Authors: Sefika Efeoglu
Abstract: Ontology matching is defined as finding a relationship or correspondence between two or more entities in two or more ontologies. To solve the interoperability problem of the domain ontologies, semantically similar entities in these ontologies must be found and aligned before merging them. GraphMatcher, developed in this study, is an ontology matching system using a graph attention approach to compute higher-level representation of a class together with its surrounding terms. The GraphMatcher has obtained remarkable results in in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) 2022 conference track. Its codes are available at ~\url{https://github.com/sefeoglu/gat_ontology_matching}.
Authors: Peiwen Li, Xin Wang, Zeyang Zhang, Yuan Meng, Fang Shen, Yue Li, Jialong Wang, Yang Li, Wenweu Zhu
Abstract: In the field of Artificial Intelligence for Information Technology Operations, causal discovery is pivotal for operation and maintenance of graph construction, facilitating downstream industrial tasks such as root cause analysis. Temporal causal discovery, as an emerging method, aims to identify temporal causal relationships between variables directly from observations by utilizing interventional data. However, existing methods mainly focus on synthetic datasets with heavy reliance on intervention targets and ignore the textual information hidden in real-world systems, failing to conduct causal discovery for real industrial scenarios. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose to investigate temporal causal discovery in industrial scenarios, which faces two critical challenges: 1) how to discover causal relationships without the interventional targets that are costly to obtain in practice, and 2) how to discover causal relations via leveraging the textual information in systems which can be complex yet abundant in industrial contexts. To address these challenges, we propose the RealTCD framework, which is able to leverage domain knowledge to discover temporal causal relationships without interventional targets. Specifically, we first develop a score-based temporal causal discovery method capable of discovering causal relations for root cause analysis without relying on interventional targets through strategic masking and regularization. Furthermore, by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle texts and integrate domain knowledge, we introduce LLM-guided meta-initialization to extract the meta-knowledge from textual information hidden in systems to boost the quality of discovery. We conduct extensive experiments on simulation and real-world datasets to show the superiority of our proposed RealTCD framework over existing baselines in discovering temporal causal structures.
Authors: Raphael Koster, Miruna P\^islar, Andrea Tacchetti, Jan Balaguer, Leqi Liu, Romuald Elie, Oliver P. Hauser, Karl Tuyls, Matt Botvinick, Christopher Summerfield
Abstract: A canonical social dilemma arises when finite resources are allocated to a group of people, who can choose to either reciprocate with interest, or keep the proceeds for themselves. What resource allocation mechanisms will encourage levels of reciprocation that sustain the commons? Here, in an iterated multiplayer trust game, we use deep reinforcement learning (RL) to design an allocation mechanism that endogenously promotes sustainable contributions from human participants to a common pool resource. We first trained neural networks to behave like human players, creating a stimulated economy that allowed us to study how different mechanisms influenced the dynamics of receipt and reciprocation. We then used RL to train a social planner to maximise aggregate return to players. The social planner discovered a redistributive policy that led to a large surplus and an inclusive economy, in which players made roughly equal gains. The RL agent increased human surplus over baseline mechanisms based on unrestricted welfare or conditional cooperation, by conditioning its generosity on available resources and temporarily sanctioning defectors by allocating fewer resources to them. Examining the AI policy allowed us to develop an explainable mechanism that performed similarly and was more popular among players. Deep reinforcement learning can be used to discover mechanisms that promote sustainable human behaviour.
Authors: Kelsey Sikes, Sarah Keren, Sarath Sreedharan
Abstract: One of the most difficult challenges in creating successful human-AI collaborations is aligning a robot's behavior with a human user's expectations. When this fails to occur, a robot may misinterpret their specified goals, prompting it to perform actions with unanticipated, potentially dangerous side effects. To avoid this, we propose a new metric we call Goal State Divergence $\mathcal{(GSD)}$, which represents the difference between a robot's final goal state and the one a human user expected. In cases where $\mathcal{GSD}$ cannot be directly calculated, we show how it can be approximated using maximal and minimal bounds. We then input the $\mathcal{GSD}$ value into our novel human-robot goal alignment (HRGA) design problem, which identifies a minimal set of environment modifications that can prevent mismatches like this. To show the effectiveness of $\mathcal{GSD}$ for reducing differences between human-robot goal states, we empirically evaluate our approach on several standard benchmarks.
Authors: Xiaoyun Chang, Yi Sun
Abstract: The hand plays a pivotal role in human ability to grasp and manipulate objects and controllable grasp synthesis is the key for successfully performing downstream tasks. Existing methods that use human intention or task-level language as control signals for grasping inherently face ambiguity. To address this challenge, we propose a grasp synthesis method guided by text prompts of object grasping parts, Text2Grasp, which provides more precise control. Specifically, we present a two-stage method that includes a text-guided diffusion model TextGraspDiff to first generate a coarse grasp pose, then apply a hand-object contact optimization process to ensure both plausibility and diversity. Furthermore, by leveraging Large Language Model, our method facilitates grasp synthesis guided by task-level and personalized text descriptions without additional manual annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves not only accurate part-level grasp control but also comparable performance in grasp quality.
Authors: Suyeon Shin, Sujin jeon, Junghyun Kim, Gi-Cheon Kang, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Abstract: Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is the task of executing natural language instructions by navigating and interacting with objects in 3D environments. One of the primary challenges in EIF is compositional task planning, which is often addressed with supervised or in-context learning with labeled data. To this end, we introduce the Socratic Planner, the first zero-shot planning method that infers without the need for any training data. Socratic Planner first decomposes the instructions into substructural information of the task through self-questioning and answering, translating it into a high-level plan, i.e., a sequence of subgoals. Subgoals are executed sequentially, with our visually grounded re-planning mechanism adjusting plans dynamically through a dense visual feedback. We also introduce an evaluation metric of high-level plans, RelaxedHLP, for a more comprehensive evaluation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the Socratic Planner, achieving competitive performance on both zero-shot and few-shot task planning in the ALFRED benchmark, particularly excelling in tasks requiring higher-dimensional inference. Additionally, a precise adjustments in the plan were achieved by incorporating environmental visual information.
Authors: Yuchen Li, Ziqi Wang, Qingquan Zhang, Jialin Liu
Abstract: This survey comprehensively reviews the multi-dimensionality of game scenario diversity, spotlighting the innovative use of procedural content generation and other fields as cornerstones for enriching player experiences through diverse game scenarios. By traversing a wide array of disciplines, from affective modeling and multi-agent systems to psychological studies, our research underscores the importance of diverse game scenarios in gameplay and education. Through a taxonomy of diversity metrics and evaluation methods, we aim to bridge the current gaps in literature and practice, offering insights into effective strategies for measuring and integrating diversity in game scenarios. Our analysis highlights the necessity for a unified taxonomy to aid developers and researchers in crafting more engaging and varied game worlds. This survey not only charts a path for future research in diverse game scenarios but also serves as a handbook for industry practitioners seeking to leverage diversity as a key component of game design and development.
Authors: Michael Aich, Philipp Hess, Baoxiang Pan, Sebastian Bathiany, Yu Huang, Niklas Boers
Abstract: Climate change exacerbates extreme weather events like heavy rainfall and flooding. As these events cause severe losses of property and lives, accurate high-resolution simulation of precipitation is imperative. However, existing Earth System Models (ESMs) struggle with resolving small-scale dynamics and suffer from biases, especially for extreme events. Traditional statistical bias correction and downscaling methods fall short in improving spatial structure, while recent deep learning methods lack controllability over the output and suffer from unstable training. Here, we propose a novel machine learning framework for simultaneous bias correction and downscaling. We train a generative diffusion model in a supervised way purely on observational data. We map observational and ESM data to a shared embedding space, where both are unbiased towards each other and train a conditional diffusion model to reverse the mapping. Our method can be used to correct any ESM field, as the training is independent of the ESM. Our approach ensures statistical fidelity, preserves large-scale spatial patterns and outperforms existing methods especially regarding extreme events and small-scale spatial features that are crucial for impact assessments.
Authors: James D. Cunningham, Conrad S. Tucker
Abstract: A significant amount of society's infrastructure can be modeled using graph structures, from electric and communication grids, to traffic networks, to social networks. Each of these domains are also susceptible to the cascading spread of negative impacts, whether this be overloaded devices in the power grid or the reach of a social media post containing misinformation. The potential harm of a cascade is compounded when considering a malicious attack by an adversary that is intended to maximize the cascading impact. However, by exploiting knowledge of the cascading dynamics, targets with the largest cascading impact can be preemptively prioritized for defense, and the damage an adversary can inflict can be mitigated. While game theory provides tools for finding an optimal preemptive defense strategy, existing methods struggle to scale to the context of large graph environments because of the combinatorial explosion of possible actions that occurs when the attacker and defender can each choose multiple targets in the graph simultaneously. The proposed method enables a data-driven deep learning approach that uses multi-node representation learning and counterfactual data augmentation to generalize to the full combinatorial action space by training on a variety of small restricted subsets of the action space. We demonstrate through experiments that the proposed method is capable of identifying defense strategies that are less exploitable than SOTA methods for large graphs, while still being able to produce strategies near the Nash equilibrium for small-scale scenarios for which it can be computed. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrates superior prediction accuracy on a validation set of unseen cascades compared to other deep learning approaches.
Authors: Abdul Wahab Ziaullah, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran
Abstract: Critical Infrastructure Facilities (CIFs), such as healthcare and transportation facilities, are vital for the functioning of a community, especially during large-scale emergencies. In this paper, we explore a potential application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to monitor the status of CIFs affected by natural disasters through information disseminated in social media networks. To this end, we analyze social media data from two disaster events in two different countries to identify reported impacts to CIFs as well as their impact severity and operational status. We employ state-of-the-art open-source LLMs to perform computational tasks including retrieval, classification, and inference, all in a zero-shot setting. Through extensive experimentation, we report the results of these tasks using standard evaluation metrics and reveal insights into the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. We note that although LLMs perform well in classification tasks, they encounter challenges with inference tasks, especially when the context/prompt is complex and lengthy. Additionally, we outline various potential directions for future exploration that can be beneficial during the initial adoption phase of LLMs for disaster response tasks.
Authors: Donghwan Lee
Abstract: Convergence of Q-learning has been the focus of extensive research over the past several decades. Recently, an asymptotic convergence analysis for Q-learning was introduced using a switching system framework. This approach applies the so-called ordinary differential equation (ODE) approach to prove the convergence of the asynchronous Q-learning modeled as a continuous-time switching system, where notions from switching system theory are used to prove its asymptotic stability without using explicit Lyapunov arguments. However, to prove stability, restrictive conditions, such as quasi-monotonicity, must be satisfied for the underlying switching systems, which makes it hard to easily generalize the analysis method to other reinforcement learning algorithms, such as the smooth Q-learning variants. In this paper, we present a more general and unified convergence analysis that improves upon the switching system approach and can analyze Q-learning and its smooth variants. The proposed analysis is motivated by previous work on the convergence of synchronous Q-learning based on $p$-norm serving as a Lyapunov function. However, the proposed analysis addresses more general ODE models that can cover both asynchronous Q-learning and its smooth versions with simpler frameworks.
Authors: Kewei Yuan, Qiurong Zhao, Yang Xu, Xiao Zhang, Huansheng Ning
Abstract: In view of the fact that most of the existing machine translation evaluation algorithms only consider the lexical and syntactic information, but ignore the deep semantic information contained in the sentence, this paper proposes a computational method for evaluating the semantic correctness of machine translations based on reference translations and incorporating semantic dependencies and sentence keyword information. Use the language technology platform developed by the Social Computing and Information Retrieval Research Center of Harbin Institute of Technology to conduct semantic dependency analysis and keyword analysis on sentences, and obtain semantic dependency graphs, keywords, and weight information corresponding to keywords. It includes all word information with semantic dependencies in the sentence and keyword information that affects semantic information. Construct semantic association pairs including word and dependency multi-features. The key semantics of the sentence cannot be highlighted in the semantic information extracted through semantic dependence, resulting in vague semantics analysis. Therefore, the sentence keyword information is also included in the scope of machine translation semantic evaluation. To achieve a comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of the semantic correctness of sentences, the experimental results show that the accuracy of the evaluation algorithm has been improved compared with similar methods, and it can more accurately measure the semantic correctness of machine translation.
Authors: Yunyi Zhao, Zhang Wei, Qingyu Yan, Man-Fai Ng, B. Sivaneasan, Cheng Xiang
Abstract: Battery health monitoring and prediction are critically important in the era of electric mobility with a huge impact on safety, sustainability, and economic aspects. Existing research often focuses on prediction accuracy but tends to neglect practical factors that may hinder the technology's deployment in real-world applications. In this paper, we address these practical considerations and develop models based on the Bayesian neural network for predicting battery end-of-life. Our models use sensor data related to battery health and apply distributions, rather than single-point, for each parameter of the models. This allows the models to capture the inherent randomness and uncertainty of battery health, which leads to not only accurate predictions but also quantifiable uncertainty. We conducted an experimental study and demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed models, with a prediction error rate averaging 13.9%, and as low as 2.9% for certain tested batteries. Additionally, all predictions include quantifiable certainty, which improved by 66% from the initial to the mid-life stage of the battery. This research has practical values for battery technologies and contributes to accelerating the technology adoption in the industry.
Authors: Yefeng Yuan, Yuhong Liu, Liang Cheng
Abstract: The rapid advancements in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have opened up new avenues for producing synthetic data, particularly in the realm of structured tabular formats, such as product reviews. Despite the potential benefits, concerns regarding privacy leakage have surfaced, especially when personal information is utilized in the training datasets. In addition, there is an absence of a comprehensive evaluation framework capable of quantitatively measuring the quality of the generated synthetic data and their utility for downstream tasks. In response to this gap, we introduce SynEval, an open-source evaluation framework designed to assess the fidelity, utility, and privacy preservation of synthetically generated tabular data via a suite of diverse evaluation metrics. We validate the efficacy of our proposed framework - SynEval - by applying it to synthetic product review data generated by three state-of-the-art LLMs: ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama. Our experimental findings illuminate the trade-offs between various evaluation metrics in the context of synthetic data generation. Furthermore, SynEval stands as a critical instrument for researchers and practitioners engaged with synthetic tabular data,, empowering them to judiciously determine the suitability of the generated data for their specific applications, with an emphasis on upholding user privacy.
Authors: Jose Cribeiro-Ramallo, Vadim Arzamasov, Federico Matteucci, Denis Wambold, Klemens B\"ohm
Abstract: Outlier detection in high-dimensional tabular data is an important task in data mining, essential for many downstream tasks and applications. Existing unsupervised outlier detection algorithms face one or more problems, including inlier assumption (IA), curse of dimensionality (CD), and multiple views (MV). To address these issues, we introduce Generative Subspace Adversarial Active Learning (GSAAL), a novel approach that uses a Generative Adversarial Network with multiple adversaries. These adversaries learn the marginal class probability functions over different data subspaces, while a single generator in the full space models the entire distribution of the inlier class. GSAAL is specifically designed to address the MV limitation while also handling the IA and CD, being the only method to do so. We provide a comprehensive mathematical formulation of MV, convergence guarantees for the discriminators, and scalability results for GSAAL. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of GSAAL, highlighting its superior performance compared to other popular OD methods, especially in MV scenarios.
Authors: Xiping Liu, Zhao Tan
Abstract: The conversion of natural language queries into SQL queries, known as Text-to-SQL, is a critical yet challenging task. This paper introduces EPI-SQL, a novel methodological framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the performance of Text-to-SQL tasks. EPI-SQL operates through a four-step process. Initially, the method involves gathering instances from the Spider dataset on which LLMs are prone to failure. These instances are then utilized to generate general error-prevention instructions (EPIs). Subsequently, LLMs craft contextualized EPIs tailored to the specific context of the current task. Finally, these context-specific EPIs are incorporated into the prompt used for SQL generation. EPI-SQL is distinguished in that it provides task-specific guidance, enabling the model to circumvent potential errors for the task at hand. Notably, the methodology rivals the performance of advanced few-shot methods despite being a zero-shot approach. An empirical assessment using the Spider benchmark reveals that EPI-SQL achieves an execution accuracy of 85.1\%, underscoring its effectiveness in generating accurate SQL queries through LLMs. The findings indicate a promising direction for future research, i.e. enhancing instructions with task-specific and contextualized rules, for boosting LLMs' performance in NLP tasks.
Authors: Yousef Khan, Ahmed Abdeen Hamed
Abstract: Addressing the global challenge of breast cancer, this research explores the fusion of generative AI, focusing on ChatGPT 3.5 turbo model, and the intricacies of breast cancer risk assessment. The research aims to evaluate ChatGPT's reasoning capabilities, emphasizing its potential to process rules and provide explanations for screening recommendations. The study seeks to bridge the technology gap between intelligent machines and clinicians by demonstrating ChatGPT's unique proficiency in natural language reasoning. The methodology employs a supervised prompt-engineering approach to enforce detailed explanations for ChatGPT's recommendations. Synthetic use cases, generated algorithmically, serve as the testing ground for the encoded rules, evaluating the model's processing prowess. Findings highlight ChatGPT's promising capacity in processing rules comparable to Expert System Shells, with a focus on natural language reasoning. The research introduces the concept of reinforcement explainability, showcasing its potential in elucidating outcomes and facilitating user-friendly interfaces for breast cancer risk assessment.
Authors: Jo\~ao Gama, Rita P. Ribeiro, Saulo Mastelini, Narjes Davarid, Bruno Veloso
Abstract: Predictive Maintenance applications are increasingly complex, with interactions between many components. Black box models are popular approaches based on deep learning techniques due to their predictive accuracy. This paper proposes a neural-symbolic architecture that uses an online rule-learning algorithm to explain when the black box model predicts failures. The proposed system solves two problems in parallel: anomaly detection and explanation of the anomaly. For the first problem, we use an unsupervised state of the art autoencoder. For the second problem, we train a rule learning system that learns a mapping from the input features to the autoencoder reconstruction error. Both systems run online and in parallel. The autoencoder signals an alarm for the examples with a reconstruction error that exceeds a threshold. The causes of the signal alarm are hard for humans to understand because they result from a non linear combination of sensor data. The rule that triggers that example describes the relationship between the input features and the autoencoder reconstruction error. The rule explains the failure signal by indicating which sensors contribute to the alarm and allowing the identification of the component involved in the failure. The system can present global explanations for the black box model and local explanations for why the black box model predicts a failure. We evaluate the proposed system in a real-world case study of Metro do Porto and provide explanations that illustrate its benefits.
Authors: Rebeka T\'oth, Tamas Bisztray, L\'aszl\'o Erdodi
Abstract: This research carries out a comprehensive examination of web application code security, when generated by Large Language Models through analyzing a dataset comprising 2,500 small dynamic PHP websites. These AI-generated sites are scanned for security vulnerabilities after being deployed as standalone websites in Docker containers. The evaluation of the websites was conducted using a hybrid methodology, incorporating the Burp Suite active scanner, static analysis, and manual checks. Our investigation zeroes in on identifying and analyzing File Upload, SQL Injection, Stored XSS, and Reflected XSS. This approach not only underscores the potential security flaws within AI-generated PHP code but also provides a critical perspective on the reliability and security implications of deploying such code in real-world scenarios. Our evaluation confirms that 27% of the programs generated by GPT-4 verifiably contains vulnerabilities in the PHP code, where this number -- based on static scanning and manual verification -- is potentially much higher. This poses a substantial risks to software safety and security. In an effort to contribute to the research community and foster further analysis, we have made the source codes publicly available, alongside a record enumerating the detected vulnerabilities for each sample. This study not only sheds light on the security aspects of AI-generated code but also underscores the critical need for rigorous testing and evaluation of such technologies for software development.
Authors: Javier Rando, Francesco Croce, Kry\v{s}tof Mitka, Stepan Shabalin, Maksym Andriushchenko, Nicolas Flammarion, Florian Tram\`er
Abstract: Large language models are aligned to be safe, preventing users from generating harmful content like misinformation or instructions for illegal activities. However, previous work has shown that the alignment process is vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Adversaries can manipulate the safety training data to inject backdoors that act like a universal sudo command: adding the backdoor string to any prompt enables harmful responses from models that, otherwise, behave safely. Our competition, co-located at IEEE SaTML 2024, challenged participants to find universal backdoors in several large language models. This report summarizes the key findings and promising ideas for future research.
Authors: Sergio Burdisso, Ernesto Reyes-Ram\'irez, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Fernando S\'anchez-Vega, Pastor L\'opez-Monroy, Petr Motlicek
Abstract: Automatic depression detection from conversational data has gained significant interest in recent years. The DAIC-WOZ dataset, interviews conducted by a human-controlled virtual agent, has been widely used for this task. Recent studies have reported enhanced performance when incorporating interviewer's prompts into the model. In this work, we hypothesize that this improvement might be mainly due to a bias present in these prompts, rather than the proposed architectures and methods. Through ablation experiments and qualitative analysis, we discover that models using interviewer's prompts learn to focus on a specific region of the interviews, where questions about past experiences with mental health issues are asked, and use them as discriminative shortcuts to detect depressed participants. In contrast, models using participant responses gather evidence from across the entire interview. Finally, to highlight the magnitude of this bias, we achieve a 0.90 F1 score by intentionally exploiting it, the highest result reported to date on this dataset using only textual information. Our findings underline the need for caution when incorporating interviewers' prompts into models, as they may inadvertently learn to exploit targeted prompts, rather than learning to characterize the language and behavior that are genuinely indicative of the patient's mental health condition.
Authors: Li Jiapeng, Liu Runze, Li Yabo, Zhou Tong, Li Mingling, Chen Xiang
Abstract: Multi-hop question answering is a knowledge-intensive complex problem. Large Language Models (LLMs) use their Chain of Thoughts (CoT) capability to reason complex problems step by step, and retrieval-augmentation can effectively alleviate factual errors caused by outdated and unknown knowledge in LLMs. Recent works have introduced retrieval-augmentation in the CoT reasoning to solve multi-hop question answering. However, these chain methods have the following problems: 1) Retrieved irrelevant paragraphs may mislead the reasoning; 2) An error in the chain structure may lead to a cascade of errors. In this paper, we propose a dynamic retrieval framework called Tree of Reviews (ToR), where the root node is the question, and the other nodes are paragraphs from retrieval, extending different reasoning paths from the root node to other nodes. Our framework dynamically decides to initiate a new search, reject, or accept based on the paragraphs on the reasoning paths. Compared to related work, we introduce a tree structure to handle each retrieved paragraph separately, alleviating the misleading effect of irrelevant paragraphs on the reasoning path; the diversity of reasoning path extension reduces the impact of a single reasoning error on the whole. We conducted experiments on three different multi-hop question answering datasets. The results show that compared to the baseline methods, ToR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both retrieval and response generation. In addition, we propose two tree-based search optimization strategies, pruning and effective expansion, to reduce time overhead and increase the diversity of path extension. We will release our code.
Authors: Dimitris Asimopoulos, Ilias Siniosoglou, Vasileios Argyriou, Thomai Karamitsou, Eleftherios Fountoukidis, Sotirios K. Goudos, Ioannis D. Moscholios, Konstantinos E. Psannis, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis
Abstract: In the realm of data privacy, the ability to effectively anonymise text is paramount. With the proliferation of deep learning and, in particular, transformer architectures, there is a burgeoning interest in leveraging these advanced models for text anonymisation tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study comparing the performance of transformer-based models and Large Language Models(LLM) against traditional architectures for text anonymisation. Utilising the CoNLL-2003 dataset, known for its robustness and diversity, we evaluate several models. Our results showcase the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, offering a clear perspective on the efficacy of modern versus traditional methods. Notably, while modern models exhibit advanced capabilities in capturing con textual nuances, certain traditional architectures still keep high performance. This work aims to guide researchers in selecting the most suitable model for their anonymisation needs, while also shedding light on potential paths for future advancements in the field.
Authors: Hongxuan Liu, Haoyu Yin, Zhiyao Luo, Xiaonan Wang
Abstract: This paper presents a study on the integration of domain-specific knowledge in prompt engineering to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in scientific domains. A benchmark dataset is curated to encapsulate the intricate physical-chemical properties of small molecules, their drugability for pharmacology, alongside the functional attributes of enzymes and crystal materials, underscoring the relevance and applicability across biological and chemical domains.The proposed domain-knowledge embedded prompt engineering method outperforms traditional prompt engineering strategies on various metrics, including capability, accuracy, F1 score, and hallucination drop. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated through case studies on complex materials including the MacMillan catalyst, paclitaxel, and lithium cobalt oxide. The results suggest that domain-knowledge prompts can guide LLMs to generate more accurate and relevant responses, highlighting the potential of LLMs as powerful tools for scientific discovery and innovation when equipped with domain-specific prompts. The study also discusses limitations and future directions for domain-specific prompt engineering development.
Authors: Yuhong Li, Yingbing Huang, Bowen Yang, Bharat Venkitesh, Acyr Locatelli, Hanchen Ye, Tianle Cai, Patrick Lewis, Deming Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in processing extensive contexts, with the Key-Value (KV) cache playing a vital role in enhancing their performance. However, the growth of the KV cache in response to increasing input length poses challenges to memory and time efficiency. To address this problem, this paper introduces SnapKV, an innovative and fine-tuning-free approach that efficiently minimizes KV cache size while still delivering comparable performance in real-world applications. We discover that each attention head in the model consistently focuses on specific prompt attention features during generation. Meanwhile, this robust pattern can be obtained from an `observation' window located at the end of the prompts. Drawing on this insight, SnapKV automatically compresses KV caches by selecting clustered important KV positions for each attention head. Our approach significantly reduces the growing computational overhead and memory footprint when processing long input sequences. Specifically, SnapKV achieves a consistent decoding speed with a 3.6x increase in generation speed and an 8.2x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to baseline when processing inputs of 16K tokens. At the same time, it maintains comparable performance to baseline models across 16 long sequence datasets. Moreover, SnapKV can process up to 380K context tokens on a single A100-80GB GPU using HuggingFace implementation with minor changes, exhibiting only a negligible accuracy drop in the Needle-in-a-Haystack test. Further comprehensive studies suggest SnapKV's potential for practical applications.
Authors: Mohammed Abugurain, Shinkyu Park
Abstract: This paper presents a framework that can interpret humans' navigation commands containing temporal elements and directly translate their natural language instructions into robot motion planning. Central to our framework is utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs). To enhance the reliability of LLMs in the framework and improve user experience, we propose methods to resolve the ambiguity in natural language instructions and capture user preferences. The process begins with an ambiguity classifier, identifying potential uncertainties in the instructions. Ambiguous statements trigger a GPT-4-based mechanism that generates clarifying questions, incorporating user responses for disambiguation. Also, the framework assesses and records user preferences for non-ambiguous instructions, enhancing future interactions. The last part of this process is the translation of disambiguated instructions into a robot motion plan using Linear Temporal Logic. This paper details the development of this framework and the evaluation of its performance in various test scenarios.
Authors: Lili Wu, Ben Evans, Riashat Islam, Raihan Seraj, Yonathan Efroni, Alex Lamb
Abstract: Discovering an informative, or agent-centric, state representation that encodes only the relevant information while discarding the irrelevant is a key challenge towards scaling reinforcement learning algorithms and efficiently applying them to downstream tasks. Prior works studied this problem in high-dimensional Markovian environments, when the current observation may be a complex object but is sufficient to decode the informative state. In this work, we consider the problem of discovering the agent-centric state in the more challenging high-dimensional non-Markovian setting, when the state can be decoded from a sequence of past observations. We establish that generalized inverse models can be adapted for learning agent-centric state representation for this task. Our results include asymptotic theory in the deterministic dynamics setting as well as counter-examples for alternative intuitive algorithms. We complement these findings with a thorough empirical study on the agent-centric state discovery abilities of the different alternatives we put forward. Particularly notable is our analysis of past actions, where we show that these can be a double-edged sword: making the algorithms more successful when used correctly and causing dramatic failure when used incorrectly.
Authors: Richard Stromer (Stanford University), Oskar Triebe (Stanford University), Chad Zanocco (Stanford University), Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
Abstract: Forecasts inform decision-making in nearly every domain. Forecasts are often produced by experts with rare or hard to acquire skills. In practice, forecasts are often used by domain experts and managers with little forecasting expertise. Our study focuses on how to design forecasting software that empowers non-expert users. We study how users can make use of state-of-the-art forecasting methods, embed their domain knowledge, and how they build understanding and trust towards generated forecasts. To do so, we co-designed a forecasting software prototype using feedback from users and then analyzed their interactions with our prototype. Our results identified three main considerations for non-expert users: (1) a safe stepwise approach facilitating causal understanding and trust; (2) a white box model supporting human-reasoning-friendly components; (3) the inclusion of domain knowledge. This paper contributes insights into how non-expert users interact with forecasting software and by recommending ways to design more accessible forecasting software.
Authors: Yuying Li, Zeyan Liu, Junyi Zhao, Liangqin Ren, Fengjun Li, Jiebo Luo, Bo Luo
Abstract: Generative AI models can produce high-quality images based on text prompts. The generated images often appear indistinguishable from images generated by conventional optical photography devices or created by human artists (i.e., real images). While the outstanding performance of such generative models is generally well received, security concerns arise. For instance, such image generators could be used to facilitate fraud or scam schemes, generate and spread misinformation, or produce fabricated artworks. In this paper, we present a systematic attempt at understanding and detecting AI-generated images (AI-art) in adversarial scenarios. First, we collect and share a dataset of real images and their corresponding artificial counterparts generated by four popular AI image generators. The dataset, named ARIA, contains over 140K images in five categories: artworks (painting), social media images, news photos, disaster scenes, and anime pictures. This dataset can be used as a foundation to support future research on adversarial AI-art. Next, we present a user study that employs the ARIA dataset to evaluate if real-world users can distinguish with or without reference images. In a benchmarking study, we further evaluate if state-of-the-art open-source and commercial AI image detectors can effectively identify the images in the ARIA dataset. Finally, we present a ResNet-50 classifier and evaluate its accuracy and transferability on the ARIA dataset.
Authors: Armando Zhu, Keqin Li, Tong Wu, Peng Zhao, Wenjing Zhou, Bo Hong
Abstract: With wearing masks becoming a new cultural norm, facial expression recognition (FER) while taking masks into account has become a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-branch vision transformer for facial expression recognition and mask wearing classification tasks. Our approach extracts shared features for both tasks using a dual-branch architecture that obtains multi-scale feature representations. Furthermore, we propose a cross-task fusion phase that processes tokens for each task with separate branches, while exchanging information using a cross attention module. Our proposed framework reduces the overall complexity compared with using separate networks for both tasks by the simple yet effective cross-task fusion phase. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model performs better than or on par with different state-of-the-art methods on both facial expression recognition and facial mask wearing classification task.
Authors: Dujian Ding, Ankur Mallick, Chi Wang, Robert Sim, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Victor Ruhle, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel in most NLP tasks but also require expensive cloud servers for deployment due to their size, while smaller models that can be deployed on lower cost (e.g., edge) devices, tend to lag behind in terms of response quality. Therefore in this work we propose a hybrid inference approach which combines their respective strengths to save cost and maintain quality. Our approach uses a router that assigns queries to the small or large model based on the predicted query difficulty and the desired quality level. The desired quality level can be tuned dynamically at test time to seamlessly trade quality for cost as per the scenario requirements. In experiments our approach allows us to make up to 40% fewer calls to the large model, with no drop in response quality.
Authors: Sachin Mehta, Mohammad Hossein Sekhavat, Qingqing Cao, Maxwell Horton, Yanzi Jin, Chenfan Sun, Iman Mirzadeh, Mahyar Najibi, Dmitry Belenko, Peter Zatloukal, Mohammad Rastegari
Abstract: The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results, and enabling investigations into data and model biases, as well as potential risks. To this end, we release OpenELM, a state-of-the-art open language model. OpenELM uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, leading to enhanced accuracy. For example, with a parameter budget of approximately one billion parameters, OpenELM exhibits a 2.36% improvement in accuracy compared to OLMo while requiring $2\times$ fewer pre-training tokens. Diverging from prior practices that only provide model weights and inference code, and pre-train on private datasets, our release includes the complete framework for training and evaluation of the language model on publicly available datasets, including training logs, multiple checkpoints, and pre-training configurations. We also release code to convert models to MLX library for inference and fine-tuning on Apple devices. This comprehensive release aims to empower and strengthen the open research community, paving the way for future open research endeavors. Our source code along with pre-trained model weights and training recipes is available at \url{https://github.com/apple/corenet}. Additionally, \model models can be found on HuggingFace at: \url{https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM}.
URLs: https://github.com/apple/corenet, https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM
Authors: Matthew Colwell, Mahdi Abolghasemi
Abstract: Prediction and optimisation are two widely used techniques that have found many applications in solving real-world problems. While prediction is concerned with estimating the unknown future values of a variable, optimisation is concerned with optimising the decision given all the available data. These methods are used together to solve problems for sequential decision-making where often we need to predict the future values of variables and then use them for determining the optimal decisions. This paradigm is known as forecast and optimise and has numerous applications, e.g., forecast demand for a product and then optimise inventory, forecast energy demand and schedule generations, forecast demand for a service and schedule staff, to name a few. In this extended abstract, we review a digital twin that was developed and applied in wastewater treatment in Urban Utility to improve their operational efficiency. While the current study is tailored to the case study problem, the underlying principles can be used to solve similar problems in other domains.
Authors: Zhen Yang, Fang Liu, Zhongxing Yu, Jacky Wai Keung, Jia Li, Shuo Liu, Yifan Hong, Xiaoxue Ma, Zhi Jin, Ge Li
Abstract: Code translation tools are developed for automatic source-to-source translation. Although learning-based transpilers have shown impressive enhancement against rule-based counterparts, owing to their task-specific pre-training on extensive monolingual corpora. Their current performance still remains unsatisfactory for practical deployment, and the associated training resources are also prohibitively expensive. LLMs pre-trained on huge amounts of human-written code/text have shown remarkable performance in many code intelligence tasks due to their powerful generality, even without task-specific training. Thus, LLMs can potentially circumvent the above limitations, but they have not been exhaustively explored yet. This paper investigates diverse LLMs and learning-based transpilers for automated code translation tasks, finding that: although certain LLMs have outperformed current transpilers, they still have some accuracy issues, where most of the failures are induced by a lack of comprehension of source programs (38.51%), missing clear instructions on I/O types in translation (14.94%), and ignoring discrepancies between source and target programs (41.38%). Enlightened by the above findings, we propose UniTrans, an Unified code Translation framework, applicable to various LLMs, for unleashing their power in this field. Specifically, UniTrans first craft a series of test cases for target programs with the assistance of source programs. Next, it harnesses the above auto-generated test cases to augment the code translation and then evaluate their correctness via execution. Afterward, UniTrans further (iteratively) repairs incorrectly translated programs prompted by test case execution results. Extensive experiments are conducted on six translation datasets between Python, Java, and C++. Three recent LLMs of diverse sizes are tested with UniTrans, and all achieve substantial improvements.
Authors: Tom Zick, Mason Kortz, David Eaves, Finale Doshi-Velez
Abstract: Public sector use of AI has been quietly on the rise for the past decade, but only recently have efforts to regulate it entered the cultural zeitgeist. While simple to articulate, promoting ethical and effective roll outs of AI systems in government is a notoriously elusive task. On the one hand there are hard-to-address pitfalls associated with AI-based tools, including concerns about bias towards marginalized communities, safety, and gameability. On the other, there is pressure not to make it too difficult to adopt AI, especially in the public sector which typically has fewer resources than the private sector$\unicode{x2014}$conserving scarce government resources is often the draw of using AI-based tools in the first place. These tensions create a real risk that procedures built to ensure marginalized groups are not hurt by government use of AI will, in practice, be performative and ineffective. To inform the latest wave of regulatory efforts in the United States, we look to jurisdictions with mature regulations around government AI use. We report on lessons learned by officials in Brazil, Singapore and Canada, who have collectively implemented risk categories, disclosure requirements and assessments into the way they procure AI tools. In particular, we investigate two implemented checklists: the Canadian Directive on Automated Decision-Making (CDADM) and the World Economic Forum's AI Procurement in a Box (WEF). We detail three key pitfalls around expertise, risk frameworks and transparency, that can decrease the efficacy of regulations aimed at government AI use and suggest avenues for improvement.
Authors: Taewook Hwang, Hyein Seo, Sangkeun Jung
Abstract: Recent deep learning models such as ChatGPT utilizing the back-propagation algorithm have exhibited remarkable performance. However, the disparity between the biological brain processes and the back-propagation algorithm has been noted. The Forward-Forward algorithm, which trains deep learning models solely through the forward pass, has emerged to address this. Although the Forward-Forward algorithm cannot replace back-propagation due to limitations such as having to use special input and loss functions, it has the potential to be useful in special situations where back-propagation is difficult to use. To work around this limitation and verify usability, we propose an Unsupervised Forward-Forward algorithm. Using an unsupervised learning model enables training with usual loss functions and inputs without restriction. Through this approach, we lead to stable learning and enable versatile utilization across various datasets and tasks. From a usability perspective, given the characteristics of the Forward-Forward algorithm and the advantages of the proposed method, we anticipate its practical application even in scenarios such as federated learning, where deep learning layers need to be trained separately in physically distributed environments.
Authors: Yang Chen, Ruituo Wu, Yipeng Liu, Ce Zhu
Abstract: Implicit neural representations (INR) suffer from worsening spectral bias, which results in overly smooth solutions to the inverse problem. To deal with this problem, we propose a universal framework for processing inverse problems called \textbf{High-Order Implicit Neural Representations (HOIN)}. By refining the traditional cascade structure to foster high-order interactions among features, HOIN enhances the model's expressive power and mitigates spectral bias through its neural tangent kernel's (NTK) strong diagonal properties, accelerating and optimizing inverse problem resolution. By analyzing the model's expression space, high-order derivatives, and the NTK matrix, we theoretically validate the feasibility of HOIN. HOIN realizes 1 to 3 dB improvements in most inverse problems, establishing a new state-of-the-art recovery quality and training efficiency, thus providing a new general paradigm for INR and paving the way for it to solve the inverse problem.
Authors: Elijah Pelofske, Vincent Urias, Lorie M. Liebrock
Abstract: The task of accurate and efficient language translation is an extremely important information processing task. Machine learning enabled and automated translation that is accurate and fast is often a large topic of interest in the machine learning and data science communities. In this study, we examine using local Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models to perform automated zero shot black-box, sentence wise, multi-natural-language translation into English text. We benchmark 16 different open-source GPT models, with no custom fine-tuning, from the Huggingface LLM repository for translating 50 different non-English languages into English using translated TED Talk transcripts as the reference dataset. These GPT model inference calls are performed strictly locally, on single A100 Nvidia GPUs. Benchmark metrics that are reported are language translation accuracy, using BLEU, GLEU, METEOR, and chrF text overlap measures, and wall-clock time for each sentence translation. The best overall performing GPT model for translating into English text for the BLEU metric is ReMM-v2-L2-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.152$, for the GLEU metric is ReMM-v2-L2-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.256$, for the chrF metric is Llama2-chat-AYT-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.448$, and for the METEOR metric is ReMM-v2-L2-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.438$.
Authors: Raehyuk Jung, Hyojun Go, Jaehyuk Yi, Jiho Jang, Daniel Kim, Jay Suh, Aiden Lee, Cooper Han, Jae Lee, Jeff Kim, Jin-Young Kim, Junwan Kim, Kyle Park, Lucas Lee, Mars Ha, Minjoon Seo, Abraham Jo, Ed Park, Hassan Kianinejad, SJ Kim, Tony Moon, Wade Jeong, Andrei Popescu, Esther Kim, EK Yoon, Genie Heo, Henry Choi, Jenna Kang, Kevin Han, Noah Seo, Sunny Nguyen, Ryan Won, Yeonhoo Park, Anthony Giuliani, Dave Chung, Hans Yoon, James Le, Jenny Ahn, June Lee, Maninder Saini, Meredith Sanders, Soyoung Lee, Sue Kim, Travis Couture
Abstract: This technical report introduces Pegasus-1, a multimodal language model specialized in video content understanding and interaction through natural language. Pegasus-1 is designed to address the unique challenges posed by video data, such as interpreting spatiotemporal information, to offer nuanced video content comprehension across various lengths. This technical report overviews Pegasus-1's architecture, training strategies, and its performance in benchmarks on video conversation, zero-shot video question answering, and video summarization. We also explore qualitative characteristics of Pegasus-1 , demonstrating its capabilities as well as its limitations, in order to provide readers a balanced view of its current state and its future direction.
Authors: Zezheng Song, Jiaxin Yuan, Haizhao Yang
Abstract: Human-designed algorithms have long been fundamental in solving a variety of scientific and engineering challenges. Recently, data-driven deep learning methods have also risen to prominence, offering innovative solutions across numerous scientific fields. While traditional algorithms excel in capturing the core aspects of specific problems, they often lack the flexibility needed for varying problem conditions due to the absence of specific data. Conversely, while data-driven approaches utilize vast datasets, they frequently fall short in domain-specific knowledge. To bridge these gaps, we introduce \textbf{FMint} (Foundation Model based on Initialization), a generative pre-trained model that synergizes the precision of human-designed algorithms with the adaptability of data-driven methods. This model is specifically engineered for high-accuracy simulation of dynamical systems. Starting from initial trajectories provided by conventional methods, FMint quickly delivers highly accurate solutions. It incorporates in-context learning and has been pre-trained on a diverse corpus of 500,000 dynamical systems, showcasing exceptional generalization across a broad spectrum of real-world applications. By effectively combining algorithmic rigor with data-driven flexibility, FMint sets the stage for the next generation of scientific foundation models, tackling complex problems with both efficiency and high accuracy.
Authors: Zhen Ye, Zeqian Ju, Haohe Liu, Xu Tan, Jianyi Chen, Yiwen Lu, Peiwen Sun, Jiahao Pan, Weizhen Bian, Shulin He, Qifeng Liu, Yike Guo, Wei Xue
Abstract: Recent progress in large-scale zero-shot speech synthesis has been significantly advanced by language models and diffusion models. However, the generation process of both methods is slow and computationally intensive. Efficient speech synthesis using a lower computing budget to achieve quality on par with previous work remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we present FlashSpeech, a large-scale zero-shot speech synthesis system with approximately 5\% of the inference time compared with previous work. FlashSpeech is built on the latent consistency model and applies a novel adversarial consistency training approach that can train from scratch without the need for a pre-trained diffusion model as the teacher. Furthermore, a new prosody generator module enhances the diversity of prosody, making the rhythm of the speech sound more natural. The generation processes of FlashSpeech can be achieved efficiently with one or two sampling steps while maintaining high audio quality and high similarity to the audio prompt for zero-shot speech generation. Our experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of FlashSpeech. Notably, FlashSpeech can be about 20 times faster than other zero-shot speech synthesis systems while maintaining comparable performance in terms of voice quality and similarity. Furthermore, FlashSpeech demonstrates its versatility by efficiently performing tasks like voice conversion, speech editing, and diverse speech sampling. Audio samples can be found in https://flashspeech.github.io/.
Authors: Xiao Wang, Aristeidis Tsaris, Siyan Liu, Jong-Youl Choi, Ming Fan, Wei Zhang, Junqi Yin, Moetasim Ashfaq, Dan Lu, Prasanna Balaprakash
Abstract: Earth system predictability is challenged by the complexity of environmental dynamics and the multitude of variables involved. Current AI foundation models, although advanced by leveraging large and heterogeneous data, are often constrained by their size and data integration, limiting their effectiveness in addressing the full range of Earth system prediction challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Oak Ridge Base Foundation Model for Earth System Predictability (ORBIT), an advanced vision-transformer model that scales up to 113 billion parameters using a novel hybrid tensor-data orthogonal parallelism technique. As the largest model of its kind, ORBIT surpasses the current climate AI foundation model size by a thousandfold. Performance scaling tests conducted on the Frontier supercomputer have demonstrated that ORBIT achieves 230 to 707 PFLOPS, with scaling efficiency maintained at 78% to 96% across 24,576 AMD GPUs. These breakthroughs establish new advances in AI-driven climate modeling and demonstrate promise to significantly improve the Earth system predictability.
Authors: Siyin Wang, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL) based on a few examples presented in dialogue history without any model parameter update. Despite such convenience, the performance of ICL heavily depends on the quality of the in-context examples presented, which makes the in-context example selection approach a critical choice. This paper proposes a novel Bayesian in-Context example Selection method (ByCS) for ICL. Extending the inference probability conditioned on in-context examples based on Bayes' theorem, ByCS focuses on the inverse inference conditioned on test input. Following the assumption that accurate inverse inference probability (likelihood) will result in accurate inference probability (posterior), in-context examples are selected based on their inverse inference results. Diverse and extensive cross-tasking and cross-modality experiments are performed with speech, text, and image examples. Experimental results show the efficacy and robustness of our ByCS method on various models, tasks and modalities.
Authors: Katie Seaborn, Jacqueline Urakami, Peter Pennefather, Norihisa P. Miyake
Abstract: Voice is a natural mode of expression offered by modern computer-based systems. Qualitative perspectives on voice-based user experiences (voice UX) offer rich descriptions of complex interactions that numbers alone cannot fully represent. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on qualitative approaches to voice UX, capturing the nature of this body of work in a systematic map and offering a qualitative synthesis of findings. We highlight the benefits of qualitative methods for voice UX research, identify opportunities for increasing rigour in methods and outcomes, and distill patterns of experience across a diversity of devices and modes of qualitative praxis.
Authors: Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Jiabei Chen, Zihao Wang, Yangqiu Song, Hanghang Tong, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Abstract: To address the issue of insufficient knowledge and the tendency to generate hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous studies have endeavored to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs). However, all these methods are evaluated on conventional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) with complete KGs, where the factual triples involved in each question are entirely covered by the given KG. In this situation, LLM mainly acts as an agent to find answer entities by exploring the KG, rather than effectively integrating internal and external knowledge sources. However, in real-world scenarios, KGs are often incomplete to cover all the knowledge required to answer questions. To simulate real-world scenarios and evaluate the ability of LLMs to integrate internal and external knowledge, in this paper, we propose leveraging LLMs for QA under Incomplete Knowledge Graph (IKGQA), where the given KG doesn't include all the factual triples involved in each question. To handle IKGQA, we propose a training-free method called Generate-on-Graph (GoG) that can generate new factual triples while exploring on KGs. Specifically, we propose a selecting-generating-answering framework, which not only treat the LLM as an agent to explore on KGs, but also treat it as a KG to generate new facts based on the explored subgraph and its inherent knowledge. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our GoG can solve IKGQA to a certain extent, while almost all previous methods cannot perform well on IKGQA.
Authors: Phoebe Jing, Yijing Gao, Xianlong Zeng
Abstract: In the field of fraud detection, the availability of comprehensive and privacy-compliant datasets is crucial for advancing machine learning research and developing effective anti-fraud systems. Traditional datasets often focus on transaction-level information, which, while useful, overlooks the broader context of customer behavior patterns that are essential for detecting sophisticated fraud schemes. The scarcity of such data, primarily due to privacy concerns, significantly hampers the development and testing of predictive models that can operate effectively at the customer level. Addressing this gap, our study introduces a benchmark that contains structured datasets specifically designed for customer-level fraud detection. The benchmark not only adheres to strict privacy guidelines to ensure user confidentiality but also provides a rich source of information by encapsulating customer-centric features. We have developed the benchmark that allows for the comprehensive evaluation of various machine learning models, facilitating a deeper understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in predicting fraudulent activities. Through this work, we seek to bridge the existing gap in data availability, offering researchers and practitioners a valuable resource that empowers the development of next-generation fraud detection techniques.
Authors: Qiao Deng, Zhongzhen Huang, Yunqi Wang, Zhichuan Wang, Zhao Wang, Xiaofan Zhang, Qi Dou, Yeung Yu Hui, Edward S. Hui
Abstract: Medical vision-language pre-training has emerged as a promising approach for learning domain-general representations of medical image and text. Current algorithms that exploit the global and local alignment between medical image and text could however be marred by the redundant information in medical data. To address this issue, we propose a grounded knowledge-enhanced medical vision-language pre-training (GK-MVLP) framework for chest X-ray. In this framework, medical knowledge is grounded to the appropriate anatomical regions by using a transformer-based grounded knowledge-enhanced module for fine-grained alignment between anatomical region-level visual features and the textural features of medical knowledge. The performance of GK-MVLP is competitive with or exceeds the state of the art on downstream chest X-ray disease classification, disease localization, report generation, and medical visual question-answering tasks. Our results show the advantage of incorporating grounding mechanism to remove biases and improve the alignment between chest X-ray image and radiology report.
Authors: Yuchao Liao, Tosiron Adegbija, Roman Lysecky, Ravi Tandon
Abstract: High-Level Synthesis (HLS) Design Space Exploration (DSE) is a widely accepted approach for efficiently exploring Pareto-optimal and optimal hardware solutions during the HLS process. Several HLS benchmarks and datasets are available for the research community to evaluate their methodologies. Unfortunately, these resources are limited and may not be sufficient for complex, multi-component system-level explorations. Generating new data using existing HLS benchmarks can be cumbersome, given the expertise and time required to effectively generate data for different HLS designs and directives. As a result, synthetic data has been used in prior work to evaluate system-level HLS DSE. However, the fidelity of the synthetic data to real data is often unclear, leading to uncertainty about the quality of system-level HLS DSE. This paper proposes a novel approach, called Vaegan, that employs generative machine learning to generate synthetic data that is robust enough to support complex system-level HLS DSE experiments that would be unattainable with only the currently available data. We explore and adapt a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for this task and evaluate our approach using state-of-the-art datasets and metrics. We compare our approach to prior works and show that Vaegan effectively generates synthetic HLS data that closely mirrors the ground truth's distribution.
Authors: Bo Lin, Yingjing Xu, Xuanwen Bao, Zhou Zhao, Zuyong Zhang, Zhouyang Wang, Jie Zhang, Shuiguang Deng, Jianwei Yin
Abstract: With the continuous advancement of vision language models (VLMs) technology, remarkable research achievements have emerged in the dermatology field, the fourth most prevalent human disease category. However, despite these advancements, VLM still faces "hallucination" in dermatological diagnosis, and due to the inherent complexity of dermatological conditions, existing tools offer relatively limited support for user comprehension. We propose SkinGEN, a diagnosis-to-generation framework that leverages the stable diffusion (SD) method to generate reference demonstrations from diagnosis results provided by VLM, thereby enhancing the visual explainability for users. Through extensive experiments with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), we identify optimal strategies for skin condition image generation. We conduct a user study with 32 participants evaluating both the system performance and explainability. Results demonstrate that SkinGEN significantly improves users' comprehension of VLM predictions and fosters increased trust in the diagnostic process. This work paves the way for more transparent and user-centric VLM applications in dermatology and beyond.
Authors: Xiongxiao Xu, Yueqing Liang, Baixiang Huang, Zhiling Lan, Kai Shu
Abstract: Time series forecasting is an important problem and plays a key role in a variety of applications including weather forecasting, stock market, and scientific simulations. Although transformers have proven to be effective in capturing dependency, its quadratic complexity of attention mechanism prevents its further adoption in long-range time series forecasting, thus limiting them attend to short-range range. Recent progress on state space models (SSMs) have shown impressive performance on modeling long range dependency due to their subquadratic complexity. Mamba, as a representative SSM, enjoys linear time complexity and has achieved strong scalability on tasks that requires scaling to long sequences, such as language, audio, and genomics. In this paper, we propose to leverage a hybrid framework Mambaformer that internally combines Mamba for long-range dependency, and Transformer for short range dependency, for long-short range forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to combine Mamba and Transformer architecture in time series data. We investigate possible hybrid architectures to combine Mamba layer and attention layer for long-short range time series forecasting. The comparative study shows that the Mambaformer family can outperform Mamba and Transformer in long-short range time series forecasting problem. The code is available at https://github.com/XiongxiaoXu/Mambaformerin-Time-Series.
URLs: https://github.com/XiongxiaoXu/Mambaformerin-Time-Series.
Authors: Sanat Sharma, David Seunghyun Yoon, Franck Dernoncourt, Dewang Sultania, Karishma Bagga, Mengjiao Zhang, Trung Bui, Varun Kotte
Abstract: Question answering (QA) has become an important application in the advanced development of large language models. General pre-trained large language models for question-answering are not trained to properly understand the knowledge or terminology for a specific domain, such as finance, healthcare, education, and customer service for a product. To better cater to domain-specific understanding, we build an in-house question-answering system for Adobe products. We propose a novel framework to compile a large question-answer database and develop the approach for retrieval-aware finetuning of a Large Language model. We showcase that fine-tuning the retriever leads to major improvements in the final generation. Our overall approach reduces hallucinations during generation while keeping in context the latest retrieval information for contextual grounding.
Authors: Chengpeng Hu, Jialin Liu, Xin Yao
Abstract: Recently, evolutionary reinforcement learning has obtained much attention in various domains. Maintaining a population of actors, evolutionary reinforcement learning utilises the collected experiences to improve the behaviour policy through efficient exploration. However, the poor scalability of genetic operators limits the efficiency of optimising high-dimensional neural networks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel cooperative coevolutionary reinforcement learning (CoERL) algorithm. Inspired by cooperative coevolution, CoERL periodically and adaptively decomposes the policy optimisation problem into multiple subproblems and evolves a population of neural networks for each of the subproblems. Instead of using genetic operators, CoERL directly searches for partial gradients to update the policy. Updating policy with partial gradients maintains consistency between the behaviour spaces of parents and offspring across generations. The experiences collected by the population are then used to improve the entire policy, which enhances the sampling efficiency. Experiments on six benchmark locomotion tasks demonstrate that CoERL outperforms seven state-of-the-art algorithms and baselines. Ablation study verifies the unique contribution of CoERL's core ingredients.
Authors: Hong Huang, Yuyi Wang, Luyao Li, Jun Lin
Abstract: Previous studies on music style transfer have mainly focused on one-to-one style conversion, which is relatively limited. When considering the conversion between multiple styles, previous methods required designing multiple modes to disentangle the complex style of the music, resulting in large computational costs and slow audio generation. The existing music style transfer methods generate spectrograms with artifacts, leading to significant noise in the generated audio. To address these issues, this study proposes a music style transfer framework based on diffusion models (DM) and uses spectrogram-based methods to achieve multi-to-multi music style transfer. The GuideDiff method is used to restore spectrograms to high-fidelity audio, accelerating audio generation speed and reducing noise in the generated audio. Experimental results show that our model has good performance in multi-mode music style transfer compared to the baseline and can generate high-quality audio in real-time on consumer-grade GPUs.
Authors: Wenbo Shang, Xin Huang
Abstract: A graph is a fundamental data model to represent various entities and their complex relationships in society and nature, such as social networks, transportation networks, financial networks, and biomedical systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have showcased a strong generalization ability to handle various NLP and multi-mode tasks to answer users' arbitrary questions and specific-domain content generation. Compared with graph learning models, LLMs enjoy superior advantages in addressing the challenges of generalizing graph tasks by eliminating the need for training graph learning models and reducing the cost of manual annotation. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of existing LLM studies on graph data, which summarizes the relevant graph analytics tasks solved by advanced LLM models and points out the existing remaining challenges and future directions. Specifically, we study the key problems of LLM-based generative graph analytics (LLM-GGA) with three categories: LLM-based graph query processing (LLM-GQP), LLM-based graph inference and learning (LLM-GIL), and graph-LLM-based applications. LLM-GQP focuses on an integration of graph analytics techniques and LLM prompts, including graph understanding and knowledge graph (KG) based augmented retrieval, while LLM-GIL focuses on learning and reasoning over graphs, including graph learning, graph-formed reasoning and graph representation. We summarize the useful prompts incorporated into LLM to handle different graph downstream tasks. Moreover, we give a summary of LLM model evaluation, benchmark datasets/tasks, and a deep pro and cons analysis of LLM models. We also explore open problems and future directions in this exciting interdisciplinary research area of LLMs and graph analytics.
Authors: Ziheng Jiao, Hongyuan Zhang, Xuelong Li
Abstract: Although the convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved excellent performance in vision tasks by extracting the intra-sample representation, it will take a higher training expense because of stacking numerous convolutional layers. Recently, as the bilinear models, graph neural networks (GNN) have succeeded in exploring the underlying topological relationship among the graph data with a few graph neural layers. Unfortunately, it cannot be directly utilized on non-graph data due to the lack of graph structure and has high inference latency on large-scale scenarios. Inspired by these complementary strengths and weaknesses, \textit{we discuss a natural question, how to bridge these two heterogeneous networks?} In this paper, we propose a novel CNN2GNN framework to unify CNN and GNN together via distillation. Firstly, to break the limitations of GNN, a differentiable sparse graph learning module is designed as the head of networks to dynamically learn the graph for inductive learning. Then, a response-based distillation is introduced to transfer the knowledge from CNN to GNN and bridge these two heterogeneous networks. Notably, due to extracting the intra-sample representation of a single instance and the topological relationship among the datasets simultaneously, the performance of distilled ``boosted'' two-layer GNN on Mini-ImageNet is much higher than CNN containing dozens of layers such as ResNet152.
Authors: Teodor Chiaburu, Frank Hau{\ss}er, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
Abstract: Mounting evidence in explainability for artificial intelligence (XAI) research suggests that good explanations should be tailored to individual tasks and should relate to concepts relevant to the task. However, building task specific explanations is time consuming and requires domain expertise which can be difficult to integrate into generic XAI methods. A promising approach towards designing useful task specific explanations with domain experts is based on compositionality of semantic concepts. Here, we present a novel approach that enables domain experts to quickly create concept-based explanations for computer vision tasks intuitively via natural language. Leveraging recent progress in deep generative methods we propose to generate visual concept-based prototypes via text-to-image methods. These prototypes are then used to explain predictions of computer vision models via a simple k-Nearest-Neighbors routine. The modular design of CoProNN is simple to implement, it is straightforward to adapt to novel tasks and allows for replacing the classification and text-to-image models as more powerful models are released. The approach can be evaluated offline against the ground-truth of predefined prototypes that can be easily communicated also to domain experts as they are based on visual concepts. We show that our strategy competes very well with other concept-based XAI approaches on coarse grained image classification tasks and may even outperform those methods on more demanding fine grained tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for human-machine collaboration settings in qualitative and quantitative user studies. All code and experimental data can be found in our GitHub $\href{https://github.com/TeodorChiaburu/beexplainable}{repository}$.
Authors: Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Yujia Zhou, Yuyao Zhang, Peitian Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou
Abstract: Information Retrieval (IR) systems are crucial tools for users to access information, widely applied in scenarios like search engines, question answering, and recommendation systems. Traditional IR methods, based on similarity matching to return ranked lists of documents, have been reliable means of information acquisition, dominating the IR field for years. With the advancement of pre-trained language models, generative information retrieval (GenIR) has emerged as a novel paradigm, gaining increasing attention in recent years. Currently, research in GenIR can be categorized into two aspects: generative document retrieval (GR) and reliable response generation. GR leverages the generative model's parameters for memorizing documents, enabling retrieval by directly generating relevant document identifiers without explicit indexing. Reliable response generation, on the other hand, employs language models to directly generate the information users seek, breaking the limitations of traditional IR in terms of document granularity and relevance matching, offering more flexibility, efficiency, and creativity, thus better meeting practical needs. This paper aims to systematically review the latest research progress in GenIR. We will summarize the advancements in GR regarding model training, document identifier, incremental learning, downstream tasks adaptation, multi-modal GR and generative recommendation, as well as progress in reliable response generation in aspects of internal knowledge memorization, external knowledge augmentation, generating response with citations and personal information assistant. We also review the evaluation, challenges and future prospects in GenIR systems. This review aims to offer a comprehensive reference for researchers in the GenIR field, encouraging further development in this area.
Authors: Beatriz Cabrero-Daniel, Tomas Herda, Victoria Pichler, Martin Eder
Abstract: This action research study focuses on the integration of "AI assistants" in two Agile software development meetings: the Daily Scrum and a feature refinement, a planning meeting that is part of an in-house Scaled Agile framework. We discuss the critical drivers of success, and establish a link between the use of AI and team collaboration dynamics. We conclude with a list of lessons learnt during the interventions in an industrial context, and provide a assessment checklist for companies and teams to reflect on their readiness level. This paper is thus a road-map to facilitate the integration of AI tools in Agile setups.
Authors: Chen Zhang, Zhuorui Liu, Dawei Song
Abstract: With the increasingly giant scales of (causal) large language models (LLMs), the inference efficiency comes as one of the core concerns along the improved performance. In contrast to the memory footprint, the latency bottleneck seems to be of greater importance as there can be billions of requests to a LLM (e.g., GPT-4) per day. The bottleneck is mainly due to the autoregressive innateness of LLMs, where tokens can only be generated sequentially during decoding. To alleviate the bottleneck, the idea of speculative execution, which originates from the field of computer architecture, is introduced to LLM decoding in a \textit{draft-then-verify} style. Under this regime, a sequence of tokens will be drafted in a fast pace by utilizing some heuristics, and then the tokens shall be verified in parallel by the LLM. As the costly sequential inference is parallelized, LLM decoding speed can be significantly boosted. Driven by the success of LLMs in recent couple of years, a growing literature in this direction has emerged. Yet, there lacks a position survey to summarize the current landscape and draw a roadmap for future development of this promising area. To meet this demand, we present the very first survey paper that reviews and unifies literature of speculative execution in LLMs (e.g., blockwise parallel decoding, speculative decoding, etc.) in a comprehensive framework and a systematic taxonomy. Based on the taxonomy, we present a critical review and comparative analysis of the current arts. Finally we highlight various key challenges and future directions to further develop the area.
Authors: Ranim Khojah, Mazen Mohamad, Philipp Leitner, Francisco Gomes de Oliveira Neto
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently discussed in academia and the general public as support tools for virtually any use case that relies on the production of text, including software engineering. Currently there is much debate, but little empirical evidence, regarding the practical usefulness of LLM-based tools such as ChatGPT for engineers in industry. We conduct an observational study of 24 professional software engineers who have been using ChatGPT over a period of one week in their jobs, and qualitatively analyse their dialogues with the chatbot as well as their overall experience (as captured by an exit survey). We find that, rather than expecting ChatGPT to generate ready-to-use software artifacts (e.g., code), practitioners more often use ChatGPT to receive guidance on how to solve their tasks or learn about a topic in more abstract terms. We also propose a theoretical framework for how (i) purpose of the interaction, (ii) internal factors (e.g., the user's personality), and (iii) external factors (e.g., company policy) together shape the experience (in terms of perceived usefulness and trust). We envision that our framework can be used by future research to further the academic discussion on LLM usage by software engineering practitioners, and to serve as a reference point for the design of future empirical LLM research in this domain.
Authors: Ross Greer, Mathias Viborg Andersen, Andreas M{\o}gelmose, Mohan Trivedi
Abstract: Driver activity classification is crucial for ensuring road safety, with applications ranging from driver assistance systems to autonomous vehicle control transitions. In this paper, we present a novel approach leveraging generalizable representations from vision-language models for driver activity classification. Our method employs a Semantic Representation Late Fusion Neural Network (SRLF-Net) to process synchronized video frames from multiple perspectives. Each frame is encoded using a pretrained vision-language encoder, and the resulting embeddings are fused to generate class probability predictions. By leveraging contrastively-learned vision-language representations, our approach achieves robust performance across diverse driver activities. We evaluate our method on the Naturalistic Driving Action Recognition Dataset, demonstrating strong accuracy across many classes. Our results suggest that vision-language representations offer a promising avenue for driver monitoring systems, providing both accuracy and interpretability through natural language descriptors.
Authors: Wenqi Fan, Shijie Wang, Jiani Huang, Zhikai Chen, Yu Song, Wenzhuo Tang, Haitao Mao, Hui Liu, Xiaorui Liu, Dawei Yin, Qing Li
Abstract: Graphs play an important role in representing complex relationships in various domains like social networks, knowledge graphs, and molecular discovery. With the advent of deep learning, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a cornerstone in Graph Machine Learning (Graph ML), facilitating the representation and processing of graph structures. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in language tasks and are widely adopted in a variety of applications such as computer vision and recommender systems. This remarkable success has also attracted interest in applying LLMs to the graph domain. Increasing efforts have been made to explore the potential of LLMs in advancing Graph ML's generalization, transferability, and few-shot learning ability. Meanwhile, graphs, especially knowledge graphs, are rich in reliable factual knowledge, which can be utilized to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and potentially alleviate their limitations such as hallucinations and the lack of explainability. Given the rapid progress of this research direction, a systematic review summarizing the latest advancements for Graph ML in the era of LLMs is necessary to provide an in-depth understanding to researchers and practitioners. Therefore, in this survey, we first review the recent developments in Graph ML. We then explore how LLMs can be utilized to enhance the quality of graph features, alleviate the reliance on labeled data, and address challenges such as graph heterogeneity and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Afterward, we delve into how graphs can enhance LLMs, highlighting their abilities to enhance LLM pre-training and inference. Furthermore, we investigate various applications and discuss the potential future directions in this promising field.
Authors: Dayananda Herurkar, Sebastian Palacio, Ahmed Anwar, Joern Hees, Andreas Dengel
Abstract: Anomaly detection in real-world scenarios poses challenges due to dynamic and often unknown anomaly distributions, requiring robust methods that operate under an open-world assumption. This challenge is exacerbated in practical settings, where models are employed by private organizations, precluding data sharing due to privacy and competitive concerns. Despite potential benefits, the sharing of anomaly information across organizations is restricted. This paper addresses the question of enhancing outlier detection within individual organizations without compromising data confidentiality. We propose a novel method leveraging representation learning and federated learning techniques to improve the detection of unknown anomalies. Specifically, our approach utilizes latent representations obtained from client-owned autoencoders to refine the decision boundary of inliers. Notably, only model parameters are shared between organizations, preserving data privacy. The efficacy of our proposed method is evaluated on two standard financial tabular datasets and an image dataset for anomaly detection in a distributed setting. The results demonstrate a strong improvement in the classification of unknown outliers during the inference phase for each organization's model.
Authors: Zhe Zhao, Pengkun Wang, Xu Wang, Haibin Wen, Xiaolong Xie, Zhengyang Zhou, Qingfu Zhang, Yang Wang
Abstract: Pre-training GNNs to extract transferable knowledge and apply it to downstream tasks has become the de facto standard of graph representation learning. Recent works focused on designing self-supervised pre-training tasks to extract useful and universal transferable knowledge from large-scale unlabeled data. However, they have to face an inevitable question: traditional pre-training strategies that aim at extracting useful information about pre-training tasks, may not extract all useful information about the downstream task. In this paper, we reexamine the pre-training process within traditional pre-training and fine-tuning frameworks from the perspective of Information Bottleneck (IB) and confirm that the forgetting phenomenon in pre-training phase may cause detrimental effects on downstream tasks. Therefore, we propose a novel \underline{D}elayed \underline{B}ottlenecking \underline{P}re-training (DBP) framework which maintains as much as possible mutual information between latent representations and training data during pre-training phase by suppressing the compression operation and delays the compression operation to fine-tuning phase to make sure the compression can be guided with labeled fine-tuning data and downstream tasks. To achieve this, we design two information control objectives that can be directly optimized and further integrate them into the actual model design. Extensive experiments on both chemistry and biology domains demonstrate the effectiveness of DBP.
Authors: Esam Ghaleb, Ilya Burenko, Marlou Rasenberg, Wim Pouw, Ivan Toni, Peter Uhrig, Anna Wilson, Judith Holler, Asl{\i} \"Ozy\"urek, Raquel Fern\'andez
Abstract: Gestures are inherent to human interaction and often complement speech in face-to-face communication, forming a multimodal communication system. An important task in gesture analysis is detecting a gesture's beginning and end. Research on automatic gesture detection has primarily focused on visual and kinematic information to detect a limited set of isolated or silent gestures with low variability, neglecting the integration of speech and vision signals to detect gestures that co-occur with speech. This work addresses this gap by focusing on co-speech gesture detection, emphasising the synchrony between speech and co-speech hand gestures. We address three main challenges: the variability of gesture forms, the temporal misalignment between gesture and speech onsets, and differences in sampling rate between modalities. We investigate extended speech time windows and employ separate backbone models for each modality to address the temporal misalignment and sampling rate differences. We utilize Transformer encoders in cross-modal and early fusion techniques to effectively align and integrate speech and skeletal sequences. The study results show that combining visual and speech information significantly enhances gesture detection performance. Our findings indicate that expanding the speech buffer beyond visual time segments improves performance and that multimodal integration using cross-modal and early fusion techniques outperforms baseline methods using unimodal and late fusion methods. Additionally, we find a correlation between the models' gesture prediction confidence and low-level speech frequency features potentially associated with gestures. Overall, the study provides a better understanding and detection methods for co-speech gestures, facilitating the analysis of multimodal communication.
Authors: Qihuang Zhong, Kang Wang, Ziyang Xu, Juhua Liu, Liang Ding, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Chain of Thought prompting strategy has enhanced the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various NLP tasks. However, it still has shortcomings when dealing with complex reasoning tasks, following~\citet{cot_wei}, including understanding errors, calculation errors and process errors (e.g. missing-step and hallucinations). Subsequently, Our in-depth analysis of various error types has found that deeply understanding the whole problem is critical in addressing complicated reasoning tasks. In this paper, we proposed a novel prompt strategy called Deeply Understanding the Problems (DUP) prompting, inspired by how humans solve complex reasoning problems, designed to enhance the comprehensive understanding of problems by LLMs. It consists of three stages: 1) extract the core question; 2) find out problem-solving information based on the core question; 3) generate and extract answers by LLMs. We evaluate the performance of DUP prompting on ten diverse reasoning datasets. Experimental results suggest that DUP prompting significantly outperforms Zero-Shot CoT ~\cite{kojima2022large} across all datasets. Notably, DUP achieves \textbf{state-of-the-art on SVAMP (90.4\% to 94.2\%) and GSM8K (94.6\% to 97.1\%).}
Authors: Xu Han, Yuan Tang, Zhaoxuan Wang, Xianzhi Li
Abstract: Existing Transformer-based models for point cloud analysis suffer from quadratic complexity, leading to compromised point cloud resolution and information loss. In contrast, the newly proposed Mamba model, based on state space models (SSM), outperforms Transformer in multiple areas with only linear complexity. However, the straightforward adoption of Mamba does not achieve satisfactory performance on point cloud tasks. In this work, we present Mamba3D, a state space model tailored for point cloud learning to enhance local feature extraction, achieving superior performance, high efficiency, and scalability potential. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective Local Norm Pooling (LNP) block to extract local geometric features. Additionally, to obtain better global features, we introduce a bidirectional SSM (bi-SSM) with both a token forward SSM and a novel backward SSM that operates on the feature channel. Extensive experimental results show that Mamba3D surpasses Transformer-based counterparts and concurrent works in multiple tasks, with or without pre-training. Notably, Mamba3D achieves multiple SoTA, including an overall accuracy of 92.6% (train from scratch) on the ScanObjectNN and 95.1% (with single-modal pre-training) on the ModelNet40 classification task, with only linear complexity.
Authors: Deheng Zhang, Clara Fernandez-Labrador, Christopher Schroers
Abstract: Creating artistic 3D scenes can be time-consuming and requires specialized knowledge. To address this, recent works such as ARF, use a radiance field-based approach with style constraints to generate 3D scenes that resemble a style image provided by the user. However, these methods lack fine-grained control over the resulting scenes. In this paper, we introduce Controllable Artistic Radiance Fields (CoARF), a novel algorithm for controllable 3D scene stylization. CoARF enables style transfer for specified objects, compositional 3D style transfer and semantic-aware style transfer. We achieve controllability using segmentation masks with different label-dependent loss functions. We also propose a semantic-aware nearest neighbor matching algorithm to improve the style transfer quality. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CoARF provides user-specified controllability of style transfer and superior style transfer quality with more precise feature matching.
Authors: Junsong Zhang, Zisong Chen, Chunyu Lin, Lang Nie, Zhijie Shen, Junda Huang, Yao Zhao
Abstract: Panoramic distortion poses a significant challenge in 360 depth estimation, particularly pronounced at the north and south poles. Existing methods either adopt a bi-projection fusion strategy to remove distortions or model long-range dependencies to capture global structures, which can result in either unclear structure or insufficient local perception. In this paper, we propose a spherical geometry transformer, named SGFormer, to address the above issues, with an innovative step to integrate spherical geometric priors into vision transformers. To this end, we retarget the transformer decoder to a spherical prior decoder (termed SPDecoder), which endeavors to uphold the integrity of spherical structures during decoding. Concretely, we leverage bipolar re-projection, circular rotation, and curve local embedding to preserve the spherical characteristics of equidistortion, continuity, and surface distance, respectively. Furthermore, we present a query-based global conditional position embedding to compensate for spatial structure at varying resolutions. It not only boosts the global perception of spatial position but also sharpens the depth structure across different patches. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on popular benchmarks, demonstrating our superiority over state-of-the-art solutions.
Authors: Kerstin Kl\"aser, B{\l}a\.zej Banaszewski, Samuel Maddrell-Mander, Callum McLean, Luis M\"uller, Ali Parviz, Shenyang Huang, Andrew Fitzgibbon
Abstract: In biological tasks, data is rarely plentiful as it is generated from hard-to-gather measurements. Therefore, pre-training foundation models on large quantities of available data and then transfer to low-data downstream tasks is a promising direction. However, how to design effective foundation models for molecular learning remains an open question, with existing approaches typically focusing on models with large parameter capacities. In this work, we propose $\texttt{MiniMol}$, a foundational model for molecular learning with 10 million parameters. $\texttt{MiniMol}$ is pre-trained on a mix of roughly 3300 sparsely defined graph- and node-level tasks of both quantum and biological nature. The pre-training dataset includes approximately 6 million molecules and 500 million labels. To demonstrate the generalizability of $\texttt{MiniMol}$ across tasks, we evaluate it on downstream tasks from the Therapeutic Data Commons (TDC) ADMET group showing significant improvements over the prior state-of-the-art foundation model across 17 tasks. $\texttt{MiniMol}$ will be a public and open-sourced model for future research.
Authors: Anej Svete, Ryan Cotterell
Abstract: Plenty of existing work has analyzed the abilities of the transformer architecture by describing its representational capacity with formal models of computation. However, the focus so far has been on analyzing the architecture in terms of language \emph{acceptance}. We contend that this is an ill-suited problem in the study of \emph{language models} (LMs), which are definitionally \emph{probability distributions} over strings. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between transformer LMs and $n$-gram LMs, a simple and historically relevant class of language models. We show that transformer LMs using the hard or sparse attention mechanisms can exactly represent any $n$-gram LM, giving us a concrete lower bound on their probabilistic representational capacity. This provides a first step towards understanding the mechanisms that transformer LMs can use to represent probability distributions over strings.
Authors: Yihao Li, Mostafa El Habib Daho, Pierre-Henri Conze, Rachid Zeghlache, Hugo Le Boit\'e, Ramin Tadayoni, B\'eatrice Cochener, Mathieu Lamard, Gwenol\'e Quellec
Abstract: Multimodal medical imaging plays a pivotal role in clinical diagnosis and research, as it combines information from various imaging modalities to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying pathology. Recently, deep learning-based multimodal fusion techniques have emerged as powerful tools for improving medical image classification. This review offers a thorough analysis of the developments in deep learning-based multimodal fusion for medical classification tasks. We explore the complementary relationships among prevalent clinical modalities and outline three main fusion schemes for multimodal classification networks: input fusion, intermediate fusion (encompassing single-level fusion, hierarchical fusion, and attention-based fusion), and output fusion. By evaluating the performance of these fusion techniques, we provide insight into the suitability of different network architectures for various multimodal fusion scenarios and application domains. Furthermore, we delve into challenges related to network architecture selection, handling incomplete multimodal data management, and the potential limitations of multimodal fusion. Finally, we spotlight the promising future of Transformer-based multimodal fusion techniques and give recommendations for future research in this rapidly evolving field.
Authors: Hao Miao, Senzhang Wang, Meiyue Zhang, Diansheng Guo, Funing Sun, Fan Yang
Abstract: Accurately forecasting traffic flows is critically important to many real applications including public safety and intelligent transportation systems. The challenges of this problem include both the dynamic mobility patterns of the people and the complex spatial-temporal correlations of the urban traffic data. Meanwhile, most existing models ignore the diverse impacts of the various traffic observations (e.g. vehicle speed and road occupancy) on the traffic flow prediction, and different traffic observations can be considered as different channels of input features. We argue that the analysis in multiple-channel traffic observations might help to better address this problem. In this paper, we study the novel problem of multi-channel traffic flow prediction, and propose a deep \underline{M}ulti-\underline{V}iew \underline{C}hannel-wise \underline{S}patio-\underline{T}emporal \underline{Net}work (MVC-STNet) model to effectively address it. Specifically, we first construct the localized and globalized spatial graph where the multi-view fusion module is used to effectively extract the local and global spatial dependencies. Then LSTM is used to learn the temporal correlations. To effectively model the different impacts of various traffic observations on traffic flow prediction, a channel-wise graph convolutional network is also designed. Extensive experiments are conducted over the PEMS04 and PEMS08 datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed MVC-STNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Authors: Kai Li, Xin Yuan, Jingjing Zheng, Wei Ni, Falko Dressler, Abbas Jamalipour
Abstract: This paper puts forth a new training data-untethered model poisoning (MP) attack on federated learning (FL). The new MP attack extends an adversarial variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) to create malicious local models based solely on the benign local models overheard without any access to the training data of FL. Such an advancement leads to the VGAE-MP attack that is not only efficacious but also remains elusive to detection. VGAE-MP attack extracts graph structural correlations among the benign local models and the training data features, adversarially regenerates the graph structure, and generates malicious local models using the adversarial graph structure and benign models' features. Moreover, a new attacking algorithm is presented to train the malicious local models using VGAE and sub-gradient descent, while enabling an optimal selection of the benign local models for training the VGAE. Experiments demonstrate a gradual drop in FL accuracy under the proposed VGAE-MP attack and the ineffectiveness of existing defense mechanisms in detecting the attack, posing a severe threat to FL.
Authors: Xun Wu, Shaohan Huang, Wenhui Wang, Furu Wei
Abstract: Sparse Mixtures of Experts (SMoE) scales model capacity without significant increases in training and inference costs, but exhibits the following two issues: (1) Low expert activation, where only a small subset of experts are activated for optimization. (2) Lacking fine-grained analytical capabilities for multiple semantic concepts within individual tokens. We propose Multi-Head Mixture-of-Experts (MH-MoE), which employs a multi-head mechanism to split each token into multiple sub-tokens. These sub-tokens are then assigned to and processed by a diverse set of experts in parallel, and seamlessly reintegrated into the original token form. The multi-head mechanism enables the model to collectively attend to information from various representation spaces within different experts, while significantly enhances expert activation, thus deepens context understanding and alleviate overfitting. Moreover, our MH-MoE is straightforward to implement and decouples from other SMoE optimization methods, making it easy to integrate with other SMoE models for enhanced performance. Extensive experimental results across three tasks: English-focused language modeling, Multi-lingual language modeling and Masked multi-modality modeling tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of MH-MoE.
Authors: Seliem El-Sayed, Canfer Akbulut, Amanda McCroskery, Geoff Keeling, Zachary Kenton, Zaria Jalan, Nahema Marchal, Arianna Manzini, Toby Shevlane, Shannon Vallor, Daniel Susser, Matija Franklin, Sophie Bridgers, Harry Law, Matthew Rahtz, Murray Shanahan, Michael Henry Tessler, Arthur Douillard, Tom Everitt, Sasha Brown
Abstract: Recent generative AI systems have demonstrated more advanced persuasive capabilities and are increasingly permeating areas of life where they can influence decision-making. Generative AI presents a new risk profile of persuasion due the opportunity for reciprocal exchange and prolonged interactions. This has led to growing concerns about harms from AI persuasion and how they can be mitigated, highlighting the need for a systematic study of AI persuasion. The current definitions of AI persuasion are unclear and related harms are insufficiently studied. Existing harm mitigation approaches prioritise harms from the outcome of persuasion over harms from the process of persuasion. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for the systematic study of AI persuasion. We first put forward definitions of persuasive generative AI. We distinguish between rationally persuasive generative AI, which relies on providing relevant facts, sound reasoning, or other forms of trustworthy evidence, and manipulative generative AI, which relies on taking advantage of cognitive biases and heuristics or misrepresenting information. We also put forward a map of harms from AI persuasion, including definitions and examples of economic, physical, environmental, psychological, sociocultural, political, privacy, and autonomy harm. We then introduce a map of mechanisms that contribute to harmful persuasion. Lastly, we provide an overview of approaches that can be used to mitigate against process harms of persuasion, including prompt engineering for manipulation classification and red teaming. Future work will operationalise these mitigations and study the interaction between different types of mechanisms of persuasion.
Authors: Tobias Ladner, Michael Eichelbeck, Matthias Althoff
Abstract: Graph neural networks are becoming increasingly popular in the field of machine learning due to their unique ability to process data structured in graphs. They have also been applied in safety-critical environments where perturbations inherently occur. However, these perturbations require us to formally verify neural networks before their deployment in safety-critical environments as neural networks are prone to adversarial attacks. While there exists research on the formal verification of neural networks, there is no work verifying the robustness of generic graph convolutional network architectures with uncertainty in the node features and in the graph structure over multiple message-passing steps. This work addresses this research gap by explicitly preserving the non-convex dependencies of all elements in the underlying computations through reachability analysis with (matrix) polynomial zonotopes. We demonstrate our approach on three popular benchmark datasets.
Authors: Buyun He, Yingguang Yang, Qi Wu, Hao Liu, Renyu Yang, Hao Peng, Xiang Wang, Yong Liao, Pengyuan Zhou
Abstract: Detecting social bots has evolved into a pivotal yet intricate task, aimed at combating the dissemination of misinformation and preserving the authenticity of online interactions. While earlier graph-based approaches, which leverage topological structure of social networks, yielded notable outcomes, they overlooked the inherent dynamicity of social networks -- In reality, they largely depicted the social network as a static graph and solely relied on its most recent state. Due to the absence of dynamicity modeling, such approaches are vulnerable to evasion, particularly when advanced social bots interact with other users to camouflage identities and escape detection. To tackle these challenges, we propose BotDGT, a novel framework that not only considers the topological structure, but also effectively incorporates dynamic nature of social network. Specifically, we characterize a social network as a dynamic graph. A structural module is employed to acquire topological information from each historical snapshot. Additionally, a temporal module is proposed to integrate historical context and model the evolving behavior patterns exhibited by social bots and legitimate users. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of BotDGT against the leading methods that neglected the dynamic nature of social networks in terms of accuracy, recall, and F1-score.
Authors: Rui Chen, Mingyi Shi, Shaoli Huang, Ping Tan, Taku Komura, Xuelin Chen
Abstract: We present a novel character control framework that effectively utilizes motion diffusion probabilistic models to generate high-quality and diverse character animations, responding in real-time to a variety of dynamic user-supplied control signals. At the heart of our method lies a transformer-based Conditional Autoregressive Motion Diffusion Model (CAMDM), which takes as input the character's historical motion and can generate a range of diverse potential future motions conditioned on high-level, coarse user control. To meet the demands for diversity, controllability, and computational efficiency required by a real-time controller, we incorporate several key algorithmic designs. These include separate condition tokenization, classifier-free guidance on past motion, and heuristic future trajectory extension, all designed to address the challenges associated with taming motion diffusion probabilistic models for character control. As a result, our work represents the first model that enables real-time generation of high-quality, diverse character animations based on user interactive control, supporting animating the character in multiple styles with a single unified model. We evaluate our method on a diverse set of locomotion skills, demonstrating the merits of our method over existing character controllers. Project page and source codes: https://aiganimation.github.io/CAMDM/
Authors: Mingbao Lin, Zhihang Lin, Wengyi Zhan, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
Abstract: Transforming large pre-trained low-resolution diffusion models to cater to higher-resolution demands, i.e., diffusion extrapolation, significantly improves diffusion adaptability. We propose tuning-free CutDiffusion, aimed at simplifying and accelerating the diffusion extrapolation process, making it more affordable and improving performance. CutDiffusion abides by the existing patch-wise extrapolation but cuts a standard patch diffusion process into an initial phase focused on comprehensive structure denoising and a subsequent phase dedicated to specific detail refinement. Comprehensive experiments highlight the numerous almighty advantages of CutDiffusion: (1) simple method construction that enables a concise higher-resolution diffusion process without third-party engagement; (2) fast inference speed achieved through a single-step higher-resolution diffusion process, and fewer inference patches required; (3) cheap GPU cost resulting from patch-wise inference and fewer patches during the comprehensive structure denoising; (4) strong generation performance, stemming from the emphasis on specific detail refinement.
Authors: Josef Pichlmeier, Philipp Ross, Andre Luckow
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced widespread adoption across scientific and industrial domains due to their versatility and utility for diverse tasks. Nevertheless, deploying and serving these models at scale with optimal throughput and latency remains a significant challenge, primarily because of the high computational and memory demands associated with LLMs. To tackle this limitation, we introduce Expert Router, a system designed to orchestrate multiple expert models efficiently, thereby enhancing scalability. Expert Router is a parallel inference system with a central routing gateway that distributes incoming requests using a clustering method. This approach effectively partitions incoming requests among available LLMs, maximizing overall throughput. Our extensive evaluations encompassed up to 1,000 concurrent users, providing comprehensive insights into the system's behavior from user and infrastructure perspectives. The results demonstrate Expert Router's effectiveness in handling high-load scenarios and achieving higher throughput rates, particularly under many concurrent users.
Authors: Kyomin Hwang, Suyoung Kim, JunHoo Lee, Nojun Kwak
Abstract: Large Models (LMs) have heightened expectations for the potential of general AI as they are akin to human intelligence. This paper shows that recent large models such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E3 also share the vulnerability of human intelligence, namely the "white bear phenomenon". We investigate the causes of the white bear phenomenon by analyzing their representation space. Based on this analysis, we propose a simple prompt-based attack method, which generates figures prohibited by the LM provider's policy. To counter these attacks, we introduce prompt-based defense strategies inspired by cognitive therapy techniques, successfully mitigating attacks by up to 48.22\%.
Authors: Yubin Kim, Chanwoo Park, Hyewon Jeong, Yik Siu Chan, Xuhai Xu, Daniel McDuff, Cynthia Breazeal, Hae Won Park
Abstract: Foundation models have become invaluable in advancing the medical field. Despite their promise, the strategic deployment of LLMs for effective utility in complex medical tasks remains an open question. Our novel framework, Medical Decision-making Agents (MDAgents) aims to address this gap by automatically assigning the effective collaboration structure for LLMs. Assigned solo or group collaboration structure is tailored to the complexity of the medical task at hand, emulating real-world medical decision making processes. We evaluate our framework and baseline methods with state-of-the-art LLMs across a suite of challenging medical benchmarks: MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, DDXPlus, PMC-VQA, Path-VQA, and MedVidQA, achieving the best performance in 5 out of 7 benchmarks that require an understanding of multi-modal medical reasoning. Ablation studies reveal that MDAgents excels in adapting the number of collaborating agents to optimize efficiency and accuracy, showcasing its robustness in diverse scenarios. We also explore the dynamics of group consensus, offering insights into how collaborative agents could behave in complex clinical team dynamics. Our code can be found at https://github.com/mitmedialab/MDAgents.
Authors: Si Chen, Feiyang Kang, Ning Yu, Ruoxi Jia
Abstract: Fact tracing seeks to identify specific training examples that serve as the knowledge source for a given query. Existing approaches to fact tracing rely on assessing the similarity between each training sample and the query along a certain dimension, such as lexical similarity, gradient, or embedding space. However, these methods fall short of effectively distinguishing between samples that are merely relevant and those that actually provide supportive evidence for the information sought by the query. This limitation often results in suboptimal effectiveness. Moreover, these approaches necessitate the examination of the similarity of individual training points for each query, imposing significant computational demands and creating a substantial barrier for practical applications. This paper introduces FASTTRACK, a novel approach that harnesses the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to validate supportive evidence for queries and at the same time clusters the training database towards a reduced extent for LLMs to trace facts. Our experiments show that FASTTRACK substantially outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and efficiency, achieving more than 100\% improvement in F1 score over the state-of-the-art methods while being X33 faster than \texttt{TracIn}.
Authors: Dengchun Li, Yingzi Ma, Naizheng Wang, Zhiyuan Cheng, Lei Duan, Jie Zuo, Cal Yang, Mingjie Tang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional performance across a wide array of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Fine-tuning techniques are commonly utilized to tailor pre-trained models to specific applications. While methods like LoRA have effectively tackled GPU memory constraints during fine-tuning, their applicability is often restricted to limited performance, especially on multi-task. On the other hand, Mix-of-Expert (MoE) models, such as Mixtral 8x7B, demonstrate remarkable performance across multiple NLP tasks while maintaining a reduced parameter count. However, the resource requirements of these MoEs still challenging, particularly for consumer-grade GPUs only have limited VRAM. To address these challenge, we propose MixLoRA, an innovative approach aimed at constructing a resource-efficient sparse MoE model based on LoRA. MixLoRA inserts multiple LoRA-based experts within the feed-forward network block of a frozen pre-trained dense model through fine-tuning, employing a commonly used top-k router. Unlike other LoRA based MoE methods, MixLoRA enhances model performance by utilizing independently configurable attention-layer LoRA adapters, supporting the use of LoRA and its variants for the construction of experts, and applying auxiliary load balance loss to address the imbalance problem of the router. In experiments, MixLoRA achieves commendable performance across all evaluation metrics in both single-task and multi-task learning scenarios. Implemented within the m-LoRA framework, MixLoRA enables parallel fine-tuning of multiple mixture-of-experts models on a single 24GB consumer-grade GPU without quantization, thereby reducing GPU memory consumption by 41\% and latency during the training process by 17\%.
Authors: John R. Lawson, Montgomery L. Flora, Kevin H. Goebbert, Seth N. Lyman, Corey K. Potvin, David M. Schultz, Adam J. Stepanek, Joseph E. Trujillo-Falc\'on
Abstract: Generative AI, such as OpenAI's GPT-4V large-language model, has rapidly entered mainstream discourse. Novel capabilities in image processing and natural-language communication may augment existing forecasting methods. Large language models further display potential to better communicate weather hazards in a style honed for diverse communities and different languages. This study evaluates GPT-4V's ability to interpret meteorological charts and communicate weather hazards appropriately to the user, despite challenges of hallucinations, where generative AI delivers coherent, confident, but incorrect responses. We assess GPT-4V's competence via its web interface ChatGPT in two tasks: (1) generating a severe-weather outlook from weather-chart analysis and conducting self-evaluation, revealing an outlook that corresponds well with a Storm Prediction Center human-issued forecast; and (2) producing hazard summaries in Spanish and English from weather charts. Responses in Spanish, however, resemble direct (not idiomatic) translations from English to Spanish, yielding poorly translated summaries that lose critical idiomatic precision required for optimal communication. Our findings advocate for cautious integration of tools like GPT-4V in meteorology, underscoring the necessity of human oversight and development of trustworthy, explainable AI.
Authors: Duy Phuong Nguyen, J. Pablo Munoz, Ali Jannesari
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, multimodal models, e.g., integrating vision and language into visual-language models (VLMs), have become pivotal for many applications, ranging from image captioning to multimodal search engines. Among these models, the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model has demonstrated remarkable performance in understanding and generating nuanced relationships between text and images. However, the conventional training of such models often requires centralized aggregation of vast datasets, posing significant privacy and data governance challenges. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a novel approach that leverages Federated Learning and parameter-efficient adapters, i.e., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to train VLMs. This methodology preserves data privacy by training models across decentralized data sources and ensures model adaptability and efficiency through LoRA's parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our approach accelerates training time by up to 34.72 times and requires 2.47 times less memory usage than full fine-tuning.
Authors: Joachim Winther Pedersen, Erwan Plantec, Eleni Nisioti, Milton Montero, Sebastian Risi
Abstract: Artificial neural networks used for reinforcement learning are structurally rigid, meaning that each optimized parameter of the network is tied to its specific placement in the network structure. It also means that a network only works with pre-defined and fixed input- and output sizes. This is a consequence of having the number of optimized parameters being directly dependent on the structure of the network. Structural rigidity limits the ability to optimize parameters of policies across multiple environments that do not share input and output spaces. Here, we evolve a set of neurons and plastic synapses each represented by a gated recurrent unit (GRU). During optimization, the parameters of these fundamental units of a neural network are optimized in different random structural configurations. Earlier work has shown that parameter sharing between units is important for making structurally flexible neurons We show that it is possible to optimize a set of distinct neuron- and synapse types allowing for a mitigation of the symmetry dilemma. We demonstrate this by optimizing a single set of neurons and synapses to solve multiple reinforcement learning control tasks simultaneously.
Authors: Renato Golin, Lorenzo Chelini, Adam Siemieniuk, Kavitha Madhu, Niranjan Hasabnis, Hans Pabst, Evangelos Georganas, Alexander Heinecke
Abstract: This work proposes a compilation flow using open-source compiler passes to build a framework to achieve ninja performance from a generic linear algebra high-level abstraction. We demonstrate this flow with a proof-of-concept MLIR project that uses input IR in Linalg-on-Tensor from TensorFlow and PyTorch, performs cache-level optimizations and lowering to micro-kernels for efficient vectorization, achieving over 90% of the performance of ninja-written equivalent programs. The contributions of this work include: (1) Packing primitives on the tensor dialect and passes for cache-aware distribution of tensors (single and multi-core) and type-aware instructions (VNNI, BFDOT, BFMMLA), including propagation of shapes across the entire function; (2) A linear algebra pipeline, including tile, fuse and bufferization strategies to get model-level IR into hardware friendly tile calls; (3) A mechanism for micro-kernel lowering to an open source library that supports various CPUs.
Authors: Mona Alzahrani, Muhammad Usman, Salma Kammoun, Saeed Anwar, Tarek Helmy
Abstract: Human decision-making often relies on visual information from multiple perspectives or views. In contrast, machine learning-based object recognition utilizes information from a single image of the object. However, the information conveyed by a single image may not be sufficient for accurate decision-making, particularly in complex recognition problems. The utilization of multi-view 3D representations for object recognition has thus far demonstrated the most promising results for achieving state-of-the-art performance. This review paper comprehensively covers recent progress in multi-view 3D object recognition methods for 3D classification and retrieval tasks. Specifically, we focus on deep learning-based and transformer-based techniques, as they are widely utilized and have achieved state-of-the-art performance. We provide detailed information about existing deep learning-based and transformer-based multi-view 3D object recognition models, including the most commonly used 3D datasets, camera configurations and number of views, view selection strategies, pre-trained CNN architectures, fusion strategies, and recognition performance on 3D classification and 3D retrieval tasks. Additionally, we examine various computer vision applications that use multi-view classification. Finally, we highlight key findings and future directions for developing multi-view 3D object recognition methods to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the field.
Authors: Yong En Kok (School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK), Alexander Bentley (Optics and Photonics Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK), Andrew Parkes (School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK), Amanda J. Wright (Optics and Photonics Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK), Michael G. Somekh (Optics and Photonics Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, Research Center for Humanoid Sensing, Zhejiang Laboratory Hangzhou, China), Michael Pound (School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK)
Abstract: Optical imaging quality can be severely degraded by system and sample induced aberrations. Existing adaptive optics systems typically rely on iterative search algorithm to correct for aberrations and improve images. This study demonstrates the application of convolutional neural networks to characterise the optical aberration by directly predicting the Zernike coefficients from two to three phase-diverse optical images. We evaluated our network on 600,000 simulated Point Spread Function (PSF) datasets randomly generated within the range of -1 to 1 radians using the first 25 Zernike coefficients. The results show that using only three phase-diverse images captured above, below and at the focal plane with an amplitude of 1 achieves a low RMSE of 0.10 radians on the simulated PSF dataset. Furthermore, this approach directly predicts Zernike modes simulated extended 2D samples, while maintaining a comparable RMSE of 0.15 radians. We demonstrate that this approach is effective using only a single prediction step, or can be iterated a small number of times. This simple and straightforward technique provides rapid and accurate method for predicting the aberration correction using three or less phase-diverse images, paving the way for evaluation on real-world dataset.
Authors: Weiyan Shi, Ryan Li, Yutong Zhang, Caleb Ziems, Chunhua yu, Raya Horesh, Rog\'erio Abreu de Paula, Diyi Yang
Abstract: To enhance language models' cultural awareness, we design a generalizable pipeline to construct cultural knowledge bases from different online communities on a massive scale. With the pipeline, we construct CultureBank, a knowledge base built upon users' self-narratives with 12K cultural descriptors sourced from TikTok and 11K from Reddit. Unlike previous cultural knowledge resources, CultureBank contains diverse views on cultural descriptors to allow flexible interpretation of cultural knowledge, and contextualized cultural scenarios to help grounded evaluation. With CultureBank, we evaluate different LLMs' cultural awareness, and identify areas for improvement. We also fine-tune a language model on CultureBank: experiments show that it achieves better performances on two downstream cultural tasks in a zero-shot setting. Finally, we offer recommendations based on our findings for future culturally aware language technologies. The project page is https://culturebank.github.io . The code and model is at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CultureBank . The released CultureBank dataset is at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SALT-NLP/CultureBank .
URLs: https://culturebank.github.io, https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CultureBank, https://huggingface.co/datasets/SALT-NLP/CultureBank
Authors: Anil Kumar Yerrapragada, Jeeva Keshav Sattianarayanin, Radha Krishna Ganti
Abstract: Accurate decoding of Uplink Control Information (UCI) on the Physical Uplink Control Channel (PUCCH) is essential for enabling 5G wireless links. This paper explores an AI/ML-based receiver design for PUCCH Format 0. Format 0 signaling encodes the UCI content within the phase of a known base waveform and even supports multiplexing of up to 12 users within the same time-frequency resources. Our first-of-a-kind neural network classifier, which we term UCINet0, is capable of predicting when no user is transmitting on the PUCCH, as well as decoding the UCI content of any number of multiplexed users, up to 12. Inference results with both simulated and hardware-captured field datasets show that the UCINet0 model outperforms conventional DFT-based decoders across all SNR ranges.
Authors: Yifeng Ding, Jiawei Liu, Yuxiang Wei, Terry Yue Zhuo, Lingming Zhang
Abstract: We introduce XFT, a simple yet powerful training scheme, by simply merging upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to unleash the performance limit of instruction-tuned code Large Language Models (LLMs). While vanilla sparse upcycling fails to improve instruction tuning, XFT introduces a shared expert mechanism with a novel routing weight normalization strategy into sparse upcycling, which significantly boosts instruction tuning. After fine-tuning the upcycled MoE model, XFT introduces a learnable model merging mechanism to compile the upcycled MoE model back to a dense model, achieving upcycled MoE-level performance with only dense-model compute. By applying XFT to a 1.3B model, we create a new state-of-the-art tiny code LLM (<3B) with 67.1 and 64.6 pass@1 on HumanEval and HumanEval+ respectively. With the same data and model architecture, XFT improves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) by 13% on HumanEval+, along with consistent improvements from 2% to 13% on MBPP+, MultiPL-E, and DS-1000, demonstrating its generalizability. XFT is fully orthogonal to existing techniques such as Evol-Instruct and OSS-Instruct, opening a new dimension for improving code instruction tuning. Codes are available at https://github.com/ise-uiuc/xft .
Authors: Junli Ren, Yikai Liu, Yingru Dai, Guijin Wang
Abstract: Legged navigation is typically examined within open-world, off-road, and challenging environments. In these scenarios, estimating external disturbances requires a complex synthesis of multi-modal information. This underlines a major limitation in existing works that primarily focus on avoiding obstacles. In this work, we propose TOP-Nav, a novel legged navigation framework that integrates a comprehensive path planner with Terrain awareness, Obstacle avoidance and close-loop Proprioception. TOP-Nav underscores the synergies between vision and proprioception in both path and motion planning. Within the path planner, we present and integrate a terrain estimator that enables the robot to select waypoints on terrains with higher traversability while effectively avoiding obstacles. In the motion planning level, we not only implement a locomotion controller to track the navigation commands, but also construct a proprioception advisor to provide motion evaluations for the path planner. Based on the close-loop motion feedback, we make online corrections for the vision-based terrain and obstacle estimations. Consequently, TOP-Nav achieves open-world navigation that the robot can handle terrains or disturbances beyond the distribution of prior knowledge and overcomes constraints imposed by visual conditions. Building upon extensive experiments conducted in both simulation and real-world environments, TOP-Nav demonstrates superior performance in open-world navigation compared to existing methods.
Authors: Ge Gao, Alexey Taymanov, Eduardo Salinas, Paul Mineiro, Dipendra Misra
Abstract: We study interactive learning of language agents based on user edits made to the agent's output. In a typical setting such as writing assistants, the user interacts with a language agent to generate a response given a context, and may optionally edit the agent response to personalize it based on their latent preference, in addition to improving the correctness. The edit feedback is naturally generated, making it a suitable candidate for improving the agent's alignment with the user's preference, and for reducing the cost of user edits over time. We propose a learning framework, PRELUDE that infers a description of the user's latent preference based on historic edit data and using it to define a prompt policy that drives future response generation. This avoids fine-tuning the agent, which is costly, challenging to scale with the number of users, and may even degrade its performance on other tasks. Furthermore, learning descriptive preference improves interpretability, allowing the user to view and modify the learned preference. However, user preference can be complex and vary based on context, making it challenging to learn. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm named CIPHER that leverages a large language model (LLM) to infer the user preference for a given context based on user edits. In the future, CIPHER retrieves inferred preferences from the k-closest contexts in the history, and forms an aggregate preference for response generation. We introduce two interactive environments -- summarization and email writing, for evaluation using a GPT-4 simulated user. We compare with algorithms that directly retrieve user edits but do not learn descriptive preference, and algorithms that learn context-agnostic preference. On both tasks, CIPHER achieves the lowest edit distance cost and learns preferences that show significant similarity to the ground truth preferences
Authors: Wanrong Zhu, Jennifer Healey, Ruiyi Zhang, William Yang Wang, Tong Sun
Abstract: Recent advancements in instruction-following models have made user interactions with models more user-friendly and efficient, broadening their applicability. In graphic design, non-professional users often struggle to create visually appealing layouts due to limited skills and resources. In this work, we introduce a novel multimodal instruction-following framework for layout planning, allowing users to easily arrange visual elements into tailored layouts by specifying canvas size and design purpose, such as for book covers, posters, brochures, or menus. We developed three layout reasoning tasks to train the model in understanding and executing layout instructions. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our method not only simplifies the design process for non-professionals but also surpasses the performance of few-shot GPT-4V models, with mIoU higher by 12% on Crello. This progress highlights the potential of multimodal instruction-following models to automate and simplify the design process, providing an approachable solution for a wide range of design tasks on visually-rich documents.
Authors: Jingyang Lin, Yingda Xia, Jianpeng Zhang, Ke Yan, Le Lu, Jiebo Luo, Ling Zhang
Abstract: Medical Vision-Language Pretraining (Med-VLP) establishes a connection between visual content from medical images and the relevant textual descriptions. Existing Med-VLP methods primarily focus on 2D images depicting a single body part, notably chest X-rays. In this paper, we extend the scope of Med-VLP to encompass 3D images, specifically targeting full-body scenarios, by using a multimodal dataset of CT images and reports. Compared with the 2D counterpart, 3D VLP is required to effectively capture essential semantics from significantly sparser representation in 3D imaging. In this paper, we introduce CT-GLIP (Grounded Language-Image Pretraining with CT scans), a novel method that constructs organ-level image-text pairs to enhance multimodal contrastive learning, aligning grounded visual features with precise diagnostic text. Additionally, we developed an abnormality dictionary to augment contrastive learning with diverse negative samples. Our method, trained on a multimodal CT dataset comprising 44,011 organ-level vision-text pairs from 17,702 patients across 104 organs, demonstrates it can identify organs and abnormalities in a zero-shot manner using natural languages. The performance of CT-GLIP is validated on a separate test set of 1,130 patients, focusing on the 16 most frequent abnormalities across 7 organs. The experimental results show our model's superior performance over the standard CLIP framework across zero-shot and fine-tuning scenarios, using both CNN and ViT architectures.
Authors: Xiangyu Xu, Lijuan Liu, Shuicheng Yan
Abstract: Existing Transformers for monocular 3D human shape and pose estimation typically have a quadratic computation and memory complexity with respect to the feature length, which hinders the exploitation of fine-grained information in high-resolution features that is beneficial for accurate reconstruction. In this work, we propose an SMPL-based Transformer framework (SMPLer) to address this issue. SMPLer incorporates two key ingredients: a decoupled attention operation and an SMPL-based target representation, which allow effective utilization of high-resolution features in the Transformer. In addition, based on these two designs, we also introduce several novel modules including a multi-scale attention and a joint-aware attention to further boost the reconstruction performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SMPLer against existing 3D human shape and pose estimation methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, the proposed algorithm achieves an MPJPE of 45.2 mm on the Human3.6M dataset, improving upon Mesh Graphormer by more than 10% with fewer than one-third of the parameters. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/xuxy09/SMPLer.
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, wherein every aspect of the environment is a relation between irreducible states. We formalise systems as behaviour (inputs and outputs), 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.
Authors: Xingpeng Sun, Haoming Meng, Souradip Chakraborty, Amrit Singh Bedi, Aniket Bera
Abstract: While LLMs excel in processing text in these human conversations, they struggle with the nuances of verbal instructions in scenarios like social navigation, where ambiguity and uncertainty can erode trust in robotic and other AI systems. We can address this shortcoming by moving beyond text and additionally focusing on the paralinguistic features of these audio responses. These features are the aspects of spoken communication that do not involve the literal wording (lexical content) but convey meaning and nuance through how something is said. We present \emph{Beyond Text}; an approach that improves LLM decision-making by integrating audio transcription along with a subsection of these features, which focus on the affect and more relevant in human-robot conversations.This approach not only achieves a 70.26\% winning rate, outperforming existing LLMs by 22.16\% to 48.30\% (gemini-1.5-pro and gpt-3.5 respectively), but also enhances robustness against token manipulation adversarial attacks, highlighted by a 22.44\% less decrease ratio than the text-only language model in winning rate. ``\textit{Beyond Text}'' marks an advancement in social robot navigation and broader Human-Robot interactions, seamlessly integrating text-based guidance with human-audio-informed language models.
Authors: Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, Felix Engel, S\"oren Auer
Abstract: Ontology Matching (OM), is a critical task in knowledge integration, where aligning heterogeneous ontologies facilitates data interoperability and knowledge sharing. Traditional OM systems often rely on expert knowledge or predictive models, with limited exploration of the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs). We present the LLMs4OM framework, a novel approach to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in OM tasks. This framework utilizes two modules for retrieval and matching, respectively, enhanced by zero-shot prompting across three ontology representations: concept, concept-parent, and concept-children. Through comprehensive evaluations using 20 OM datasets from various domains, we demonstrate that LLMs, under the LLMs4OM framework, can match and even surpass the performance of traditional OM systems, particularly in complex matching scenarios. Our results highlight the potential of LLMs to significantly contribute to the field of OM.
Authors: Robik Shrestha, Kushal Kafle, Christopher Kanan
Abstract: Existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods tend to exploit dataset biases and spurious statistical correlations, instead of producing right answers for the right reasons. To address this issue, recent bias mitigation methods for VQA propose to incorporate visual cues (e.g., human attention maps) to better ground the VQA models, showcasing impressive gains. However, we show that the performance improvements are not a result of improved visual grounding, but a regularization effect which prevents over-fitting to linguistic priors. For instance, we find that it is not actually necessary to provide proper, human-based cues; random, insensible cues also result in similar improvements. Based on this observation, we propose a simpler regularization scheme that does not require any external annotations and yet achieves near state-of-the-art performance on VQA-CPv2.
Authors: Robik Shrestha, Kushal Kafle, Christopher Kanan
Abstract: A critical problem in deep learning is that systems learn inappropriate biases, resulting in their inability to perform well on minority groups. This has led to the creation of multiple algorithms that endeavor to mitigate bias. However, it is not clear how effective these methods are. This is because study protocols differ among papers, systems are tested on datasets that fail to test many forms of bias, and systems have access to hidden knowledge or are tuned specifically to the test set. To address this, we introduce an improved evaluation protocol, sensible metrics, and a new dataset, which enables us to ask and answer critical questions about bias mitigation algorithms. We evaluate seven state-of-the-art algorithms using the same network architecture and hyperparameter selection policy across three benchmark datasets. We introduce a new dataset called Biased MNIST that enables assessment of robustness to multiple bias sources. We use Biased MNIST and a visual question answering (VQA) benchmark to assess robustness to hidden biases. Rather than only tuning to the test set distribution, we study robustness across different tuning distributions, which is critical because for many applications the test distribution may not be known during development. We find that algorithms exploit hidden biases, are unable to scale to multiple forms of bias, and are highly sensitive to the choice of tuning set. Based on our findings, we implore the community to adopt more rigorous assessment of future bias mitigation methods. All data, code, and results are publicly available at: https://github.com/erobic/bias-mitigators.
Authors: Junfeng Hu, Yuxuan Liang, Zhencheng Fan, Li Liu, Yifang Yin, Roger Zimmermann
Abstract: Sensors are the key to environmental monitoring, which impart benefits to smart cities in many aspects, such as providing real-time air quality information to assist human decision-making. However, it is impractical to deploy massive sensors due to the expensive costs, resulting in sparse data collection. Therefore, how to get fine-grained data measurement has long been a pressing issue. In this paper, we aim to infer values at non-sensor locations based on observations from available sensors (termed spatiotemporal inference), where capturing spatiotemporal relationships among the data plays a critical role. Our investigations reveal two significant insights that have not been explored by previous works. Firstly, data exhibits distinct patterns at both long- and short-term temporal scales, which should be analyzed separately. Secondly, short-term patterns contain more delicate relations including those across spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously, while long-term patterns involve high-level temporal trends. Based on these observations, we propose to decouple the modeling of short-term and long-term patterns. Specifically, we introduce a joint spatiotemporal graph attention network to learn the relations across space and time for short-term patterns. Furthermore, we propose a graph recurrent network with a time skip strategy to alleviate the gradient vanishing problem and model the long-term dependencies. Experimental results on four public real-world datasets demonstrate that our method effectively captures both long- and short-term relations, achieving state-of-the-art performance against existing methods.
Authors: Elie Bursztein, Marina Zhang, Owen Vallis, Xinyu Jia, Alexey Kurakin
Abstract: This paper describes RETVec, an efficient, resilient, and multilingual text vectorizer designed for neural-based text processing. RETVec combines a novel character encoding with an optional small embedding model to embed words into a 256-dimensional vector space. The RETVec embedding model is pre-trained using pair-wise metric learning to be robust against typos and character-level adversarial attacks. In this paper, we evaluate and compare RETVec to state-of-the-art vectorizers and word embeddings on popular model architectures and datasets. These comparisons demonstrate that RETVec leads to competitive, multilingual models that are significantly more resilient to typos and adversarial text attacks. RETVec is available under the Apache 2 license at https://github.com/google-research/retvec.
Authors: Jia Lin Hau, Erick Delage, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Marek Petrik
Abstract: Optimizing static risk-averse objectives in Markov decision processes is difficult because they do not admit standard dynamic programming equations common in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Dynamic programming decompositions that augment the state space with discrete risk levels have recently gained popularity in the RL community. Prior work has shown that these decompositions are optimal when the risk level is discretized sufficiently. However, we show that these popular decompositions for Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) and Entropic-Value-at-Risk (EVaR) are inherently suboptimal regardless of the discretization level. In particular, we show that a saddle point property assumed to hold in prior literature may be violated. However, a decomposition does hold for Value-at-Risk and our proof demonstrates how this risk measure differs from CVaR and EVaR. Our findings are significant because risk-averse algorithms are used in high-stake environments, making their correctness much more critical.
Authors: Yizhi Li, Ruibin Yuan, Ge Zhang, Yinghao Ma, Xingran Chen, Hanzhi Yin, Chenghao Xiao, Chenghua Lin, Anton Ragni, Emmanouil Benetos, Norbert Gyenge, Roger Dannenberg, Ruibo Liu, Wenhu Chen, Gus Xia, Yemin Shi, Wenhao Huang, Zili Wang, Yike Guo, Jie Fu
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for training generalisable models on large-scale data in the fields of vision, text, and speech. Although SSL has been proven effective in speech and audio, its application to music audio has yet to be thoroughly explored. This is partially due to the distinctive challenges associated with modelling musical knowledge, particularly tonal and pitched characteristics of music. To address this research gap, we propose an acoustic Music undERstanding model with large-scale self-supervised Training (MERT), which incorporates teacher models to provide pseudo labels in the masked language modelling (MLM) style acoustic pre-training. In our exploration, we identified an effective combination of teacher models, which outperforms conventional speech and audio approaches in terms of performance. This combination includes an acoustic teacher based on Residual Vector Quantisation - Variational AutoEncoder (RVQ-VAE) and a musical teacher based on the Constant-Q Transform (CQT). Furthermore, we explore a wide range of settings to overcome the instability in acoustic language model pre-training, which allows our designed paradigm to scale from 95M to 330M parameters. Experimental results indicate that our model can generalise and perform well on 14 music understanding tasks and attain state-of-the-art (SOTA) overall scores.
Authors: Matias Alvo, Daniel Russo, Yash Kanoria
Abstract: We argue that inventory management presents unique opportunities for reliably applying and evaluating deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Toward reliable application, we emphasize and test two techniques. The first is Hindsight Differentiable Policy Optimization (HDPO), which performs stochastic gradient descent to optimize policy performance while avoiding the need to repeatedly deploy randomized policies in the environment-as is common with generic policy gradient methods. Our second technique involves aligning policy (neural) network architectures with the structure of the inventory network. Specifically, we focus on a network with a single warehouse that consolidates inventory from external suppliers, holds it, and then distributes it to many stores as needed. In this setting, we introduce the symmetry-aware policy network architecture. We motivate this architecture by establishing an asymptotic performance guarantee and empirically demonstrate its ability to reduce the amount of data needed to uncover strong policies. Both techniques exploit structures inherent in inventory management problems, moving beyond generic DRL algorithms. Toward rigorous evaluation, we create and share new benchmark problems, divided into two categories. One type focuses on problems with hidden structures that allow us to compute or bound the cost of the true optimal policy. Across four problems of this type, we find HDPO consistently attains near-optimal performance, handling up to 60-dimensional raw state vectors effectively. The other type of evaluation involves constructing a test problem using real time series data from a large retailer, where the optimum is poorly understood. Here, we find HDPO methods meaningfully outperform a variety of generalized newsvendor heuristics. Our code can be found at github.com/MatiasAlvo/Neural_inventory_control.
Authors: Ya Zhou, Xiaolin Diao, Yanni Huo, Yang Liu, Xiaohan Fan, Wei Zhao
Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most important diagnostic tools in clinical applications. With the advent of advanced algorithms, various deep learning models have been adopted for ECG tasks. However, the potential of Transformer for ECG data has not been fully realized, despite their widespread success in computer vision and natural language processing. In this work, we present Masked Transformer for ECG classification (MTECG), a simple yet effective method which significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art algorithms in ECG classification. Our approach adapts the image-based masked autoencoders to self-supervised representation learning from ECG time series. We utilize a lightweight Transformer for the encoder and a 1-layer Transformer for the decoder. The ECG signal is split into a sequence of non-overlapping segments along the time dimension, and learnable positional embeddings are added to preserve the sequential information. We construct the Fuwai dataset comprising 220,251 ECG recordings with a broad range of diagnoses, annotated by medical experts, to explore the potential of Transformer. A strong pre-training and fine-tuning recipe is proposed from the empirical study. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method increases the macro F1 scores by 3.4%-27.5% on the Fuwai dataset, 9.9%-32.0% on the PTB-XL dataset, and 9.4%-39.1% on a multicenter dataset, compared to the alternative methods. We hope that this study could direct future research on the application of Transformer to more ECG tasks.
Authors: Xiongye Xiao, Gengshuo Liu, Gaurav Gupta, Defu Cao, Shixuan Li, Yaxing Li, Tianqing Fang, Mingxi Cheng, Paul Bogdan
Abstract: Integrating and processing information from various sources or modalities are critical for obtaining a comprehensive and accurate perception of the real world. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, we develop the Information-Theoretic Hierarchical Perception (ITHP) model, which utilizes the concept of information bottleneck. Distinct from most traditional fusion models that aim to incorporate all modalities as input, our model designates the prime modality as input, while the remaining modalities act as detectors in the information pathway. Our proposed perception model focuses on constructing an effective and compact information flow by achieving a balance between the minimization of mutual information between the latent state and the input modal state, and the maximization of mutual information between the latent states and the remaining modal states. This approach leads to compact latent state representations that retain relevant information while minimizing redundancy, thereby substantially enhancing the performance of downstream tasks. Experimental evaluations on both the MUStARD and CMU-MOSI datasets demonstrate that our model consistently distills crucial information in multimodal learning scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Authors: Lane Lawley, Christopher J. MacLellan
Abstract: Machine learning often requires millions of examples to produce static, black-box models. In contrast, interactive task learning (ITL) emphasizes incremental knowledge acquisition from limited instruction provided by humans in modalities such as natural language. However, ITL systems often suffer from brittle, error-prone language parsing, which limits their usability. Large language models (LLMs) are resistant to brittleness but are not interpretable and cannot learn incrementally. We present VAL, an ITL system with a new philosophy for LLM/symbolic integration. By using LLMs only for specific tasks--such as predicate and argument selection--within an algorithmic framework, VAL reaps the benefits of LLMs to support interactive learning of hierarchical task knowledge from natural language. Acquired knowledge is human interpretable and generalizes to support execution of novel tasks without additional training. We studied users' interactions with VAL in a video game setting, finding that most users could successfully teach VAL using language they felt was natural.
Authors: Naram Mhaisen, George Iosifidis
Abstract: We tackle the problem of Non-stochastic Control (NSC) with the aim of obtaining algorithms whose policy regret is proportional to the difficulty of the controlled environment. Namely, we tailor the Follow The Regularized Leader (FTRL) framework to dynamical systems by using regularizers that are proportional to the actual witnessed costs. The main challenge arises from using the proposed adaptive regularizers in the presence of a state, or equivalently, a memory, which couples the effect of the online decisions and requires new tools for bounding the regret. Via new analysis techniques for NSC and FTRL integration, we obtain novel disturbance action controllers (DAC) with sub-linear data adaptive policy regret bounds that shrink when the trajectory of costs has small gradients, while staying sub-linear even in the worst case.
Authors: Yong Lin, Fan Zhou, Lu Tan, Lintao Ma, Jiameng Liu, Yansu He, Yuan Yuan, Yu Liu, James Zhang, Yujiu Yang, Hao Wang
Abstract: Invariance learning methods aim to learn invariant features in the hope that they generalize under distributional shifts. Although many tasks are naturally characterized by continuous domains, current invariance learning techniques generally assume categorically indexed domains. For example, auto-scaling in cloud computing often needs a CPU utilization prediction model that generalizes across different times (e.g., time of a day and date of a year), where `time' is a continuous domain index. In this paper, we start by theoretically showing that existing invariance learning methods can fail for continuous domain problems. Specifically, the naive solution of splitting continuous domains into discrete ones ignores the underlying relationship among domains, and therefore potentially leads to suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we then propose Continuous Invariance Learning (CIL), which extracts invariant features across continuously indexed domains. CIL is a novel adversarial procedure that measures and controls the conditional independence between the labels and continuous domain indices given the extracted features. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates the superiority of CIL over existing invariance learning methods. Empirical results on both synthetic and real-world datasets (including data collected from production systems) show that CIL consistently outperforms strong baselines among all the tasks.
Authors: Hang Shao, Bei Liu, Bo Xiao, Ke Zeng, Guanglu Wan, Yanmin Qian
Abstract: Various Large Language Models~(LLMs) from the Generative Pretrained Transformer(GPT) family have achieved outstanding performances in a wide range of text generation tasks. However, the enormous model sizes have hindered their practical use in real-world applications due to high inference latency. Therefore, improving the efficiencies of LLMs through quantization, pruning, and other means has been a key issue in LLM studies. In this work, we propose a method based on Hessian sensitivity-aware mixed sparsity pruning to prune LLMs to at least 50% sparsity without the need of any retraining. It allocates sparsity adaptively based on sensitivity, allowing us to reduce pruning-induced error while maintaining the overall sparsity level. The advantages of the proposed method exhibit even more when the sparsity is extremely high. Furthermore, our method is compatible with quantization, enabling further compression of LLMs. We have released the available code.
Authors: Roger Creus Castanyer, Joshua Romoff, Glen Berseth
Abstract: Exploration bonuses in reinforcement learning guide long-horizon exploration by defining custom intrinsic objectives. Several exploration objectives like count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization are non-stationary and hence are difficult to optimize for the agent. While this issue is generally known, it is usually omitted and solutions remain under-explored. The key contribution of our work lies in transforming the original non-stationary rewards into stationary rewards through an augmented state representation. For this purpose, we introduce the Stationary Objectives For Exploration (SOFE) framework. SOFE requires identifying sufficient statistics for different exploration bonuses and finding an efficient encoding of these statistics to use as input to a deep network. SOFE is based on proposing state augmentations that expand the state space but hold the promise of simplifying the optimization of the agent's objective. We show that SOFE improves the performance of several exploration objectives, including count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization. Moreover, SOFE outperforms prior methods that attempt to stabilize the optimization of intrinsic objectives. We demonstrate the efficacy of SOFE in hard-exploration problems, including sparse-reward tasks, pixel-based observations, 3D navigation, and procedurally generated environments.
Authors: Armin Danesh Pazho, Ghazal Alinezhad Noghre, Vinit Katariya, Hamed Tabkhi
Abstract: Enhancing roadway safety has become an essential computer vision focus area for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). As a part of ITS, Vehicle Trajectory Prediction (VTP) aims to forecast a vehicle's future positions based on its past and current movements. VTP is a pivotal element for road safety, aiding in applications such as traffic management, accident prevention, work-zone safety, and energy optimization. While most works in this field focus on autonomous driving, with the growing number of surveillance cameras, another sub-field emerges for surveillance VTP with its own set of challenges. In this paper, we introduce VT-Former, a novel transformer-based VTP approach for highway safety and surveillance. In addition to utilizing transformers to capture long-range temporal patterns, a new Graph Attentive Tokenization (GAT) module has been proposed to capture intricate social interactions among vehicles. This study seeks to explore both the advantages and the limitations inherent in combining transformer architecture with graphs for VTP. Our investigation, conducted across three benchmark datasets from diverse surveillance viewpoints, showcases the State-of-the-Art (SotA) or comparable performance of VT-Former in predicting vehicle trajectories. This study underscores the potential of VT-Former and its architecture, opening new avenues for future research and exploration.
Authors: Lin Lawrence Guo, Jason Fries, Ethan Steinberg, Scott Lanyon Fleming, Keith Morse, Catherine Aftandilian, Jose Posada, Nigam Shah, Lillian Sung
Abstract: Foundation models hold promise for transforming AI in healthcare by providing modular components that are easily adaptable to downstream healthcare tasks, making AI development more scalable and cost-effective. Structured EHR foundation models, trained on coded medical records from millions of patients, demonstrated benefits including increased performance with fewer training labels, and improved robustness to distribution shifts. However, questions remain on the feasibility of sharing these models across different hospitals and their performance for local task adaptation. This multi-center study examined the adaptability of a recently released structured EHR foundation model ($FM_{SM}$), trained on longitudinal medical record data from 2.57M Stanford Medicine patients. Experiments were conducted using EHR data at The Hospital for Sick Children and MIMIC-IV. We assessed both adaptability via continued pretraining on local data, and task adaptability compared to baselines of training models from scratch at each site, including a local foundation model. We evaluated the performance of these models on 8 clinical prediction tasks. In both datasets, adapting the off-the-shelf $FM_{SM}$ matched the performance of GBM models locally trained on all data while providing a 13% improvement in settings with few task-specific training labels. With continued pretraining on local data, label efficiency substantially improved, such that $FM_{SM}$ required fewer than 1% of training examples to match the fully trained GBM's performance. Continued pretraining was also 60 to 90% more sample-efficient than training local foundation models from scratch. Our findings show that adapting shared EHR foundation models across hospitals provides improved prediction performance at less cost, underscoring the utility of base foundation models as modular components to streamline the development of healthcare AI.
Authors: Mohamed Nejjar, Luca Zacharias, Fabian Stiehle, Ingo Weber
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been touted to enable increased productivity in many areas of today's work life. Scientific research as an area of work is no exception: the potential of LLM-based tools to assist in the daily work of scientists has become a highly discussed topic across disciplines. However, we are only at the very onset of this subject of study. It is still unclear how the potential of LLMs will materialise in research practice. With this study, we give first empirical evidence on the use of LLMs in the research process. We have investigated a set of use cases for LLM-based tools in scientific research, and conducted a first study to assess to which degree current tools are helpful. In this paper we report specifically on use cases related to software engineering, such as generating application code and developing scripts for data analytics. While we studied seemingly simple use cases, results across tools differ significantly. Our results highlight the promise of LLM-based tools in general, yet we also observe various issues, particularly regarding the integrity of the output these tools provide.
Authors: Lingmin Ran, Xiaodong Cun, Jia-Wei Liu, Rui Zhao, Song Zijie, Xintao Wang, Jussi Keppo, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract: We introduce X-Adapter, a universal upgrader to enable the pretrained plug-and-play modules (e.g., ControlNet, LoRA) to work directly with the upgraded text-to-image diffusion model (e.g., SDXL) without further retraining. We achieve this goal by training an additional network to control the frozen upgraded model with the new text-image data pairs. In detail, X-Adapter keeps a frozen copy of the old model to preserve the connectors of different plugins. Additionally, X-Adapter adds trainable mapping layers that bridge the decoders from models of different versions for feature remapping. The remapped features will be used as guidance for the upgraded model. To enhance the guidance ability of X-Adapter, we employ a null-text training strategy for the upgraded model. After training, we also introduce a two-stage denoising strategy to align the initial latents of X-Adapter and the upgraded model. Thanks to our strategies, X-Adapter demonstrates universal compatibility with various plugins and also enables plugins of different versions to work together, thereby expanding the functionalities of diffusion community. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments and the results show that X-Adapter may facilitate wider application in the upgraded foundational diffusion model.
Authors: Marcel Wagenl\"ander, Guo Li, Bo Zhao, Luo Mai, Peter Pietzuch
Abstract: Deep learning (DL) jobs use multi-dimensional parallelism, i.e. combining data, model, and pipeline parallelism, to use large GPU clusters efficiently. Long-running jobs may experience changes to their GPU allocation: (i) resource elasticity during training adds or removes GPUs; (ii) hardware maintenance may require redeployment on different GPUs; and (iii) GPU failures force jobs to run with fewer devices. Current DL frameworks tie jobs to a set of GPUs and thus lack support for these scenarios. In particular, they cannot change the multi-dimensional parallelism of an already-running job in an efficient and model-independent way. We describe Scalai, a state management library for DL systems that enables jobs to change their parallelism dynamically after the GPU allocation is updated at runtime. Scalai achieves this through a new abstraction, a parallelizable tensor collection (PTC), that externalizes the job state during training. After a GPU change, Scalai uses the PTC to transform the job state: the PTC repartitions the dataset state under data parallelism and exposes it to DL workers through a virtual file system; and the PTC obtains the model state as partitioned checkpoints and transforms them to reflect the new parallelization configuration. For efficiency, Scalai executes PTC transformations in parallel with minimum data movement between workers. Our experiments show that Scalai enables DL jobs to support dynamic parallelization with low overhead.
Authors: Pavel Petracek, Kostas Alexis, Martin Saska
Abstract: The typical point cloud sampling methods used in state estimation for mobile robots preserve a high level of point redundancy. This redundancy unnecessarily slows down the estimation pipeline and may cause drift under real-time constraints. Such undue latency becomes a bottleneck for resource-constrained robots (especially UAVs), requiring minimal delay for agile and accurate operation. We propose a novel, deterministic, uninformed, and single-parameter point cloud sampling method named RMS that minimizes redundancy within a 3D point cloud. In contrast to the state of the art, RMS balances the translation-space observability by leveraging the fact that linear and planar surfaces inherently exhibit high redundancy propagated into iterative estimation pipelines. We define the concept of gradient flow, quantifying the local surface underlying a point. We also show that maximizing the entropy of the gradient flow minimizes point redundancy for robot ego-motion estimation. We integrate RMS into the point-based KISS-ICP and feature-based LOAM odometry pipelines and evaluate experimentally on KITTI, Hilti-Oxford, and custom datasets from multirotor UAVs. The experiments demonstrate that RMS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in speed, compression, and accuracy in well-conditioned as well as in geometrically-degenerated settings.
Authors: Yue Yang, Fan-Yun Sun, Luca Weihs, Eli VanderBilt, Alvaro Herrasti, Winson Han, Jiajun Wu, Nick Haber, Ranjay Krishna, Lingjie Liu, Chris Callison-Burch, Mark Yatskar, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Christopher Clark
Abstract: 3D simulated environments play a critical role in Embodied AI, but their creation requires expertise and extensive manual effort, restricting their diversity and scope. To mitigate this limitation, we present Holodeck, a system that generates 3D environments to match a user-supplied prompt fully automatedly. Holodeck can generate diverse scenes, e.g., arcades, spas, and museums, adjust the designs for styles, and can capture the semantics of complex queries such as "apartment for a researcher with a cat" and "office of a professor who is a fan of Star Wars". Holodeck leverages a large language model (i.e., GPT-4) for common sense knowledge about what the scene might look like and uses a large collection of 3D assets from Objaverse to populate the scene with diverse objects. To address the challenge of positioning objects correctly, we prompt GPT-4 to generate spatial relational constraints between objects and then optimize the layout to satisfy those constraints. Our large-scale human evaluation shows that annotators prefer Holodeck over manually designed procedural baselines in residential scenes and that Holodeck can produce high-quality outputs for diverse scene types. We also demonstrate an exciting application of Holodeck in Embodied AI, training agents to navigate in novel scenes like music rooms and daycares without human-constructed data, which is a significant step forward in developing general-purpose embodied agents.
Authors: Jing Xu, Andrew Lee, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jason Weston
Abstract: Practitioners commonly align large language models using pairwise preferences, i.e., given labels of the type response A is preferred to response B for a given input. Perhaps less commonly, methods have also been developed for binary feedback, i.e. training models given labels of type response A is good or bad. We show how an existing performant binary feedback method, the Cringe Loss (Adolphs et al., 2022), can be generalized to the pairwise preference setting using a simple soft margin extension. Pairwise Cringe Loss is straightforward to implement and efficient to train, and we find it outperforms state-of-the-art preference optimization algorithms such as PPO and DPO on the AlpacaFarm benchmark. We show that iterations of training of our model are important for improved results, and that we can generalize DPO to Iterative DPO in the same way.
Authors: Zhaokun Jiang, Ziyin Zhang
Abstract: Large language models have demonstrated parallel and even superior translation performance compared to neural machine translation (NMT) systems. However, existing comparative studies between them mainly rely on automated metrics, raising questions into the feasibility of these metrics and their alignment with human judgment. The present study investigates the convergences and divergences between automated metrics and human evaluation in assessing the quality of machine translation from ChatGPT and three NMT systems. To perform automatic assessment, four automated metrics are employed, while human evaluation incorporates the DQF-MQM error typology and six rubrics. Notably, automatic assessment and human evaluation converge in measuring formal fidelity (e.g., error rates), but diverge when evaluating semantic and pragmatic fidelity, with automated metrics failing to capture the improvement of ChatGPT's translation brought by prompt engineering. These results underscore the indispensable role of human judgment in evaluating the performance of advanced translation tools at the current stage.
Authors: Qiao Jin, Fangyuan Chen, Yiliang Zhou, Ziyang Xu, Justin M. Cheung, Robert Chen, Ronald M. Summers, Justin F. Rousseau, Peiyun Ni, Marc J Landsman, Sally L. Baxter, Subhi J. Al'Aref, Yijia Li, Alex Chen, Josef A. Brejt, Michael F. Chiang, Yifan Peng, Zhiyong Lu
Abstract: Recent studies indicate that Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 with Vision (GPT-4V) outperforms human physicians in medical challenge tasks. However, these evaluations primarily focused on the accuracy of multi-choice questions alone. Our study extends the current scope by conducting a comprehensive analysis of GPT-4V's rationales of image comprehension, recall of medical knowledge, and step-by-step multimodal reasoning when solving New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Image Challenges - an imaging quiz designed to test the knowledge and diagnostic capabilities of medical professionals. Evaluation results confirmed that GPT-4V performs comparatively to human physicians regarding multi-choice accuracy (81.6% vs. 77.8%). GPT-4V also performs well in cases where physicians incorrectly answer, with over 78% accuracy. However, we discovered that GPT-4V frequently presents flawed rationales in cases where it makes the correct final choices (35.5%), most prominent in image comprehension (27.2%). Regardless of GPT-4V's high accuracy in multi-choice questions, our findings emphasize the necessity for further in-depth evaluations of its rationales before integrating such multimodal AI models into clinical workflows.
Authors: Qinglong Meng, Chongkun Xia, Xueqian Wang, Songping Mai, Bin Liang
Abstract: The classical path planners, such as sampling-based path planners, can provide probabilistic completeness guarantees in the sense that the probability that the planner fails to return a solution if one exists, decays to zero as the number of samples approaches infinity. However, finding a near-optimal feasible solution in a given period is challenging in many applications such as the autonomous vehicle. To achieve an end-to-end near-optimal path planner, we first divide the path planning problem into two subproblems, which are path space segmentation and waypoints generation in the given path's space. We further propose a two-stage neural network named Path Planning Network (PPNet) each stage solves one of the subproblems abovementioned. Moreover, we propose a novel efficient data generation method for path planning named EDaGe-PP. EDaGe-PP can generate data with continuous-curvature paths with analytical expression while satisfying the clearance requirement. The results show the total computation time of generating random 2D path planning data is less than 1/33 and the success rate of PPNet trained by the dataset that is generated by EDaGe-PP is about 2 times compared to other methods. We validate PPNet against state-of-the-art path planning methods. The results show that PPNet can find a near-optimal solution in 15.3ms, which is much shorter than the state-of-the-art path planners.
Authors: Xiaopeng Li, Shasha Li, Shezheng Song, Huijun Liu, Bin Ji, Xi Wang, Jun Ma, Jie Yu, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Wang, Weimin Zhang
Abstract: The general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) make them the infrastructure for various AI applications, but updating their inner knowledge requires significant resources. Recent model editing is a promising technique for efficiently updating a small amount of knowledge of LLMs and has attracted much attention. In particular, local editing methods, which directly update model parameters, are more suitable for updating a small amount of knowledge. Local editing methods update weights by computing least squares closed-form solutions and identify edited knowledge by vector-level matching in inference, which achieve promising results. However, these methods still require a lot of time and resources to complete the computation. Moreover, vector-level matching lacks reliability, and such updates disrupt the original organization of the model's parameters. To address these issues, we propose an detachable and expandable Subject Word Embedding Altering (SWEA) framework, which finds the editing embeddings through token-level matching and adds them to the subject word embeddings in Transformer input. To get these editing embeddings, we propose optimizing then suppressing fusion method, which first optimizes learnable embedding vectors for the editing target and then suppresses the Knowledge Embedding Dimensions (KEDs) to obtain final editing embeddings. We thus propose SWEA$\oplus$OS method for editing factual knowledge in LLMs. We demonstrate the overall state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of SWEA$\oplus$OS on the \textsc{CounterFact} and zsRE datasets. To further validate the reasoning ability of SWEA$\oplus$OS in editing knowledge, we evaluate it on the more complex \textsc{RippleEdits} benchmark. The results demonstrate that SWEA$\oplus$OS possesses SOTA reasoning ability.
Authors: Yixu Feng, Cheng Zhang, Pei Wang, Peng Wu, Qingsen Yan, Yanning Zhang
Abstract: Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) task tends to restore the details and visual information from corrupted low-light images. Most existing methods learn the mapping function between low/normal-light images by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on sRGB and HSV color space. Nevertheless, enhancement involves amplifying image signals, and applying these color spaces to low-light images with a low signal-to-noise ratio can introduce sensitivity and instability into the enhancement process. Consequently, this results in the presence of color artifacts and brightness artifacts in the enhanced images. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel trainable color space, named Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI). It not only decouples brightness and color from RGB channels to mitigate the instability during enhancement but also adapts to low-light images in different illumination ranges due to the trainable parameters. Further, we design a novel Color and Intensity Decoupling Network (CIDNet) with two branches dedicated to processing the decoupled image brightness and color in the HVI space. Within CIDNet, we introduce the Lightweight Cross-Attention (LCA) module to facilitate interaction between image structure and content information in both branches, while also suppressing noise in low-light images. Finally, we conducted 22 quantitative and qualitative experiments to show that the proposed CIDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 11 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/HVI-CIDNet.
Authors: Matthieu Vilain, R\'emi Giraud, Hugo Germain, Guillaume Bourmaud
Abstract: Semi-dense detector-free approaches (SDF), such as LoFTR, are currently among the most popular image matching methods. While SDF methods are trained to establish correspondences between two images, their performances are almost exclusively evaluated using relative pose estimation metrics. Thus, the link between their ability to establish correspondences and the quality of the resulting estimated pose has thus far received little attention. This paper is a first attempt to study this link. We start with proposing a novel structured attention-based image matching architecture (SAM). It allows us to show a counter-intuitive result on two datasets (MegaDepth and HPatches): on the one hand SAM either outperforms or is on par with SDF methods in terms of pose/homography estimation metrics, but on the other hand SDF approaches are significantly better than SAM in terms of matching accuracy. We then propose to limit the computation of the matching accuracy to textured regions, and show that in this case SAM often surpasses SDF methods. Our findings highlight a strong correlation between the ability to establish accurate correspondences in textured regions and the accuracy of the resulting estimated pose/homography. Our code will be made available.
Authors: Nadav Schneider, Niranjan Hasabnis, Vy A. Vo, Tal Kadosh, Neva Krien, Mihai Capot\u{a}, Guy Tamir, Ted Willke, Nesreen Ahmed, Yuval Pinter, Timothy Mattson, Gal Oren
Abstract: The imperative need to scale computation across numerous nodes highlights the significance of efficient parallel computing, particularly in the realm of Message Passing Interface (MPI) integration. The challenging parallel programming task of generating MPI-based parallel programs has remained unexplored. This study first investigates the performance of state-of-the-art language models in generating MPI-based parallel programs. Findings reveal that widely used models such as GPT-3.5 and PolyCoder (specialized multi-lingual code models) exhibit notable performance degradation, when generating MPI-based programs compared to general-purpose programs. In contrast, domain-specific models such as MonoCoder, which are pretrained on MPI-related programming languages of C and C++, outperform larger models. Subsequently, we introduce a dedicated downstream task of MPI-based program generation by fine-tuning MonoCoder on HPCorpusMPI. We call the resulting model as MPIrigen. We propose an innovative preprocessing for completion only after observing the whole code, thus enabling better completion with a wider context. Comparative analysis against GPT-3.5 zero-shot performance, using a novel HPC-oriented evaluation method, demonstrates that MPIrigen excels in generating accurate MPI functions up to 0.8 accuracy in location and function predictions, and with more than 0.9 accuracy for argument predictions. The success of this tailored solution underscores the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning in optimizing language models for parallel computing code generation, paving the way for a new generation of automatic parallelization tools. The sources of this work are available at our GitHub MPIrigen repository: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MPI-rigen
URLs: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MPI-rigen
Authors: Ailin Deng, Zhirui Chen, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are susceptible to object hallucinations, an issue in which their generated text contains non-existent objects, greatly limiting their reliability and practicality. Current approaches often rely on the model's token likelihoods or other internal information, instruction tuning on additional datasets, or incorporating complex external tools. We first perform empirical analysis on sentence-level LVLM hallucination, finding that CLIP similarity to the image acts as a stronger and more robust indicator of hallucination compared to token likelihoods. Motivated by this, we introduce our CLIP-Guided Decoding (CGD) approach, a straightforward but effective training-free approach to reduce object hallucination at decoding time. CGD uses CLIP to guide the model's decoding process by enhancing visual grounding of generated text with the image. Experiments demonstrate that CGD effectively mitigates object hallucination across multiple LVLM families while preserving the utility of text generation. Codes are available at https://github.com/d-ailin/CLIP-Guided-Decoding.
Authors: Zeqian Ju, Yuancheng Wang, Kai Shen, Xu Tan, Detai Xin, Dongchao Yang, Yanqing Liu, Yichong Leng, Kaitao Song, Siliang Tang, Zhizheng Wu, Tao Qin, Xiang-Yang Li, Wei Ye, Shikun Zhang, Jiang Bian, Lei He, Jinyu Li, Sheng Zhao
Abstract: While recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved significant progress, they still fall short in speech quality, similarity, and prosody. Considering speech intricately encompasses various attributes (e.g., content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details) that pose significant challenges for generation, a natural idea is to factorize speech into individual subspaces representing different attributes and generate them individually. Motivated by it, we propose NaturalSpeech 3, a TTS system with novel factorized diffusion models to generate natural speech in a zero-shot way. Specifically, 1) we design a neural codec with factorized vector quantization (FVQ) to disentangle speech waveform into subspaces of content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details; 2) we propose a factorized diffusion model to generate attributes in each subspace following its corresponding prompt. With this factorization design, NaturalSpeech 3 can effectively and efficiently model intricate speech with disentangled subspaces in a divide-and-conquer way. Experiments show that NaturalSpeech 3 outperforms the state-of-the-art TTS systems on quality, similarity, prosody, and intelligibility, and achieves on-par quality with human recordings. Furthermore, we achieve better performance by scaling to 1B parameters and 200K hours of training data.
Authors: Nathaniel Li, Alexander Pan, Anjali Gopal, Summer Yue, Daniel Berrios, Alice Gatti, Justin D. Li, Ann-Kathrin Dombrowski, Shashwat Goel, Long Phan, Gabriel Mukobi, Nathan Helm-Burger, Rassin Lababidi, Lennart Justen, Andrew B. Liu, Michael Chen, Isabelle Barrass, Oliver Zhang, Xiaoyuan Zhu, Rishub Tamirisa, Bhrugu Bharathi, Adam Khoja, Zhenqi Zhao, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Cort B. Breuer, Sam Marks, Oam Patel, Andy Zou, Mantas Mazeika, Zifan Wang, Palash Oswal, Weiran Liu, Adam A. Hunt, Justin Tienken-Harder, Kevin Y. Shih, Kemper Talley, John Guan, Russell Kaplan, Ian Steneker, David Campbell, Brad Jokubaitis, Alex Levinson, Jean Wang, William Qian, Kallol Krishna Karmakar, Steven Basart, Stephen Fitz, Mindy Levine, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Uday Tupakula, Vijay Varadharajan, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Jimmy Ba, Kevin M. Esvelt, Alexandr Wang, Dan Hendrycks
Abstract: The White House Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence highlights the risks of large language models (LLMs) empowering malicious actors in developing biological, cyber, and chemical weapons. To measure these risks of malicious use, government institutions and major AI labs are developing evaluations for hazardous capabilities in LLMs. However, current evaluations are private, preventing further research into mitigating risk. Furthermore, they focus on only a few, highly specific pathways for malicious use. To fill these gaps, we publicly release the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy (WMDP) benchmark, a dataset of 4,157 multiple-choice questions that serve as a proxy measurement of hazardous knowledge in biosecurity, cybersecurity, and chemical security. WMDP was developed by a consortium of academics and technical consultants, and was stringently filtered to eliminate sensitive information prior to public release. WMDP serves two roles: first, as an evaluation for hazardous knowledge in LLMs, and second, as a benchmark for unlearning methods to remove such hazardous knowledge. To guide progress on unlearning, we develop CUT, a state-of-the-art unlearning method based on controlling model representations. CUT reduces model performance on WMDP while maintaining general capabilities in areas such as biology and computer science, suggesting that unlearning may be a concrete path towards reducing malicious use from LLMs. We release our benchmark and code publicly at https://wmdp.ai
URLs: https://wmdp.ai
Authors: Weichao Mao, Haoran Qiu, Chen Wang, Hubertus Franke, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Tamer Ba\c{s}ar
Abstract: No-regret learning has a long history of being closely connected to game theory. Recent works have devised uncoupled no-regret learning dynamics that, when adopted by all the players in normal-form games, converge to various equilibrium solutions at a near-optimal rate of $\widetilde{O}(T^{-1})$, a significant improvement over the $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate of classic no-regret learners. However, analogous convergence results are scarce in Markov games, a more generic setting that lays the foundation for multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this work, we close this gap by showing that the optimistic-follow-the-regularized-leader (OFTRL) algorithm, together with appropriate value update procedures, can find $\widetilde{O}(T^{-1})$-approximate (coarse) correlated equilibria in full-information general-sum Markov games within $T$ iterations. Numerical results are also included to corroborate our theoretical findings.
Authors: Feng Cheng, Ziyang Wang, Yi-Lin Sung, Yan-Bo Lin, Mohit Bansal, Gedas Bertasius
Abstract: We present a parameter-efficient method for continual video question-answering (VidQA) learning. Our method, named DAM, uses the proposed Dynamic Adapter Merging to (i) mitigate catastrophic forgetting, (ii) enable efficient adaptation to continually arriving datasets, (iii) handle inputs from unknown datasets during inference, and (iv) enable knowledge sharing across similar dataset domains. Given a set of continually streaming VidQA datasets, we sequentially train dataset-specific adapters for each dataset while freezing the parameters of a large pretrained video-language backbone. During inference, given a video-question sample from an unknown domain, our method first uses the proposed non-parametric router function to compute a probability for each adapter, reflecting how relevant that adapter is to the current video-question input instance. Subsequently, the proposed dynamic adapter merging scheme aggregates all the adapter weights into a new adapter instance tailored for that particular test sample to compute the final VidQA prediction, mitigating the impact of inaccurate router predictions and facilitating knowledge sharing across domains. Our DAM model outperforms prior state-of-the-art continual learning approaches by 9.1% while exhibiting 1.9% less forgetting on 6 VidQA datasets spanning various domains. We further extend DAM to continual image classification and image QA and outperform prior methods by a large margin. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/klauscc/DAM
Authors: Ashish Sinha, Ghassan Hamarneh
Abstract: Anatomical trees play a central role in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. However, accurately representing anatomical trees is challenging due to their varying and complex topology and geometry. Traditional methods for representing tree structures, captured using medical imaging, while invaluable for visualizing vascular and bronchial networks, exhibit drawbacks in terms of limited resolution, flexibility, and efficiency. Recently, implicit neural representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful tool for representing shapes accurately and efficiently. We propose a novel approach for representing anatomical trees using INR, while also capturing the distribution of a set of trees via denoising diffusion in the space of INRs. We accurately capture the intricate geometries and topologies of anatomical trees at any desired resolution. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we demonstrate high-fidelity tree reconstruction with arbitrary resolution yet compact storage, and versatility across anatomical sites and tree complexities.
Authors: Laura Fern\'andez-Becerra, Miguel \'Angel Gonz\'alez-Santamarta, \'Angel Manuel Guerrero-Higueras, Francisco Javier Rodr\'iguez-Lera, Vicente Matell\'an Olivera
Abstract: The deployment of autonomous agents in environments involving human interaction has increasingly raised security concerns. Consequently, understanding the circumstances behind an event becomes critical, requiring the development of capabilities to justify their behaviors to non-expert users. Such explanations are essential in enhancing trustworthiness and safety, acting as a preventive measure against failures, errors, and misunderstandings. Additionally, they contribute to improving communication, bridging the gap between the agent and the user, thereby improving the effectiveness of their interactions. This work presents an accountability and explainability architecture implemented for ROS-based mobile robots. The proposed solution consists of two main components. Firstly, a black box-like element to provide accountability, featuring anti-tampering properties achieved through blockchain technology. Secondly, a component in charge of generating natural language explanations by harnessing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) over the data contained within the previously mentioned black box. The study evaluates the performance of our solution in three different scenarios, each involving autonomous agent navigation functionalities. This evaluation includes a thorough examination of accountability and explainability metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in using accountable data from robot actions to obtain coherent, accurate and understandable explanations, even when facing challenges inherent in the use of autonomous agents in real-world scenarios.
Authors: Dong Won Lee, Hae Won Park, Yoon Kim, Cynthia Breazeal, Louis-Philippe Morency
Abstract: We describe an approach for aligning an LLM-based dialogue agent based on global (i.e., dialogue-level) rewards, while also taking into account naturally-occurring multimodal signals. At a high level, our approach (dubbed GELI) learns a local, turn-level reward model by decomposing the human-provided Global Explicit (GE) session-level reward, using Local Implicit (LI) multimodal reward signals to crossmodally shape the reward decomposition step. This decomposed reward model is then used as part of the standard RHLF pipeline improve an LLM-based dialog agent. We run quantitative and qualitative human studies to evaluate the performance of our GELI approach, and find that it shows consistent improvements across various conversational metrics compared to baseline methods.
Authors: Andrea Venturi, Dario Stabili, Mirco Marchetti
Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have become increasingly popular for supporting Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). Nevertheless, extensive research has shown their vulnerability to adversarial attacks, which involve subtle perturbations to the inputs of the models aimed at compromising their performance. Recent proposals have effectively leveraged Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to produce predictions based also on the structural patterns exhibited by intrusions to enhance the detection robustness. However, the adoption of GNN-based NIDS introduces new types of risks. In this paper, we propose the first formalization of adversarial attacks specifically tailored for GNN in network intrusion detection. Moreover, we outline and model the problem space constraints that attackers need to consider to carry out feasible structural attacks in real-world scenarios. As a final contribution, we conduct an extensive experimental campaign in which we launch the proposed attacks against state-of-the-art GNN-based NIDS. Our findings demonstrate the increased robustness of the models against classical feature-based adversarial attacks, while highlighting their susceptibility to structure-based attacks.
Authors: Yifei Wang, Qi Zhang, Yaoyu Guo, Yisen Wang
Abstract: Deep representations have shown promising performance when transferred to downstream tasks in a black-box manner. Yet, their inherent lack of interpretability remains a significant challenge, as these features are often opaque to human understanding. In this paper, we propose Non-negative Contrastive Learning (NCL), a renaissance of Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) aimed at deriving interpretable features. The power of NCL lies in its enforcement of non-negativity constraints on features, reminiscent of NMF's capability to extract features that align closely with sample clusters. NCL not only aligns mathematically well with an NMF objective but also preserves NMF's interpretability attributes, resulting in a more sparse and disentangled representation compared to standard contrastive learning (CL). Theoretically, we establish guarantees on the identifiability and downstream generalization of NCL. Empirically, we show that these advantages enable NCL to outperform CL significantly on feature disentanglement, feature selection, as well as downstream classification tasks. At last, we show that NCL can be easily extended to other learning scenarios and benefit supervised learning as well. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/non_neg.
Authors: Wannaphong Phatthiyaphaibun, Surapon Nonesung, Patomporn Payoungkhamdee, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Jitkapat Sawatphol, Chompakorn Chaksangchaichot, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
Abstract: This technical report describes the development of WangchanLion, an instruction fine-tuned model focusing on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in the Thai language. Our model is based on SEA-LION and a collection of instruction following datasets. To promote open research and reproducibility, we publicly release all training data, code, and the final model weights under the Apache-2 license. To assess the contextual understanding capability, we conducted extensive experimental studies using two Thai MRC datasets, XQuAD and Iapp_wiki_qa_squad. Experimental results demonstrate the model's ability to comprehend the context and produce an answer faithful to the reference one in 0-shot and 1-shot settings. In addition, our evaluation goes beyond the traditional MRC. We propose a new evaluation scheme assessing the answer's correctness, helpfulness, conciseness, and contextuality. Our code is available publicly at https://github.com/vistec-AI/WangchanLion.
Authors: Titouan Renard, Andreas Schlaginhaufen, Tingting Ni, Maryam Kamgarpour
Abstract: Given a dataset of expert demonstrations, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward for which the expert is optimal. This work proposes a model-free algorithm to solve entropy-regularized IRL problem. In particular, we employ a stochastic gradient descent update for the reward and a stochastic soft policy iteration update for the policy. Assuming access to a generative model, we prove that our algorithm is guaranteed to recover a reward for which the expert is $\varepsilon$-optimal using $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ samples of the Markov decision process (MDP). Furthermore, with $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon^{4})$ samples we prove that the optimal policy corresponding to the recovered reward is $\varepsilon$-close to the expert policy in total variation distance.
Authors: Yang Zhong, Mohamed Elaraby, Diane Litman, Ahmed Ashraf Butt, Muhsin Menekse
Abstract: This paper introduces ReflectSumm, a novel summarization dataset specifically designed for summarizing students' reflective writing. The goal of ReflectSumm is to facilitate developing and evaluating novel summarization techniques tailored to real-world scenarios with little training data, %practical tasks with potential implications in the opinion summarization domain in general and the educational domain in particular. The dataset encompasses a diverse range of summarization tasks and includes comprehensive metadata, enabling the exploration of various research questions and supporting different applications. To showcase its utility, we conducted extensive evaluations using multiple state-of-the-art baselines. The results provide benchmarks for facilitating further research in this area.
Authors: Taishi Nakamura, Mayank Mishra, Simone Tedeschi, Yekun Chai, Jason T Stillerman, Felix Friedrich, Prateek Yadav, Tanmay Laud, Vu Minh Chien, Terry Yue Zhuo, Diganta Misra, Ben Bogin, Xuan-Son Vu, Marzena Karpinska, Arnav Varma Dantuluri, Wojciech Kusa, Tommaso Furlanello, Rio Yokota, Niklas Muennighoff, Suhas Pai, Tosin Adewumi, Veronika Laippala, Xiaozhe Yao, Adalberto Junior, Alpay Ariyak, Aleksandr Drozd, Jordan Clive, Kshitij Gupta, Liangyu Chen, Qi Sun, Ken Tsui, Noah Persaud, Nour Fahmy, Tianlong Chen, Mohit Bansal, Nicolo Monti, Tai Dang, Ziyang Luo, Tien-Tung Bui, Roberto Navigli, Virendra Mehta, Matthew Blumberg, Victor May, Huu Nguyen, Sampo Pyysalo
Abstract: Pretrained language models underpin several AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as BLOOM and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. However, such existing models face challenges: limited multilingual capabilities, continual pretraining causing catastrophic forgetting, whereas pretraining from scratch is computationally expensive, and compliance with AI safety and development laws. This paper presents Aurora-M, a 15B parameter multilingual open-source model trained on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. Continually pretrained from StarCoderPlus on 435 billion additional tokens, Aurora-M surpasses 2 trillion tokens in total training token count. It is the first open-source multilingual model fine-tuned on human-reviewed safety instructions, thus aligning its development not only with conventional red-teaming considerations, but also with the specific concerns articulated in the Biden-Harris Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Aurora-M is rigorously evaluated across various tasks and languages, demonstrating robustness against catastrophic forgetting and outperforming alternatives in multilingual settings, particularly in safety evaluations. To promote responsible open-source LLM development, Aurora-M and its variants are released at https://huggingface.co/collections/aurora-m/aurora-m-models-65fdfdff62471e09812f5407 .
URLs: https://huggingface.co/collections/aurora-m/aurora-m-models-65fdfdff62471e09812f5407
Authors: Shanshan Feng, Haoming Lyu, Caishun Chen, Yew-Soon Ong
Abstract: Next Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation provides valuable suggestions for users to explore their surrounding environment. Existing studies rely on building recommendation models from large-scale users' check-in data, which is task-specific and needs extensive computational resources. Recently, the pretrained large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advancements in various NLP tasks and have also been investigated for recommendation scenarios. However, the generalization abilities of LLMs still are unexplored to address the next POI recommendations, where users' geographical movement patterns should be extracted. Although there are studies that leverage LLMs for next-item recommendations, they fail to consider the geographical influence and sequential transitions. Hence, they cannot effectively solve the next POI recommendation task. To this end, we design novel prompting strategies and conduct empirical studies to assess the capability of LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, for predicting a user's next check-in. Specifically, we consider several essential factors in human movement behaviors, including user geographical preference, spatial distance, and sequential transitions, and formulate the recommendation task as a ranking problem. Through extensive experiments on two widely used real-world datasets, we derive several key findings. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that LLMs have promising zero-shot recommendation abilities and can provide accurate and reasonable predictions. We also reveal that LLMs cannot accurately comprehend geographical context information and are sensitive to the order of presentation of candidate POIs, which shows the limitations of LLMs and necessitates further research on robust human mobility reasoning mechanisms.
Authors: Pengxiao Han, Changkun Ye, Jieming Zhou, Jing Zhang, Jie Hong, Xuesong Li
Abstract: Long-tailed imbalance distribution is a common issue in practical computer vision applications. Previous works proposed methods to address this problem, which can be categorized into several classes: re-sampling, re-weighting, transfer learning, and feature augmentation. In recent years, diffusion models have shown an impressive generation ability in many sub-problems of deep computer vision. However, its powerful generation has not been explored in long-tailed problems. We propose a new approach, the Latent-based Diffusion Model for Long-tailed Recognition (LDMLR), as a feature augmentation method to tackle the issue. First, we encode the imbalanced dataset into features using the baseline model. Then, we train a Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) using these encoded features to generate pseudo-features. Finally, we train the classifier using the encoded and pseudo-features from the previous two steps. The model's accuracy shows an improvement on the CIFAR-LT and ImageNet-LT datasets by using the proposed method.
Authors: Yifei Wang, Wenhan Ma, Stefanie Jegelka, Yisen Wang
Abstract: Relying only on unlabeled data, Self-supervised learning (SSL) can learn rich features in an economical and scalable way. As the drive-horse for building foundation models, SSL has received a lot of attention recently with wide applications, which also raises security concerns where backdoor attack is a major type of threat: if the released dataset is maliciously poisoned, backdoored SSL models can behave badly when triggers are injected to test samples. The goal of this work is to investigate this potential risk. We notice that existing backdoors all require a considerable amount of \emph{labeled} data that may not be available for SSL. To circumvent this limitation, we explore a more restrictive setting called no-label backdoors, where we only have access to the unlabeled data alone, where the key challenge is how to select the proper poison set without using label information. We propose two strategies for poison selection: clustering-based selection using pseudolabels, and contrastive selection derived from the mutual information principle. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that both no-label backdoors are effective on many SSL methods and outperform random poisoning by a large margin. Code will be available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/nlb.
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.
Authors: Hui Bai, Ran Cheng
Abstract: Hyperparameter optimization plays a key role in the machine learning domain. Its significance is especially pronounced in reinforcement learning (RL), where agents continuously interact with and adapt to their environments, requiring dynamic adjustments in their learning trajectories. To cater to this dynamicity, the Population-Based Training (PBT) was introduced, leveraging the collective intelligence of a population of agents learning simultaneously. However, PBT tends to favor high-performing agents, potentially neglecting the explorative potential of agents on the brink of significant advancements. To mitigate the limitations of PBT, we present the Generalized Population-Based Training (GPBT), a refined framework designed for enhanced granularity and flexibility in hyperparameter adaptation. Complementing GPBT, we further introduce Pairwise Learning (PL). Instead of merely focusing on elite agents, PL employs a comprehensive pairwise strategy to identify performance differentials and provide holistic guidance to underperforming agents. By integrating the capabilities of GPBT and PL, our approach significantly improves upon traditional PBT in terms of adaptability and computational efficiency. Rigorous empirical evaluations across a range of RL benchmarks confirm that our approach consistently outperforms not only the conventional PBT but also its Bayesian-optimized variant.
Authors: Xuelong Li, Hongjun An, Guangying Li, Xing Wang, Guanghua Cheng, Zhe Sun
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce StreakNet-Arch, a novel signal processing architecture designed for Underwater Carrier LiDAR-Radar (UCLR) imaging systems, to address the limitations in scatter suppression and real-time imaging. StreakNet-Arch formulates the signal processing as a real-time, end-to-end binary classification task, enabling real-time image acquisition. To achieve this, we leverage Self-Attention networks and propose a novel Double Branch Cross Attention (DBC-Attention) mechanism that surpasses the performance of traditional methods. Furthermore, we present a method for embedding streak-tube camera images into attention networks, effectively acting as a learned bandpass filter. To facilitate further research, we contribute a publicly available streak-tube camera image dataset. The dataset contains 2,695,168 real-world underwater 3D point cloud data. These advancements significantly improve UCLR capabilities, enhancing its performance and applicability in underwater imaging tasks. The source code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/BestAnHongjun/StreakNet .
Authors: Zelin Wu, Gan Song, Christopher Li, Pat Rondon, Zhong Meng, Xavier Velez, Weiran Wang, Diamantino Caseiro, Golan Pundak, Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Angad Chandorkar, Rohit Prabhavalkar
Abstract: Contextual biasing enables speech recognizers to transcribe important phrases in the speaker's context, such as contact names, even if they are rare in, or absent from, the training data. Attention-based biasing is a leading approach which allows for full end-to-end cotraining of the recognizer and biasing system and requires no separate inference-time components. Such biasers typically consist of a context encoder; followed by a context filter which narrows down the context to apply, improving per-step inference time; and, finally, context application via cross attention. Though much work has gone into optimizing per-frame performance, the context encoder is at least as important: recognition cannot begin before context encoding ends. Here, we show the lightweight phrase selection pass can be moved before context encoding, resulting in a speedup of up to 16.1 times and enabling biasing to scale to 20K phrases with a maximum pre-decoding delay under 33ms. With the addition of phrase- and wordpiece-level cross-entropy losses, our technique also achieves up to a 37.5% relative WER reduction over the baseline without the losses and lightweight phrase selection pass.
Authors: Yu Li, Zhihua Wei, Han Jiang, Chuanyang Gong
Abstract: Despite the remarkable achievements of language models (LMs) across a broad spectrum of tasks, their propensity for generating toxic outputs remains a prevalent concern. Current solutions involving fine-tuning or auxiliary models usually require extensive memory and computational resources, rendering them less practical for deployment in large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose DeStein, a novel method that detoxififies LMs by altering their internal representations in the activation space with lower resource and time cost. Specifically, we leverage self-induced steering pairs to identify detoxification vectors through arithmetic operations in the activation space. During inference, detoxification is achieved by blending the detoxification vectors with the original representations. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on popular detoxification metrics, while also maintaining satisfactory generation quality and diversity. Furthermore, we extend our method to multiple LLMs, demonstrating its practicality and scalability. We open-source our method at https://github.com/LizLizLi/DeStein . Warning: Some example model outputs contain highly offensive or disturbing text.
Authors: Nadav Joseph Outmezguine, Noam Levi
Abstract: With the success of deep neural networks (NNs) in a variety of domains, the computational and storage requirements for training and deploying large NNs have become a bottleneck for further improvements. Sparsification has consequently emerged as a leading approach to tackle these issues. In this work, we consider a simple yet effective approach to sparsification, based on the Bridge, or $L_p$ regularization during training. We introduce a novel weight decay scheme, which generalizes the standard $L_2$ weight decay to any $p$ norm. We show that this scheme is compatible with adaptive optimizers, and avoids the gradient divergence associated with $0
Authors: Jiangbo Yu
Abstract: Unleashing the synergies of rapidly evolving mobility technologies in a multi-stakeholder landscape presents unique challenges and opportunities for addressing urban transportation problems. This paper introduces a novel synthetic participatory method, critically leveraging large language models (LLMs) to create digital avatars representing diverse stakeholders to plan shared automated electric mobility systems (SAEMS). These calibratable agents collaboratively identify objectives, envision and evaluate SAEMS alternatives, and strategize implementation under risks and constraints. The results of a Montreal case study indicate that a structured and parameterized workflow provides outputs with high controllability and comprehensiveness on an SAEMS plan than generated using a single LLM-enabled expert agent. Consequently, the approach provides a promising avenue for cost-efficiently improving the inclusivity and interpretability of multi-objective transportation planning, suggesting a paradigm shift in how we envision and strategize for sustainable and equitable transportation systems.
Authors: Alaa Saleh, Praveen Kumar Donta, Roberto Morabito, Naser Hossein Motlagh, Lauri Lov\'en
Abstract: This article introduces Follow-Me AI, a concept designed to enhance user interactions with smart environments, optimize energy use, and provide better control over data captured by these environments. Through AI agents that accompany users, Follow-Me AI negotiates data management based on user consent, aligns environmental controls as well as user communication and computes resources available in the environment with user preferences, and predicts user behavior to proactively adjust the smart environment. The manuscript illustrates this concept with a detailed example of Follow-Me AI in a smart campus setting, detailing the interactions with the building's management system for optimal comfort and efficiency. Finally, this article looks into the challenges and opportunities related to Follow-Me AI.
Authors: Mustafa Doga Dogan, Eric J. Gonzalez, Andrea Colaco, Karan Ahuja, Ruofei Du, Johnny Lee, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, David Kim
Abstract: Seamless integration of physical objects as interactive digital entities remains a challenge for spatial computing. This paper introduces Augmented Object Intelligence (AOI), a novel XR interaction paradigm designed to blur the lines between digital and physical by equipping real-world objects with the ability to interact as if they were digital, where every object has the potential to serve as a portal to vast digital functionalities. Our approach utilizes object segmentation and classification, combined with the power of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), to facilitate these interactions. We implement the AOI concept in the form of XR-Objects, an open-source prototype system that provides a platform for users to engage with their physical environment in rich and contextually relevant ways. This system enables analog objects to not only convey information but also to initiate digital actions, such as querying for details or executing tasks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we define the AOI concept and detail its advantages over traditional AI assistants, (2) detail the XR-Objects system's open-source design and implementation, and (3) show its versatility through a variety of use cases and a user study.
Authors: Ukesh Thapa, Bipun Man Pati, Samit Thapa, Dhiraj Pyakurel, Anup Shrestha
Abstract: The rapid advancement of machine learning techniques has led to their widespread application in various domains including water resources. However, snowmelt modeling remains an area that has not been extensively explored. In this study, we propose a state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning sequential model, leveraging the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), for snowmelt-driven discharge modeling in the Himalayan basin of the Hindu Kush Himalayan Region. To evaluate the performance of our proposed model, we conducted a comparative analysis with other popular models including Support Vector Regression (SVR), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Transformer. Furthermore, Nested cross-validation (CV) is used with five outer folds and three inner folds, and hyper-parameter tuning is performed on the inner folds. To evaluate the performance of the model mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), R square ($R^{2}$), Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE), and Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) are computed for each outer fold. The average metrics revealed that TCN outperformed the other models, with an average MAE of 0.011, RMSE of 0.023, $R^{2}$ of 0.991, KGE of 0.992, and NSE of 0.991. The findings of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of the deep learning model as compared to traditional machine learning approaches for snowmelt-driven streamflow forecasting. Moreover, the superior performance of TCN highlights its potential as a promising deep learning model for similar hydrological applications.
Authors: Tetsuro Morimura, Mitsuki Sakamoto, Yuu Jinnai, Kenshi Abe, Kaito Ariu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning language models with human preferences. While the significance of dataset quality is generally recognized, explicit investigations into its impact within the RLHF framework, to our knowledge, have been limited. This paper addresses the issue of text quality within the preference dataset by focusing on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), an increasingly adopted reward-model-free RLHF method. We confirm that text quality significantly influences the performance of models optimized with DPO more than those optimized with reward-model-based RLHF. Building on this new insight, we propose an extension of DPO, termed filtered direct preference optimization (fDPO). fDPO uses a trained reward model to monitor the quality of texts within the preference dataset during DPO training. Samples of lower quality are discarded based on comparisons with texts generated by the model being optimized, resulting in a more accurate dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that fDPO enhances the final model performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/filtered-dpo.
Authors: Zuheng Kang, Yayun He, Botao Zhao, Xiaoyang Qu, Junqing Peng, Jing Xiao, Jianzong Wang
Abstract: With recent advances in speech synthesis including text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) systems enabling the generation of ultra-realistic audio deepfakes, there is growing concern about their potential misuse. However, most deepfake (DF) detection methods rely solely on the fuzzy knowledge learned by a single model, resulting in performance bottlenecks and transparency issues. Inspired by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), we propose a retrieval-augmented detection (RAD) framework that augments test samples with similar retrieved samples for enhanced detection. We also extend the multi-fusion attentive classifier to integrate it with our proposed RAD framework. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of the proposed RAD framework over baseline methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on the ASVspoof 2021 DF set and competitive results on the 2019 and 2021 LA sets. Further sample analysis indicates that the retriever consistently retrieves samples mostly from the same speaker with acoustic characteristics highly consistent with the query audio, thereby improving detection performance.
Authors: Marah Abdin, Sam Ade Jacobs, Ammar Ahmad Awan, Jyoti Aneja, Ahmed Awadallah, Hany Awadalla, Nguyen Bach, Amit Bahree, Arash Bakhtiari, Harkirat Behl, Alon Benhaim, Misha Bilenko, Johan Bjorck, S\'ebastien Bubeck, Martin Cai, Caio C\'esar Teodoro Mendes, Weizhu Chen, Vishrav Chaudhary, Parul Chopra, Allie Del Giorno, Gustavo de Rosa, Matthew Dixon, Ronen Eldan, Dan Iter, Amit Garg, Abhishek Goswami, Suriya Gunasekar, Emman Haider, Junheng Hao, Russell J. Hewett, Jamie Huynh, Mojan Javaheripi, Xin Jin, Piero Kauffmann, Nikos Karampatziakis, Dongwoo Kim, Mahoud Khademi, Lev Kurilenko, James R. Lee, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Chen Liang, Weishung Liu, Eric Lin, Zeqi Lin, Piyush Madan, Arindam Mitra, Hardik Modi, Anh Nguyen, Brandon Norick, Barun Patra, Daniel Perez-Becker, Thomas Portet, Reid Pryzant, Heyang Qin, Marko Radmilac, Corby Rosset, Sambudha Roy, Olatunji Ruwase, Olli Saarikivi, Amin Saied, Adil Salim, Michael Santacroce, Shital Shah, Ning Shang, Hiteshi Sharma, Xia Song, Masahiro Tanaka, Xin Wang, Rachel Ward, Guanhua Wang, Philipp Witte, Michael Wyatt, Can Xu, Jiahang Xu, Sonali Yadav, Fan Yang, Ziyi Yang, Donghan Yu, Chengruidong Zhang, Cyril Zhang, Jianwen Zhang, Li Lyna Zhang, Yi Zhang, Yue Zhang, Yunan Zhang, Xiren Zhou
Abstract: We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training, a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide some initial parameter-scaling results with a 7B and 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small and phi-3-medium, both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75% and 78% on MMLU, and 8.7 and 8.9 on MT-bench).