper examines the Task Assignment and Path Finding with Precedence and Temporal Constraints (TAPF-PTC) problem. We augment Conflict-Based Search (CBS) to simultaneously generate task assignments and collision-free paths that adhere to precedence and temporal constraints, maximizing an objective quantified by the return from a user-defined reward function in reinforcement learning (RL). Experimentally, we demonstrate that our algorithm, CBS-TA-PTC, can solve highly challenging bomb-defusing tasks with precedence and temporal constraints efficiently relative to MARL and adapted Target Assignment and Path Finding (TAPF) methods.

replace Multi-Scale Subgraph Contrastive Learning

Authors: Yanbei Liu, Yu Zhao, Xiao Wang, Lei Geng, Zhitao Xiao

Abstract: Graph-level contrastive learning, aiming to learn the representations for each graph by contrasting two augmented graphs, has attracted considerable attention. Previous studies usually simply assume that a graph and its augmented graph as a positive pair, otherwise as a negative pair. However, it is well known that graph structure is always complex and multi-scale, which gives rise to a fundamental question: after graph augmentation, will the previous assumption still hold in reality? By an experimental analysis, we discover the semantic information of an augmented graph structure may be not consistent as original graph structure, and whether two augmented graphs are positive or negative pairs is highly related with the multi-scale structures. Based on this finding, we propose a multi-scale subgraph contrastive learning architecture which is able to characterize the fine-grained semantic information. Specifically, we generate global and local views at different scales based on subgraph sampling, and construct multiple contrastive relationships according to their semantic associations to provide richer self-supervised signals. Extensive experiments and parametric analyzes on eight graph classification real-world datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

replace What AIs are not Learning (and Why): Bio-Inspired Foundation Models for Robots

Authors: Mark Stefik

Abstract: What applications is AI ready for? Advances in deep learning and generative approaches have produced AIs that learn from massive online data and outperform manually built AIs. Some of these AIs outperform people. It is easy (but misleading) to conclude that today's AI technologies are learning to do anything and everything. Conversely, it is striking that big data, deep learning, and generative AI have had so little impact on robotics. For example, today's autonomous robots do not learn to provide home care or to be nursing assistants. Current robot applications are created using manual programming, mathematical models, planning frameworks, and reinforcement learning. These methods do not lead to the leaps in performance and generality seen with deep learning and generative AI. Better approaches to train robots for service applications would greatly expand their social roles and economic impact. AI research is now extending "big data" approaches to train robots by combining multimodal sensing and effector technology from robotics with deep learning technology adapted for embodied systems. These approaches create robotic (or "experiential") foundation models (FMs) for AIs that perceive and act in the world. Robotic FM approaches differ in their expectations, sources, and timing of training data. Like mainstream FM approaches, some robotic FM approaches use vast data to create adult expert-level robots. In contrast, developmental robotic approaches would create progressive FMs that learn continuously and experientially. Aspirationally, these would progress from child-level to student-level, apprentice-level, and expert levels. They would acquire self-developed and socially developed competences. These AIs would model the goals of people around them. Like people, they would learn to coordinate, communicate, and collaborate.

replace Novelty Heuristics, Multi-Queue Search, and Portfolios for Numeric Planning

Authors: Dillon Z. Chen, Sylvie Thi\'ebaux

Abstract: Heuristic search is a powerful approach for solving planning problems and numeric planning is no exception. In this paper, we boost the performance of heuristic search for numeric planning with various powerful techniques orthogonal to improving heuristic informedness: numeric novelty heuristics, the Manhattan distance heuristic, and exploring the use of multi-queue search and portfolios for combining heuristics.

replace Wu's Method can Boost Symbolic AI to Rival Silver Medalists and AlphaGeometry to Outperform Gold Medalists at IMO Geometry

Authors: Shiven Sinha, Ameya Prabhu, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Siddharth Bhat, Matthias Bethge

Abstract: Proving geometric theorems constitutes a hallmark of visual reasoning combining both intuitive and logical skills. Therefore, automated theorem proving of Olympiad-level geometry problems is considered a notable milestone in human-level automated reasoning. The introduction of AlphaGeometry, a neuro-symbolic model trained with 100 million synthetic samples, marked a major breakthrough. It solved 25 of 30 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) problems whereas the reported baseline based on Wu's method solved only ten. In this note, we revisit the IMO-AG-30 Challenge introduced with AlphaGeometry, and find that Wu's method is surprisingly strong. Wu's method alone can solve 15 problems, and some of them are not solved by any of the other methods. This leads to two key findings: (i) Combining Wu's method with the classic synthetic methods of deductive databases and angle, ratio, and distance chasing solves 21 out of 30 methods by just using a CPU-only laptop with a time limit of 5 minutes per problem. Essentially, this classic method solves just 4 problems less than AlphaGeometry and establishes the first fully symbolic baseline strong enough to rival the performance of an IMO silver medalist. (ii) Wu's method even solves 2 of the 5 problems that AlphaGeometry failed to solve. Thus, by combining AlphaGeometry with Wu's method we set a new state-of-the-art for automated theorem proving on IMO-AG-30, solving 27 out of 30 problems, the first AI method which outperforms an IMO gold medalist.

replace-cross Technical Report: Impact of Position Bias on Language Models in Token Classification

Authors: Mehdi Ben Amor, Michael Granitzer, Jelena Mitrovi\'c

Abstract: Language Models (LMs) have shown state-of-the-art performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Downstream tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) or Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging are known to suffer from data imbalance issues, particularly regarding the ratio of positive to negative examples and class disparities. This paper investigates an often-overlooked issue of encoder models, specifically the position bias of positive examples in token classification tasks. For completeness, we also include decoders in the evaluation. We evaluate the impact of position bias using different position embedding techniques, focusing on BERT with Absolute Position Embedding (APE), Relative Position Embedding (RPE), and Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). Therefore, we conduct an in-depth evaluation of the impact of position bias on the performance of LMs when fine-tuned on token classification benchmarks. Our study includes CoNLL03 and OntoNote5.0 for NER, English Tree Bank UD\_en, and TweeBank for POS tagging. We propose an evaluation approach to investigate position bias in transformer models. We show that LMs can suffer from this bias with an average drop ranging from 3\% to 9\% in their performance. To mitigate this effect, we propose two methods: Random Position Shifting and Context Perturbation, that we apply on batches during the training process. The results show an improvement of $\approx$ 2\% in the performance of the model on CoNLL03, UD\_en, and TweeBank.

replace-cross Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Tuomas Haarnoja, Ben Moran, Guy Lever, Sandy H. Huang, Dhruva Tirumala, Jan Humplik, Markus Wulfmeier, Saran Tunyasuvunakool, Noah Y. Siegel, Roland Hafner, Michael Bloesch, Kristian Hartikainen, Arunkumar Byravan, Leonard Hasenclever, Yuval Tassa, Fereshteh Sadeghi, Nathan Batchelor, Federico Casarini, Stefano Saliceti, Charles Game, Neil Sreendra, Kushal Patel, Marlon Gwira, Andrea Huber, Nicole Hurley, Francesco Nori, Raia Hadsell, Nicolas Heess

Abstract: We investigate whether Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) is able to synthesize sophisticated and safe movement skills for a low-cost, miniature humanoid robot that can be composed into complex behavioral strategies in dynamic environments. We used Deep RL to train a humanoid robot with 20 actuated joints to play a simplified one-versus-one (1v1) soccer game. The resulting agent exhibits robust and dynamic movement skills such as rapid fall recovery, walking, turning, kicking and more; and it transitions between them in a smooth, stable, and efficient manner. The agent's locomotion and tactical behavior adapts to specific game contexts in a way that would be impractical to manually design. The agent also developed a basic strategic understanding of the game, and learned, for instance, to anticipate ball movements and to block opponent shots. Our agent was trained in simulation and transferred to real robots zero-shot. We found that a combination of sufficiently high-frequency control, targeted dynamics randomization, and perturbations during training in simulation enabled good-quality transfer. Although the robots are inherently fragile, basic regularization of the behavior during training led the robots to learn safe and effective movements while still performing in a dynamic and agile way -- well beyond what is intuitively expected from the robot. Indeed, in experiments, they walked 181% faster, turned 302% faster, took 63% less time to get up, and kicked a ball 34% faster than a scripted baseline, while efficiently combining the skills to achieve the longer term objectives.

replace-cross Deep Temporal Graph Clustering

Authors: Meng Liu, Yue Liu, Ke Liang, Wenxuan Tu, Siwei Wang, Sihang Zhou, Xinwang Liu

Abstract: Deep graph clustering has recently received significant attention due to its ability to enhance the representation learning capabilities of models in unsupervised scenarios. Nevertheless, deep clustering for temporal graphs, which could capture crucial dynamic interaction information, has not been fully explored. It means that in many clustering-oriented real-world scenarios, temporal graphs can only be processed as static graphs. This not only causes the loss of dynamic information but also triggers huge computational consumption. To solve the problem, we propose a general framework for deep Temporal Graph Clustering called TGC, which introduces deep clustering techniques to suit the interaction sequence-based batch-processing pattern of temporal graphs. In addition, we discuss differences between temporal graph clustering and static graph clustering from several levels. To verify the superiority of the proposed framework TGC, we conduct extensive experiments. The experimental results show that temporal graph clustering enables more flexibility in finding a balance between time and space requirements, and our framework can effectively improve the performance of existing temporal graph learning methods. The code is released: https://github.com/MGitHubL/Deep-Temporal-Graph-Clustering.

URLs: https://github.com/MGitHubL/Deep-Temporal-Graph-Clustering.

replace-cross Simple Linguistic Inferences of Large Language Models (LLMs): Blind Spots and Blinds

Authors: Victoria Basmov, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty

Abstract: We evaluate LLMs' language understanding capacities on simple inference tasks that most humans find trivial. Specifically, we target (i) grammatically-specified entailments, (ii) premises with evidential adverbs of uncertainty, and (iii) monotonicity entailments. We design evaluation sets for these tasks and conduct experiments in both zero-shot and chain-of-thought setups, and with multiple prompts and LLMs. The models exhibit moderate to low performance on these evaluation sets. Subsequent experiments show that embedding the premise in syntactic constructions that should preserve the entailment relations (presupposition triggers) or change them (non-factives), further confuses the models, causing them to either under-predict or over-predict certain entailment labels regardless of the true relation, and often disregarding the nature of the embedding context. Overall these results suggest that, despite LLMs' celebrated language understanding capacity, even the strongest models have blindspots with respect to certain types of entailments, and certain information-packaging structures act as ``blinds'' overshadowing the semantics of the embedded premise.

replace-cross SE(3)-Stochastic Flow Matching for Protein Backbone Generation

Authors: Avishek Joey Bose, Tara Akhound-Sadegh, Guillaume Huguet, Kilian Fatras, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Cheng-Hao Liu, Andrei Cristian Nica, Maksym Korablyov, Michael Bronstein, Alexander Tong

Abstract: The computational design of novel protein structures has the potential to impact numerous scientific disciplines greatly. Toward this goal, we introduce FoldFlow, a series of novel generative models of increasing modeling power based on the flow-matching paradigm over $3\mathrm{D}$ rigid motions -- i.e. the group $\text{SE}(3)$ -- enabling accurate modeling of protein backbones. We first introduce FoldFlow-Base, a simulation-free approach to learning deterministic continuous-time dynamics and matching invariant target distributions on $\text{SE}(3)$. We next accelerate training by incorporating Riemannian optimal transport to create FoldFlow-OT, leading to the construction of both more simple and stable flows. Finally, we design FoldFlow-SFM, coupling both Riemannian OT and simulation-free training to learn stochastic continuous-time dynamics over $\text{SE}(3)$. Our family of FoldFlow, generative models offers several key advantages over previous approaches to the generative modeling of proteins: they are more stable and faster to train than diffusion-based approaches, and our models enjoy the ability to map any invariant source distribution to any invariant target distribution over $\text{SE}(3)$. Empirically, we validate FoldFlow, on protein backbone generation of up to $300$ amino acids leading to high-quality designable, diverse, and novel samples.

replace-cross Sheared LLaMA: Accelerating Language Model Pre-training via Structured Pruning

Authors: Mengzhou Xia, Tianyu Gao, Zhiyuan Zeng, Danqi Chen

Abstract: The popularity of LLaMA (Touvron et al., 2023a;b) and other recently emerged moderate-sized large language models (LLMs) highlights the potential of building smaller yet powerful LLMs. Regardless, the cost of training such models from scratch on trillions of tokens remains high. In this work, we study structured pruning as an effective means to develop smaller LLMs from pre-trained, larger models. Our approach employs two key techniques: (1) targeted structured pruning, which prunes a larger model to a specified target shape by removing layers, heads, and intermediate and hidden dimensions in an end-to-end manner, and (2) dynamic batch loading, which dynamically updates the composition of sampled data in each training batch based on varying losses across different domains. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by presenting the Sheared-LLaMA series, pruning the LLaMA2-7B model down to 1.3B and 2.7B parameters. Sheared-LLaMA models outperform state-of-the-art open-source models of equivalent sizes, such as Pythia, INCITE, OpenLLaMA and the concurrent TinyLlama models, on a wide range of downstream and instruction tuning evaluations, while requiring only 3% of compute compared to training such models from scratch. This work provides compelling evidence that leveraging existing LLMs with structured pruning is a far more cost-effective approach for building competitive small-scale LLMs

replace-cross A Systematic Comparison of Syllogistic Reasoning in Humans and Language Models

Authors: Tiwalayo Eisape, MH Tessler, Ishita Dasgupta, Fei Sha, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Tal Linzen

Abstract: A central component of rational behavior is logical inference: the process of determining which conclusions follow from a set of premises. Psychologists have documented several ways in which humans' inferences deviate from the rules of logic. Do language models, which are trained on text generated by humans, replicate such human biases, or are they able to overcome them? Focusing on the case of syllogisms -- inferences from two simple premises -- we show that, within the PaLM2 family of transformer language models, larger models are more logical than smaller ones, and also more logical than humans. At the same time, even the largest models make systematic errors, some of which mirror human reasoning biases: they show sensitivity to the (irrelevant) ordering of the variables in the syllogism, and draw confident but incorrect inferences from particular syllogisms (syllogistic fallacies). Overall, we find that language models often mimic the human biases included in their training data, but are able to overcome them in some cases.

replace-cross A Quantitative Autonomy Quantification Framework for Fully Autonomous Robotic Systems

Authors: Nasser Gyagenda (University of Siegen), Hubert Roth (University of Siegen)

Abstract: Although autonomous functioning facilitates deployment of robotic systems in domains that admit limited human oversight on our planet and beyond, finding correspondence between task requirements and autonomous capability is still an open challenge. Consequently, a number of methods for quantifying autonomy have been proposed over the last three decades, but to our knowledge all these have no discernment of sub-mode features of variation of autonomy and some are based on metrics that violet the Goodhart's law. This paper focuses on the full autonomous mode and proposes a quantitative autonomy assessment framework based on task requirements. The framework starts by establishing robot task characteristics from which three autonomy metrics, namely requisite capability set, reliability and responsiveness are derived. These characteristics were founded on the realization that robots ultimately replace human skilled workers, from which a relationship between human job and robot task characteristics was established. Additionally, mathematical functions mapping metrics to autonomy as a two-part measure, namely of level and degree of autonomy are also presented. The distinction between level and degree of autonomy stemmed from the acknowledgment that autonomy is not just a question of existence, but also one of performance of requisite capability. The framework has been demonstrated on two case studies, namely autonomous vehicle at an on-road dynamic driving task and the DARPA subterranean challenge rules analysis. The framework provides not only a tool for quantifying autonomy, but also a regulatory interface and common language for autonomous systems developers and users. Its greatest feature is the ability to monitor system integrity when implemented online.

replace-cross Enhancing Data Efficiency and Feature Identification for Lithium-Ion Battery Lifespan Prediction by Deciphering Interpretation of Temporal Patterns and Cyclic Variability Using Attention-Based Models

Authors: Jaewook Lee, Seongmin Heo, Jay H. Lee

Abstract: Accurately predicting the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries is crucial for optimizing operational strategies and mitigating risks. While numerous studies have aimed at predicting battery lifespan, few have examined the interpretability of their models or how such insights could improve predictions. Addressing this gap, we introduce three innovative models that integrate shallow attention layers into a foundational model from our previous work, which combined elements of recurrent and convolutional neural networks. Utilizing a well-known public dataset, we showcase our methodology's effectiveness. Temporal attention is applied to identify critical timesteps and highlight differences among test cell batches, particularly underscoring the significance of the "rest" phase. Furthermore, by applying cyclic attention via self-attention to context vectors, our approach effectively identifies key cycles, enabling us to strategically decrease the input size for quicker predictions. Employing both single- and multi-head attention mechanisms, we have systematically minimized the required input from 100 to 50 and then to 30 cycles, refining this process based on cyclic attention scores. Our refined model exhibits strong regression capabilities, accurately forecasting the initiation of rapid capacity fade with an average deviation of only 58 cycles by analyzing just the initial 30 cycles of easily accessible input data.

replace-cross Bounds on Representation-Induced Confounding Bias for Treatment Effect Estimation

Authors: Valentyn Melnychuk, Dennis Frauen, Stefan Feuerriegel

Abstract: State-of-the-art methods for conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation make widespread use of representation learning. Here, the idea is to reduce the variance of the low-sample CATE estimation by a (potentially constrained) low-dimensional representation. However, low-dimensional representations can lose information about the observed confounders and thus lead to bias, because of which the validity of representation learning for CATE estimation is typically violated. In this paper, we propose a new, representation-agnostic refutation framework for estimating bounds on the representation-induced confounding bias that comes from dimensionality reduction (or other constraints on the representations) in CATE estimation. First, we establish theoretically under which conditions CATE is non-identifiable given low-dimensional (constrained) representations. Second, as our remedy, we propose a neural refutation framework which performs partial identification of CATE or, equivalently, aims at estimating lower and upper bounds of the representation-induced confounding bias. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our bounds in a series of experiments. In sum, our refutation framework is of direct relevance in practice where the validity of CATE estimation is of importance.

replace-cross Supervised Knowledge Makes Large Language Models Better In-context Learners

Authors: Linyi Yang, Shuibai Zhang, Zhuohao Yu, Guangsheng Bao, Yidong Wang, Jindong Wang, Ruochen Xu, Wei Ye, Xing Xie, Weizhu Chen, Yue Zhang

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emerging in-context learning abilities through prompt engineering. The recent progress in large-scale generative models has further expanded their use in real-world language applications. However, the critical challenge of improving the generalizability and factuality of LLMs in natural language understanding and question answering remains under-explored. While previous in-context learning research has focused on enhancing models to adhere to users' specific instructions and quality expectations, and to avoid undesired outputs, little to no work has explored the use of task-Specific fine-tuned Language Models (SLMs) to improve LLMs' in-context learning during the inference stage. Our primary contribution is the establishment of a simple yet effective framework that enhances the reliability of LLMs as it: 1) generalizes out-of-distribution data, 2) elucidates how LLMs benefit from discriminative models, and 3) minimizes hallucinations in generative tasks. Using our proposed plug-in method, enhanced versions of Llama 2 and ChatGPT surpass their original versions regarding generalizability and factuality. We offer a comprehensive suite of resources, including 16 curated datasets, prompts, model checkpoints, and LLM outputs across 9 distinct tasks. The code and data are released at: https://github.com/YangLinyi/Supervised-Knowledge-Makes-Large-Language-Models-Better-In-context-Learners. Our empirical analysis sheds light on the advantages of incorporating discriminative models into LLMs and highlights the potential of our methodology in fostering more reliable LLMs.

URLs: https://github.com/YangLinyi/Supervised-Knowledge-Makes-Large-Language-Models-Better-In-context-Learners.

replace-cross Generating High-Precision Force Fields for Molecular Dynamics Simulations to Study Chemical Reaction Mechanisms using Molecular Configuration Transformer

Authors: Sihao Yuan, Xu Han, Jun Zhang, Zhaoxin Xie, Cheng Fan, Yunlong Xiao, Yi Qin Gao, Yi Isaac Yang

Abstract: Theoretical studies on chemical reaction mechanisms have been crucial in organic chemistry. Traditionally, calculating the manually constructed molecular conformations of transition states for chemical reactions using quantum chemical calculations is the most commonly used method. However, this way is heavily dependent on individual experience and chemical intuition. In our previous study, we proposed a research paradigm that uses enhanced sampling in molecular dynamics simulations to study chemical reactions. This approach can directly simulate the entire process of a chemical reaction. However, the computational speed limits the use of high-precision potential energy functions for simulations. To address this issue, we present a scheme for training high-precision force fields for molecular modeling using a previously developed graph-neural-network-based molecular model, molecular configuration transformer. This potential energy function allows for highly accurate simulations at a low computational cost, leading to more precise calculations of the mechanism of chemical reactions. We applied this approach to study a Claisen rearrangement reaction and a Carbonyl insertion reaction catalyzed by Manganese.

replace-cross Deep Automated Mechanism Design for Integrating Ad Auction and Allocation in Feed

Authors: Xuejian Li, Ze Wang, Bingqi Zhu, Fei He, Yongkang Wang, Xingxing Wang

Abstract: E-commerce platforms usually present an ordered list, mixed with several organic items and an advertisement, in response to each user's page view request. This list, the outcome of ad auction and allocation processes, directly impacts the platform's ad revenue and gross merchandise volume (GMV). Specifically, the ad auction determines which ad is displayed and the corresponding payment, while the ad allocation decides the display positions of the advertisement and organic items. The prevalent methods of segregating the ad auction and allocation into two distinct stages face two problems: 1) Ad auction does not consider externalities, such as the influence of actual display position and context on ad Click-Through Rate (CTR); 2) The ad allocation, which utilizes the auction-winning ad's payment to determine the display position dynamically, fails to maintain incentive compatibility (IC) for the advertisement. For instance, in the auction stage employing the traditional Generalized Second Price (GSP) , even if the winning ad increases its bid, its payment remains unchanged. This implies that the advertisement cannot secure a better position and thus loses the opportunity to achieve higher utility in the subsequent ad allocation stage. Previous research often focused on one of the two stages, neglecting the two-stage problem, which may result in suboptimal outcomes...

replace-cross EgoGen: An Egocentric Synthetic Data Generator

Authors: Gen Li, Kaifeng Zhao, Siwei Zhang, Xiaozhong Lyu, Mihai Dusmanu, Yan Zhang, Marc Pollefeys, Siyu Tang

Abstract: Understanding the world in first-person view is fundamental in Augmented Reality (AR). This immersive perspective brings dramatic visual changes and unique challenges compared to third-person views. Synthetic data has empowered third-person-view vision models, but its application to embodied egocentric perception tasks remains largely unexplored. A critical challenge lies in simulating natural human movements and behaviors that effectively steer the embodied cameras to capture a faithful egocentric representation of the 3D world. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoGen, a new synthetic data generator that can produce accurate and rich ground-truth training data for egocentric perception tasks. At the heart of EgoGen is a novel human motion synthesis model that directly leverages egocentric visual inputs of a virtual human to sense the 3D environment. Combined with collision-avoiding motion primitives and a two-stage reinforcement learning approach, our motion synthesis model offers a closed-loop solution where the embodied perception and movement of the virtual human are seamlessly coupled. Compared to previous works, our model eliminates the need for a pre-defined global path, and is directly applicable to dynamic environments. Combined with our easy-to-use and scalable data generation pipeline, we demonstrate EgoGen's efficacy in three tasks: mapping and localization for head-mounted cameras, egocentric camera tracking, and human mesh recovery from egocentric views. EgoGen will be fully open-sourced, offering a practical solution for creating realistic egocentric training data and aiming to serve as a useful tool for egocentric computer vision research. Refer to our project page: https://ego-gen.github.io/.

URLs: https://ego-gen.github.io/.

replace-cross Supervised Fine-tuning in turn Improves Visual Foundation Models

Authors: Xiaohu Jiang, Yixiao Ge, Yuying Ge, Dachuan Shi, Chun Yuan, Ying Shan

Abstract: Image-text training like CLIP has dominated the pretraining of vision foundation models in recent years. Subsequent efforts have been made to introduce region-level visual learning into CLIP's pretraining but face scalability challenges due to the lack of large-scale region-level datasets. Drawing inspiration from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in natural language processing such as instruction tuning, we explore the potential of fine-grained SFT in enhancing the generation of vision foundation models after their pretraining. Thus a two-stage method ViSFT (Vision SFT) is proposed to unleash the fine-grained knowledge of vision foundation models. In ViSFT, the vision foundation model is enhanced by performing visual joint learning on some in-domain tasks and then tested on out-of-domain benchmarks. With updating using ViSFT on 8 V100 GPUs in less than 2 days, a vision transformer with over 4.4B parameters shows improvements across various out-of-domain benchmarks including vision and vision-linguistic scenarios.

replace-cross On the $O(\frac{\sqrt{d}}{T^{1/4}})$ Convergence Rate of RMSProp and Its Momentum Extension Measured by $\ell_1$ Norm

Authors: Huan Li, Zhouchen Lin

Abstract: Although adaptive gradient methods have been extensively used in deep learning, their convergence rates proved in the literature are all slower than that of SGD, particularly with respect to their dependence on the dimension. This paper considers the classical RMSProp and its momentum extension and establishes the convergence rate of $\frac{1}{T}\sum_{k=1}^T E\left[\|\nabla f(x^k)\|_1\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{d}C}{T^{1/4}})$ measured by $\ell_1$ norm without the bounded gradient assumption, where $d$ is the dimension of the optimization variable, $T$ is the iteration number, and $C$ is a constant identical to that appeared in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Our convergence rate matches the lower bound with respect to all the coefficients except the dimension $d$. Since $\|x\|_2\ll\|x\|_1\leq\sqrt{d}\|x\|_2$ for problems with extremely large $d$, our convergence rate can be considered to be analogous to the $\frac{1}{T}\sum_{k=1}^T E\left[\|\nabla f(x^k)\|_2\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{T^{1/4}})$ rate of SGD in the ideal case of $\|\nabla f(x)\|_1=\varTheta(\sqrt{d}\|\nabla f(x)\|_2)$.

replace-cross Driving Everywhere with Large Language Model Policy Adaptation

Authors: Boyi Li, Yue Wang, Jiageng Mao, Boris Ivanovic, Sushant Veer, Karen Leung, Marco Pavone

Abstract: Adapting driving behavior to new environments, customs, and laws is a long-standing problem in autonomous driving, precluding the widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we present LLaDA, a simple yet powerful tool that enables human drivers and autonomous vehicles alike to drive everywhere by adapting their tasks and motion plans to traffic rules in new locations. LLaDA achieves this by leveraging the impressive zero-shot generalizability of large language models (LLMs) in interpreting the traffic rules in the local driver handbook. Through an extensive user study, we show that LLaDA's instructions are useful in disambiguating in-the-wild unexpected situations. We also demonstrate LLaDA's ability to adapt AV motion planning policies in real-world datasets; LLaDA outperforms baseline planning approaches on all our metrics. Please check our website for more details: https://boyiliee.github.io/llada.

URLs: https://boyiliee.github.io/llada.

replace-cross Group Decision-Making among Privacy-Aware Agents

Authors: Marios Papachristou, M. Amin Rahimian

Abstract: How can individuals exchange information to learn from each other despite their privacy needs and security concerns? For example, consider individuals deliberating a contentious topic and being concerned about divulging their private experiences. Preserving individual privacy and enabling efficient social learning are both important desiderata but seem fundamentally at odds with each other and very hard to reconcile. We do so by controlling information leakage using rigorous statistical guarantees that are based on differential privacy (DP). Our agents use log-linear rules to update their beliefs after communicating with their neighbors. Adding DP randomization noise to beliefs provides communicating agents with plausible deniability with regard to their private information and their network neighborhoods. We consider two learning environments one for distributed maximum-likelihood estimation given a finite number of private signals and another for online learning from an infinite, intermittent signal stream. Noisy information aggregation in the finite case leads to interesting tradeoffs between rejecting low-quality states and making sure all high-quality states are accepted in the algorithm output. Our results flesh out the nature of the trade-offs in both cases between the quality of the group decision outcomes, learning accuracy, communication cost, and the level of privacy protections that the agents are afforded.

replace-cross LLaGA: Large Language and Graph Assistant

Authors: Runjin Chen, Tong Zhao, Ajay Jaiswal, Neil Shah, Zhangyang Wang

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have empowered the advance in graph-structured data analysis. Recently, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has heralded a new era in deep learning. However, their application to graph data poses distinct challenges due to the inherent difficulty of translating graph structures to language. To this end, we introduce the Large Language and Graph Assistant (LLaGA), an innovative model that effectively integrates LLM capabilities to handle the complexities of graph-structured data. LLaGA retains the general-purpose nature of LLMs while adapting graph data into a format compatible with LLM input. LLaGA achieves this by reorganizing graph nodes to structure-aware sequences and then mapping these into the token embedding space through a versatile projector. LLaGA excels in versatility, generalizability and interpretability, allowing it to perform consistently well across different datasets and tasks, extend its ability to unseen datasets or tasks, and provide explanations for graphs. Our extensive experiments across popular graph benchmarks show that LLaGA delivers outstanding performance across four datasets and three tasks using one single model, surpassing state-of-the-art graph models in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/VITA-Group/LLaGA}.

URLs: https://github.com/VITA-Group/LLaGA

replace-cross Me LLaMA: Foundation Large Language Models for Medical Applications

Authors: Qianqian Xie, Qingyu Chen, Aokun Chen, Cheng Peng, Yan Hu, Fongci Lin, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, Jeffrey Zhang, Vipina Keloth, Xinyu Zhou, Huan He, Lucila Ohno-Machado, Yonghui Wu, Hua Xu, Jiang Bian

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMA have hinted at their potential to revolutionize medical applications, yet their application in clinical settings often reveals limitations due to a lack of specialized training on medical-specific data. In response to this challenge, this study introduces Me-LLaMA, a novel medical LLM family that includes foundation models - Me-LLaMA 13/70B, along with their chat-enhanced versions - Me-LLaMA 13/70B-chat, developed through continual pre-training and instruction tuning of LLaMA2 using large medical datasets. Our methodology leverages a comprehensive domain-specific data suite, including a large-scale, continual pre-training dataset with 129B tokens, an instruction tuning dataset with 214k samples, and a new medical evaluation benchmark (MIBE) across six critical medical tasks with 12 datasets. Our extensive evaluation using the MIBE shows that Me-LLaMA models achieve overall better performance than existing open-source medical LLMs in zero-shot, few-shot and supervised learning abilities. With task-specific instruction tuning, Me-LLaMA models outperform ChatGPT on 7 out of 8 datasets and GPT-4 on 5 out of 8 datasets. In addition, we investigated the catastrophic forgetting problem, and our results show that Me-LLaMA models outperform other open-source medical LLMs in mitigating this issue. Me-LLaMA is one of the largest open-source medical foundation LLMs that use both biomedical and clinical data. It exhibits superior performance across both general and medical tasks compared to other open-source medical LLMs, rendering it an attractive choice for medical AI applications. We release our models, datasets, and evaluation scripts at: https://github.com/BIDS-Xu-Lab/Me-LLaMA.

URLs: https://github.com/BIDS-Xu-Lab/Me-LLaMA.

replace-cross GEM3D: GEnerative Medial Abstractions for 3D Shape Synthesis

Authors: Dmitry Petrov, Pradyumn Goyal, Vikas Thamizharasan, Vladimir G. Kim, Matheus Gadelha, Melinos Averkiou, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Evangelos Kalogerakis

Abstract: We introduce GEM3D -- a new deep, topology-aware generative model of 3D shapes. The key ingredient of our method is a neural skeleton-based representation encoding information on both shape topology and geometry. Through a denoising diffusion probabilistic model, our method first generates skeleton-based representations following the Medial Axis Transform (MAT), then generates surfaces through a skeleton-driven neural implicit formulation. The neural implicit takes into account the topological and geometric information stored in the generated skeleton representations to yield surfaces that are more topologically and geometrically accurate compared to previous neural field formulations. We discuss applications of our method in shape synthesis and point cloud reconstruction tasks, and evaluate our method both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate significantly more faithful surface reconstruction and diverse shape generation results compared to the state-of-the-art, also involving challenging scenarios of reconstructing and synthesizing structurally complex, high-genus shape surfaces from Thingi10K and ShapeNet.

replace-cross Evaluation of LLMs on Syntax-Aware Code Fill-in-the-Middle Tasks

Authors: Linyuan Gong, Sida Wang, Mostafa Elhoushi, Alvin Cheung

Abstract: We introduce Syntax-Aware Fill-In-the-Middle (SAFIM), a new benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) on the code Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) task. This benchmark focuses on syntax-aware completions of program structures such as code blocks and conditional expressions, and includes 17,720 examples from multiple programming languages, sourced from recent code submissions after April 2022 to minimize data contamination. SAFIM provides a robust framework with various prompt designs and novel syntax-aware post-processing techniques, facilitating accurate and fair comparisons across LLMs. Our comprehensive evaluation of 15 LLMs shows that FIM pretraining not only enhances FIM proficiency but also improves Left-to-Right (L2R) inference using LLMs. Our findings challenge conventional beliefs and suggest that pretraining methods and data quality have more impact than model size. SAFIM thus serves as a foundational platform for future research in effective pretraining strategies for code LLMs. The evaluation toolkit and dataset are available at https://github.com/gonglinyuan/safim, and the leaderboard is available at https://safimbenchmark.com.

URLs: https://github.com/gonglinyuan/safim,, https://safimbenchmark.com.

replace-cross AI and Identity

Authors: Sri Yash Tadimalla, Mary Lou Maher

Abstract: AI-empowered technologies' impact on the world is undeniable, reshaping industries, revolutionizing how humans interact with technology, transforming educational paradigms, and redefining social codes. However, this rapid growth is accompanied by two notable challenges: a lack of diversity within the AI field and a widening AI divide. In this context, This paper examines the intersection of AI and identity as a pathway to understand biases, inequalities, and ethical considerations in AI development and deployment. We present a multifaceted definition of AI identity, which encompasses its creators, applications, and their broader impacts. Understanding AI's identity involves understanding the associations between the individuals involved in AI's development, the technologies produced, and the social, ethical, and psychological implications. After exploring the AI identity ecosystem and its societal dynamics, We propose a framework that highlights the need for diversity in AI across three dimensions: Creators, Creations, and Consequences through the lens of identity. This paper proposes the need for a comprehensive approach to fostering a more inclusive and responsible AI ecosystem through the lens of identity.

replace-cross Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology

Authors: Gemma Team, Thomas Mesnard, Cassidy Hardin, Robert Dadashi, Surya Bhupatiraju, Shreya Pathak, Laurent Sifre, Morgane Rivi\`ere, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Juliette Love, Pouya Tafti, L\'eonard Hussenot, Pier Giuseppe Sessa, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Adam Roberts, Aditya Barua, Alex Botev, Alex Castro-Ros, Ambrose Slone, Am\'elie H\'eliou, Andrea Tacchetti, Anna Bulanova, Antonia Paterson, Beth Tsai, Bobak Shahriari, Charline Le Lan, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Cl\'ement Crepy, Daniel Cer, Daphne Ippolito, David Reid, Elena Buchatskaya, Eric Ni, Eric Noland, Geng Yan, George Tucker, George-Christian Muraru, Grigory Rozhdestvenskiy, Henryk Michalewski, Ian Tenney, Ivan Grishchenko, Jacob Austin, James Keeling, Jane Labanowski, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Jeff Stanway, Jenny Brennan, Jeremy Chen, Johan Ferret, Justin Chiu, Justin Mao-Jones, Katherine Lee, Kathy Yu, Katie Millican, Lars Lowe Sjoesund, Lisa Lee, Lucas Dixon, Machel Reid, Maciej Miku{\l}a, Mateo Wirth, Michael Sharman, Nikolai Chinaev, Nithum Thain, Olivier Bachem, Oscar Chang, Oscar Wahltinez, Paige Bailey, Paul Michel, Petko Yotov, Rahma Chaabouni, Ramona Comanescu, Reena Jana, Rohan Anil, Ross McIlroy, Ruibo Liu, Ryan Mullins, Samuel L Smith, Sebastian Borgeaud, Sertan Girgin, Sholto Douglas, Shree Pandya, Siamak Shakeri, Soham De, Ted Klimenko, Tom Hennigan, Vlad Feinberg, Wojciech Stokowiec, Yu-hui Chen, Zafarali Ahmed, Zhitao Gong, Tris Warkentin, Ludovic Peran, Minh Giang, Cl\'ement Farabet, Oriol Vinyals, Jeff Dean, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Demis Hassabis, Zoubin Ghahramani, Douglas Eck, Joelle Barral, Fernando Pereira, Eli Collins, Armand Joulin, Noah Fiedel, Evan Senter, Alek Andreev, Kathleen Kenealy

Abstract: This work introduces Gemma, a family of lightweight, state-of-the art open models built from the research and technology used to create Gemini models. Gemma models demonstrate strong performance across academic benchmarks for language understanding, reasoning, and safety. We release two sizes of models (2 billion and 7 billion parameters), and provide both pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints. Gemma outperforms similarly sized open models on 11 out of 18 text-based tasks, and we present comprehensive evaluations of safety and responsibility aspects of the models, alongside a detailed description of model development. We believe the responsible release of LLMs is critical for improving the safety of frontier models, and for enabling the next wave of LLM innovations.

replace-cross StateFlow: Enhancing LLM Task-Solving through State-Driven Workflows

Authors: Yiran Wu, Tianwei Yue, Shaokun Zhang, Chi Wang, Qingyun Wu

Abstract: It is a notable trend to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, e.g., tasks that require a sequence of actions and dynamic interaction with tools and external environments. In this paper, we propose StateFlow, a novel LLM-based task-solving paradigm that conceptualizes complex task-solving processes as state machines. In StateFlow, we distinguish between "process grounding" (via state and state transitions) and "sub-task solving" (through actions within a state), enhancing control and interpretability of the task-solving procedure. A state represents the status of a running process. The transitions between states are controlled by heuristic rules or decisions made by the LLM, allowing for a dynamic and adaptive progression. Upon entering a state, a series of actions is executed, involving not only calling LLMs guided by different prompts, but also the utilization of external tools as needed. Our results show that StateFlow significantly enhances LLMs' efficiency. For instance, StateFlow achieves 13% and 28% higher success rates compared to ReAct in InterCode SQL and ALFWorld benchmark, with 5x and 3x less cost respectively. We also show that StateFlow can be combined with iterative refining methods like Reflexion to further improve performance.

replace-cross Provable Privacy with Non-Private Pre-Processing

Authors: Yaxi Hu, Amartya Sanyal, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf

Abstract: When analysing Differentially Private (DP) machine learning pipelines, the potential privacy cost of data-dependent pre-processing is frequently overlooked in privacy accounting. In this work, we propose a general framework to evaluate the additional privacy cost incurred by non-private data-dependent pre-processing algorithms. Our framework establishes upper bounds on the overall privacy guarantees by utilising two new technical notions: a variant of DP termed Smooth DP and the bounded sensitivity of the pre-processing algorithms. In addition to the generic framework, we provide explicit overall privacy guarantees for multiple data-dependent pre-processing algorithms, such as data imputation, quantization, deduplication and PCA, when used in combination with several DP algorithms. Notably, this framework is also simple to implement, allowing direct integration into existing DP pipelines.

replace-cross KTbench: A Novel Data Leakage-Free Framework for Knowledge Tracing

Authors: Yahya Badran, Christine Preisach

Abstract: Knowledge Tracing (KT) is concerned with predicting students' future performance on learning items in intelligent tutoring systems. Learning items are tagged with skill labels called knowledge concepts (KCs). Many KT models expand the sequence of item-student interactions into KC-student interactions by replacing learning items with their constituting KCs. This often results in a longer sequence length. This approach addresses the issue of sparse item-student interactions and minimises model parameters. However, two problems have been identified with such models. The first problem is the model's ability to learn correlations between KCs belonging to the same item, which can result in the leakage of ground truth labels and hinder performance. This problem can lead to a significant decrease in performance on datasets with a higher number of KCs per item. The second problem is that the available benchmark implementations ignore accounting for changes in sequence length when expanding KCs, leading to different models being tested with varying sequence lengths but still compared against the same benchmark. To address these problems, we introduce a general masking framework that mitigates the first problem and enhances the performance of such KT models while preserving the original model architecture without significant alterations. Additionally, we introduce KTbench, an open-source benchmark library designed to ensure the reproducibility of this work while mitigating the second problem.

replace-cross Concept-based Analysis of Neural Networks via Vision-Language Models

Authors: Ravi Mangal, Nina Narodytska, Divya Gopinath, Boyue Caroline Hu, Anirban Roy, Susmit Jha, Corina Pasareanu

Abstract: The analysis of vision-based deep neural networks (DNNs) is highly desirable but it is very challenging due to the difficulty of expressing formal specifications for vision tasks and the lack of efficient verification procedures. In this paper, we propose to leverage emerging multimodal, vision-language, foundation models (VLMs) as a lens through which we can reason about vision models. VLMs have been trained on a large body of images accompanied by their textual description, and are thus implicitly aware of high-level, human-understandable concepts describing the images. We describe a logical specification language $\texttt{Con}_{\texttt{spec}}$ designed to facilitate writing specifications in terms of these concepts. To define and formally check $\texttt{Con}_{\texttt{spec}}$ specifications, we build a map between the internal representations of a given vision model and a VLM, leading to an efficient verification procedure of natural-language properties for vision models. We demonstrate our techniques on a ResNet-based classifier trained on the RIVAL-10 dataset using CLIP as the multimodal model.

replace-cross Source-Aware Training Enables Knowledge Attribution in Language Models

Authors: Muhammad Khalifa, David Wadden, Emma Strubell, Honglak Lee, Lu Wang, Iz Beltagy, Hao Peng

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) learn a vast amount of knowledge during pretraining, but they are often oblivious to the source(s) of such knowledge. We investigate the problem of intrinsic source citation, where LLMs are required to cite the pretraining source supporting a generated response. Intrinsic source citation can enhance LLM transparency, interpretability, and verifiability. To give LLMs such ability, we explore source-aware training -- a post pretraining recipe that involves (i) training the LLM to associate unique source document identifiers with the knowledge in each document, followed by (ii) an instruction-tuning to teach the LLM to cite a supporting pretraining source when prompted. Source-aware training can easily be applied to pretrained LLMs off the shelf, and diverges minimally from existing pretraining/fine-tuning frameworks. Through experiments on carefully curated data, we demonstrate that our training recipe can enable faithful attribution to the pretraining data without a substantial impact on the model's quality compared to standard pretraining. Our results also highlight the importance of data augmentation in achieving attribution. Code and data available here: \url{https://github.com/mukhal/intrinsic-source-citation}

URLs: https://github.com/mukhal/intrinsic-source-citation

replace-cross Finding Regions of Interest in Whole Slide Images Using Multiple Instance Learning

Authors: Martim Afonso, Praphulla M. S. Bhawsar, Monjoy Saha, Jonas S. Almeida, Arlindo L. Oliveira

Abstract: Whole Slide Images (WSI), obtained by high-resolution digital scanning of microscope slides at multiple scales, are the cornerstone of modern Digital Pathology. However, they represent a particular challenge to AI-based/AI-mediated analysis because pathology labeling is typically done at slide-level, instead of tile-level. It is not just that medical diagnostics is recorded at the specimen level, the detection of oncogene mutation is also experimentally obtained, and recorded by initiatives like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), at the slide level. This configures a dual challenge: a) accurately predicting the overall cancer phenotype and b) finding out what cellular morphologies are associated with it at the tile level. To address these challenges, a weakly supervised Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) approach was explored for two prevalent cancer types, Invasive Breast Carcinoma (TCGA-BRCA) and Lung Squamous Cell Carcinoma (TCGA-LUSC). This approach was explored for tumor detection at low magnification levels and TP53 mutations at various levels. Our results show that a novel additive implementation of MIL matched the performance of reference implementation (AUC 0.96), and was only slightly outperformed by Attention MIL (AUC 0.97). More interestingly from the perspective of the molecular pathologist, these different AI architectures identify distinct sensitivities to morphological features (through the detection of Regions of Interest, RoI) at different amplification levels. Tellingly, TP53 mutation was most sensitive to features at the higher applications where cellular morphology is resolved.

replace-cross Efficient Online Unlearning via Hessian-Free Recollection of Individual Data Statistics

Authors: Xinbao Qiao, Meng Zhang, Ming Tang, Ermin Wei

Abstract: Machine unlearning strives to uphold the data owners' right to be forgotten by enabling models to selectively forget specific data. Recent methods suggest that one approach of data forgetting is by precomputing and storing statistics carrying second-order information to improve computational and memory efficiency. However, they rely on restrictive assumptions and the computation/storage suffer from the curse of model parameter dimensionality, making it challenging to apply to most deep neural networks. In this work, we propose a Hessian-free online unlearning method. We propose to maintain a statistical vector for each data point, computed through affine stochastic recursion approximation of the difference between retrained and learned models. Our proposed algorithm achieves near-instantaneous online unlearning as it only requires a vector addition operation. Based on the strategy that recollecting statistics for forgetting data, the proposed method significantly reduces the unlearning runtime. Experimental studies demonstrate that the proposed scheme surpasses existing results by orders of magnitude in terms of time and memory costs, while also enhancing accuracy.

replace-cross Deep Reinforcement Learning for Traveling Purchaser Problems

Authors: Haofeng Yuan, Rongping Zhu, Wanlu Yang, Shiji Song, Keyou You, Yuli Zhang

Abstract: The traveling purchaser problem (TPP) is an important combinatorial optimization problem with broad applications. Due to the coupling between routing and purchasing, existing works on TPPs commonly address route construction and purchase planning simultaneously, which, however, leads to exact methods with high computational cost and heuristics with sophisticated design but limited performance. In sharp contrast, we propose a novel approach based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which addresses route construction and purchase planning separately, while evaluating and optimizing the solution from a global perspective. The key components of our approach include a bipartite graph representation for TPPs to capture the market-product relations, and a policy network that extracts information from the bipartite graph and uses it to sequentially construct the route. One significant benefit of our framework is that we can efficiently construct the route using the policy network, and once the route is determined, the associated purchasing plan can be easily derived through linear programming, while, leveraging DRL, we can train the policy network to optimize the global solution objective. Furthermore, by introducing a meta-learning strategy, the policy network can be trained stably on large-sized TPP instances, and generalize well across instances of varying sizes and distributions, even to much larger instances that are never seen during training. Experiments on various synthetic TPP instances and the TPPLIB benchmark demonstrate that our DRL-based approach can significantly outperform well-established TPP heuristics, reducing the optimality gap by 40%-90%, and also showing an advantage in runtime, especially on large-sized instances.

replace-cross ChangeMamba: Remote Sensing Change Detection with Spatio-Temporal State Space Model

Authors: Hongruixuan Chen, Jian Song, Chengxi Han, Junshi Xia, Naoto Yokoya

Abstract: Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Transformers have made impressive progress in the field of remote sensing change detection (CD). However, both architectures have inherent shortcomings. Recently, the Mamba architecture, based on state space models, has shown remarkable performance in a series of natural language processing tasks, which can effectively compensate for the shortcomings of the above two architectures. In this paper, we explore for the first time the potential of the Mamba architecture for remote sensing CD tasks. We tailor the corresponding frameworks, called MambaBCD, MambaSCD, and MambaBDA, for binary change detection (BCD), semantic change detection (SCD), and building damage assessment (BDA), respectively. All three frameworks adopt the cutting-edge Visual Mamba architecture as the encoder, which allows full learning of global spatial contextual information from the input images. For the change decoder, which is available in all three architectures, we propose three spatio-temporal relationship modeling mechanisms, which can be naturally combined with the Mamba architecture and fully utilize its attribute to achieve spatio-temporal interaction of multi-temporal features, thereby obtaining accurate change information. On five benchmark datasets, our proposed frameworks outperform current CNN- and Transformer-based approaches without using any complex training strategies or tricks, fully demonstrating the potential of the Mamba architecture in CD tasks. Specifically, we obtained 83.11%, 88.39% and 94.19% F1 scores on the three BCD datasets SYSU, LEVIR-CD+, and WHU-CD; on the SCD dataset SECOND, we obtained 24.11% SeK; and on the BDA dataset xBD, we obtained 81.41% overall F1 score. Further experiments show that our architecture is quite robust to degraded data. The source code will be available in https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/MambaCD

URLs: https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/MambaCD

replace-cross A Block-Coordinate Descent EMO Algorithm: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Authors: Benjamin Doerr, Joshua Knowles, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann

Abstract: We consider whether conditions exist under which block-coordinate descent is asymptotically efficient in evolutionary multi-objective optimization, addressing an open problem. Block-coordinate descent, where an optimization problem is decomposed into $k$ blocks of decision variables and each of the blocks is optimized (with the others fixed) in a sequence, is a technique used in some large-scale optimization problems such as airline scheduling, however its use in multi-objective optimization is less studied. We propose a block-coordinate version of GSEMO and compare its running time to the standard GSEMO algorithm. Theoretical and empirical results on a bi-objective test function, a variant of LOTZ, serve to demonstrate the existence of cases where block-coordinate descent is faster. The result may yield wider insights into this class of algorithms.

replace-cross CLUE: A Clinical Language Understanding Evaluation for LLMs

Authors: Amin Dada, Marie Bauer, Amanda Butler Contreras, Osman Alperen Kora\c{s}, Constantin Marc Seibold, Kaleb E Smith, Jens Kleesiek

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the potential to significantly contribute to patient care, diagnostics, and administrative processes. Emerging biomedical LLMs address healthcare-specific challenges, including privacy demands and computational constraints. However, evaluation of these models has primarily been limited to non-clinical tasks, which do not reflect the complexity of practical clinical applications. Additionally, there has been no thorough comparison between biomedical and general-domain LLMs for clinical tasks. To fill this gap, we present the Clinical Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE), a benchmark tailored to evaluate LLMs on real-world clinical tasks. CLUE includes two novel datasets derived from MIMIC IV discharge letters and four existing tasks designed to test the practical applicability of LLMs in healthcare settings. Our evaluation covers several biomedical and general domain LLMs, providing insights into their clinical performance and applicability. CLUE represents a step towards a standardized approach to evaluating and developing LLMs in healthcare to align future model development with the real-world needs of clinical application. We publish our evaluation and data generation scripts: https://github.com/TIO-IKIM/CLUE.

URLs: https://github.com/TIO-IKIM/CLUE.

replace-cross Eagle and Finch: RWKV with Matrix-Valued States and Dynamic Recurrence

Authors: Bo Peng, Daniel Goldstein, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Eric Alcaide, Stella Biderman, Eugene Cheah, Xingjian Du, Teddy Ferdinan, Haowen Hou, Przemys{\l}aw Kazienko, Kranthi Kiran GV, Jan Koco\'n, Bart{\l}omiej Koptyra, Satyapriya Krishna, Ronald McClelland Jr., Niklas Muennighoff, Fares Obeid, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Haoqin Tu, Stanis{\l}aw Wo\'zniak, Ruichong Zhang, Bingchen Zhao, Qihang Zhao, Peng Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu

Abstract: We present Eagle (RWKV-5) and Finch (RWKV-6), sequence models improving upon the RWKV (RWKV-4) architecture. Our architectural design advancements include multi-headed matrix-valued states and a dynamic recurrence mechanism that improve expressivity while maintaining the inference efficiency characteristics of RNNs. We introduce a new multilingual corpus with 1.12 trillion tokens and a fast tokenizer based on greedy matching for enhanced multilinguality. We trained four Eagle models, ranging from 0.46 to 7.5 billion parameters, and two Finch models with 1.6 and 3.1 billion parameters and find that they achieve competitive performance across a wide variety of benchmarks. We release all our models on HuggingFace under the Apache 2.0 license. Models at: https://huggingface.co/RWKV Training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM Inference code at: https://github.com/RWKV/ChatRWKV Time-parallel training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-infctx-trainer

URLs: https://huggingface.co/RWKV, https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM, https://github.com/RWKV/ChatRWKV, https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-infctx-trainer

replace-cross Uncertainty-aware Evidential Fusion-based Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Yuanpeng He, Lijian Li

Abstract: Although the existing uncertainty-based semi-supervised medical segmentation methods have achieved excellent performance, they usually only consider a single uncertainty evaluation, which often fails to solve the problem related to credibility completely. Therefore, based on the framework of evidential deep learning, this paper integrates the evidential predictive results in the cross-region of mixed and original samples to reallocate the confidence degree and uncertainty measure of each voxel, which is realized by emphasizing uncertain information of probability assignments fusion rule of traditional evidence theory. Furthermore, we design a voxel-level asymptotic learning strategy by introducing information entropy to combine with the fused uncertainty measure to estimate voxel prediction more precisely. The model will gradually pay attention to the prediction results with high uncertainty in the learning process, to learn the features that are difficult to master. The experimental results on LA, Pancreas-CT, ACDC and TBAD datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method in comparison with the existing state of the arts.

replace-cross From Protoscience to Epistemic Monoculture: How Benchmarking Set the Stage for the Deep Learning Revolution

Authors: Bernard J. Koch, David Peterson

Abstract: Over the past decade, AI research has focused heavily on building ever-larger deep learning models. This approach has simultaneously unlocked incredible achievements in science and technology, and hindered AI from overcoming long-standing limitations with respect to explainability, ethical harms, and environmental efficiency. Drawing on qualitative interviews and computational analyses, our three-part history of AI research traces the creation of this "epistemic monoculture" back to a radical reconceptualization of scientific progress that began in the late 1980s. In the first era of AI research (1950s-late 1980s), researchers and patrons approached AI as a "basic" science that would advance through autonomous exploration and organic assessments of progress (e.g., peer-review, theoretical consensus). The failure of this approach led to a retrenchment of funding in the 1980s. Amid this "AI Winter," an intervention by the U.S. government reoriented the field towards measurable progress on tasks of military and commercial interest. A new evaluation system called "benchmarking" provided an objective way to quantify progress on tasks by focusing exclusively on increasing predictive accuracy on example datasets. Distilling science down to verifiable metrics clarified the roles of scientists, allowed the field to rapidly integrate talent, and provided clear signals of significance and progress. But history has also revealed a tradeoff to this streamlined approach to science: the consolidation around external interests and inherent conservatism of benchmarking has disincentivized exploration beyond scaling monoculture. In the discussion, we explain how AI's monoculture offers a compelling challenge to the belief that basic, exploration-driven research is needed for scientific progress. Implications for the spread of AI monoculture to other sciences in the era of generative AI are also discussed.

replace-cross VoiceShop: A Unified Speech-to-Speech Framework for Identity-Preserving Zero-Shot Voice Editing

Authors: Philip Anastassiou, Zhenyu Tang, Kainan Peng, Dongya Jia, Jiaxin Li, Ming Tu, Yuping Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Mingbo Ma

Abstract: We present VoiceShop, a novel speech-to-speech framework that can modify multiple attributes of speech, such as age, gender, accent, and speech style, in a single forward pass while preserving the input speaker's timbre. Previous works have been constrained to specialized models that can only edit these attributes individually and suffer from the following pitfalls: the magnitude of the conversion effect is weak, there is no zero-shot capability for out-of-distribution speakers, or the synthesized outputs exhibit undesirable timbre leakage. Our work proposes solutions for each of these issues in a simple modular framework based on a conditional diffusion backbone model with optional normalizing flow-based and sequence-to-sequence speaker attribute-editing modules, whose components can be combined or removed during inference to meet a wide array of tasks without additional model finetuning. Audio samples are available at \url{https://voiceshopai.github.io}.

URLs: https://voiceshopai.github.io

replace-cross SpikeNVS: Enhancing Novel View Synthesis from Blurry Images via Spike Camera

Authors: Gaole Dai, Zhenyu Wang, Qinwen Xu, Ming Lu, Wen Cheng, Baixin Shi, Shanghang Zhang, Tiejun Huang

Abstract: One of the most critical factors in achieving sharp Novel View Synthesis (NVS) using neural field methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is the quality of the training images. However, Conventional RGB cameras are susceptible to motion blur. In contrast, neuromorphic cameras like event and spike cameras inherently capture more comprehensive temporal information, which can provide a sharp representation of the scene as additional training data. Recent methods have explored the integration of event cameras to improve the quality of NVS. The event-RGB approaches have some limitations, such as high training costs and the inability to work effectively in the background. Instead, our study introduces a new method that uses the spike camera to overcome these limitations. By considering texture reconstruction from spike streams as ground truth, we design the Texture from Spike (TfS) loss. Since the spike camera relies on temporal integration instead of temporal differentiation used by event cameras, our proposed TfS loss maintains manageable training costs. It handles foreground objects with backgrounds simultaneously. We also provide a real-world dataset captured with our spike-RGB camera system to facilitate future research endeavors. We conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate that our design can enhance novel view synthesis across NeRF and 3DGS. The code and dataset will be made available for public access.

replace-cross Multi-Label Continual Learning for the Medical Domain: A Novel Benchmark

Authors: Marina Ceccon, Davide Dalle Pezze, Alessandro Fabris, Gian Antonio Susto

Abstract: Multi-label image classification in dynamic environments is a problem that poses significant challenges. Previous studies have primarily focused on scenarios such as Domain Incremental Learning and Class Incremental Learning, which do not fully capture the complexity of real-world applications. In this paper, we study the problem of classification of medical imaging in the scenario termed New Instances and New Classes, which combines the challenges of both new class arrivals and domain shifts in a single framework. Unlike traditional scenarios, it reflects the realistic nature of CL in domains such as medical imaging, where updates may introduce both new classes and changes in domain characteristics. To address the unique challenges posed by this complex scenario, we introduce a novel approach called Pseudo-Label Replay. This method aims to mitigate forgetting while adapting to new classes and domain shifts by combining the advantages of the Replay and Pseudo-Label methods and solving their limitations in the proposed scenario. We evaluate our proposed approach on a challenging benchmark consisting of two datasets, seven tasks, and nineteen classes, modeling a realistic Continual Learning scenario. Our experimental findings demonstrate the effectiveness of Pseudo-Label Replay in addressing the challenges posed by the complex scenario proposed. Our method surpasses existing approaches, exhibiting superior performance while showing minimal forgetting.

replace-cross MetaCheckGPT -- A Multi-task Hallucination Detector Using LLM Uncertainty and Meta-models

Authors: Rahul Mehta, Andrew Hoblitzell, Jack O'Keefe, Hyeju Jang, Vasudeva Varma

Abstract: Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) have recently become a significant problem. A recent effort in this direction is a shared task at Semeval 2024 Task 6, SHROOM, a Shared-task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes. This paper describes our winning solution ranked 1st and 2nd in the 2 sub-tasks of model agnostic and model aware tracks respectively. We propose a meta-regressor framework of LLMs for model evaluation and integration that achieves the highest scores on the leaderboard. We also experiment with various transformer-based models and black box methods like ChatGPT, Vectara, and others. In addition, we perform an error analysis comparing GPT4 against our best model which shows the limitations of the former.

replace-cross Semantically-correlated memories in a dense associative model

Authors: Thomas F Burns

Abstract: I introduce a novel associative memory model named Correlated Dense Associative Memory (CDAM), which integrates both auto- and hetero-association in a unified framework for continuous-valued memory patterns. Employing an arbitrary graph structure to semantically link memory patterns, CDAM is theoretically and numerically analysed, revealing four distinct dynamical modes: auto-association, narrow hetero-association, wide hetero-association, and neutral quiescence. Drawing inspiration from inhibitory modulation studies, I employ anti-Hebbian learning rules to control the range of hetero-association, extract multi-scale representations of community structures in graphs, and stabilise the recall of temporal sequences. Experimental demonstrations showcase CDAM's efficacy in handling real-world data, replicating a classical neuroscience experiment, performing image retrieval, and simulating arbitrary finite automata.

replace-cross Towards Robustness of Text-to-Visualization Translation against Lexical and Phrasal Variability

Authors: Jinwei Lu, Yuanfeng Song, Haodi Zhang, Chen Zhang, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong

Abstract: Text-to-Vis is an emerging task in the natural language processing (NLP) area that aims to automatically generate data visualizations from natural language questions (NLQs). Despite their progress, existing text-to-vis models often heavily rely on lexical matching between words in the questions and tokens in data schemas. This overreliance on lexical matching may lead to a diminished level of model robustness against input variations. In this study, we thoroughly examine the robustness of current text-to-vis models, an area that has not previously been explored. In particular, we construct the first robustness dataset nvBench-Rob, which contains diverse lexical and phrasal variations based on the original text-to-vis benchmark nvBench. Then, we found that the performance of existing text-to-vis models on this new dataset dramatically drops, implying that these methods exhibit inadequate robustness overall. Finally, we propose a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique, named GRED, specifically designed to address input perturbations in these two variants. The framework consists of three parts: NLQ-Retrieval Generator, Visualization Query-Retrieval Retuner and Annotation-based Debugger, which are used to tackle the challenges posed by natural language variants, programming style differences and data schema variants, respectively. Extensive experimental evaluations show that, compared to the state-of-the-art model RGVisNet in the Text-to-Vis field, GRED performs better in terms of model robustness, with a 32% increase in accuracy on the proposed nvBench-Rob dataset.