Authors: Sridhar Mahadevan
Abstract: Alan Turing proposed in 1950 a framework called an imitation game to decide if a machine could think. Using mathematics developed largely after Turing -- category theory -- we analyze a broader class of universal imitation games (UIGs), which includes static, dynamic, and evolutionary games. In static games, the participants are in a steady state. In dynamic UIGs, "learner" participants are trying to imitate "teacher" participants over the long run. In evolutionary UIGs, the participants are competing against each other in an evolutionary game, and participants can go extinct and be replaced by others with higher fitness. We use the framework of category theory -- in particular, two influential results by Yoneda -- to characterize each type of imitation game. Universal properties in categories are defined by initial and final objects. We characterize dynamic UIGs where participants are learning by inductive inference as initial algebras over well-founded sets, and contrast them with participants learning by conductive inference over the final coalgebra of non-well-founded sets. We briefly discuss the extension of our categorical framework for UIGs to imitation games on quantum computers.
Authors: Sujit Khanna, Shishir Subedi
Abstract: In recent times Large Language Models have exhibited tremendous capabilities, especially in the areas of mathematics, code generation and general-purpose reasoning. However for specialized domains especially in applications that require parsing and analyzing large chunks of numeric or tabular data even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models struggle. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to solving domain-specific tabular data analysis tasks by presenting a unique RAG workflow that mitigates the scalability issues of existing tabular LLM solutions. Specifically, we present Tabular Embedding Model (TEM), a novel approach to fine-tune embedding models for tabular Retrieval-Augmentation Generation (RAG) applications. Embedding models form a crucial component in the RAG workflow and even current SOTA embedding models struggle as they are predominantly trained on textual datasets and thus underperform in scenarios involving complex tabular data. The evaluation results showcase that our approach not only outperforms current SOTA embedding models in this domain but also does so with a notably smaller and more efficient model structure.
Authors: Shumaila Javaid, Nasir Saeed, Bin He
Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a transformative technology across diverse sectors, offering adaptable solutions to complex challenges in both military and civilian domains. Their expanding capabilities present a platform for further advancement by integrating cutting-edge computational tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. These advancements have significantly impacted various facets of human life, fostering an era of unparalleled efficiency and convenience. Large Language Models (LLMs), a key component of AI, exhibit remarkable learning and adaptation capabilities within deployed environments, demonstrating an evolving form of intelligence with the potential to approach human-level proficiency. This work explores the significant potential of integrating UAVs and LLMs to propel the development of autonomous systems. We comprehensively review LLM architectures, evaluating their suitability for UAV integration. Additionally, we summarize the state-of-the-art LLM-based UAV architectures and identify novel opportunities for LLM embedding within UAV frameworks. Notably, we focus on leveraging LLMs to refine data analysis and decision-making processes, specifically for enhanced spectral sensing and sharing in UAV applications. Furthermore, we investigate how LLM integration expands the scope of existing UAV applications, enabling autonomous data processing, improved decision-making, and faster response times in emergency scenarios like disaster response and network restoration. Finally, we highlight crucial areas for future research that are critical for facilitating the effective integration of LLMs and UAVs.
Authors: Tian Xie, Zhiqun Zuo, Mohammad Mahdi Khalili, Xueru Zhang
Abstract: Machine learning systems have been widely used to make decisions about individuals who may best respond and behave strategically to receive favorable outcomes, e.g., they may genuinely improve the true labels or manipulate observable features directly to game the system without changing labels. Although both behaviors have been studied (often as two separate problems) in the literature, most works assume individuals can (i) perfectly foresee the outcomes of their behaviors when they best respond; (ii) change their features arbitrarily as long as it is affordable, and the costs they need to pay are deterministic functions of feature changes. In this paper, we consider a different setting and focus on imitative strategic behaviors with unforeseeable outcomes, i.e., individuals manipulate/improve by imitating the features of those with positive labels, but the induced feature changes are unforeseeable. We first propose a Stackelberg game to model the interplay between individuals and the decision-maker, under which we examine how the decision-maker's ability to anticipate individual behavior affects its objective function and the individual's best response. We show that the objective difference between the two can be decomposed into three interpretable terms, with each representing the decision-maker's preference for a certain behavior. By exploring the roles of each term, we further illustrate how a decision-maker with adjusted preferences can simultaneously disincentivize manipulation, incentivize improvement, and promote fairness.
Authors: Tian Xie, Xueru Zhang
Abstract: This paper studies algorithmic decision-making in the presence of strategic individual behaviors, where an ML model is used to make decisions about human agents and the latter can adapt their behavior strategically to improve their future data. Existing results on strategic learning have largely focused on the linear setting where agents with linear labeling functions best respond to a (noisy) linear decision policy. Instead, this work focuses on general non-linear settings where agents respond to the decision policy with only "local information" of the policy. Moreover, we simultaneously consider the objectives of maximizing decision-maker welfare (model prediction accuracy), social welfare (agent improvement caused by strategic behaviors), and agent welfare (the extent that ML underestimates the agents). We first generalize the agent best response model in previous works to the non-linear setting, then reveal the compatibility of welfare objectives. We show the three welfare can attain the optimum simultaneously only under restrictive conditions which are challenging to achieve in non-linear settings. The theoretical results imply that existing works solely maximizing the welfare of a subset of parties inevitably diminish the welfare of the others. We thus claim the necessity of balancing the welfare of each party in non-linear settings and propose an irreducible optimization algorithm suitable for general strategic learning. Experiments on synthetic and real data validate the proposed algorithm.
Authors: Qian Long, Fangwei Zhong, Mingdong Wu, Yizhou Wang, Song-Chun Zhu
Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) need to adaptively cope with dynamic environments, changing agent populations, and diverse tasks. However, most of the multi-agent systems cannot easily handle them, due to the complexity of the state and task space. The social impact theory regards the complex influencing factors as forces acting on an agent, emanating from the environment, other agents, and the agent's intrinsic motivation, referring to the social force. Inspired by this concept, we propose a novel gradient-based state representation for multi-agent reinforcement learning. To non-trivially model the social forces, we further introduce a data-driven method, where we employ denoising score matching to learn the social gradient fields (SocialGFs) from offline samples, e.g., the attractive or repulsive outcomes of each force. During interactions, the agents take actions based on the multi-dimensional gradients to maximize their own rewards. In practice, we integrate SocialGFs into the widely used multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms, e.g., MAPPO. The empirical results reveal that SocialGFs offer four advantages for multi-agent systems: 1) they can be learned without requiring online interaction, 2) they demonstrate transferability across diverse tasks, 3) they facilitate credit assignment in challenging reward settings, and 4) they are scalable with the increasing number of agents.
Authors: Herbert L. Roitblat
Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are signs for ideas, which we can paraphrase as thoughts and concepts. To understand a word is to know and be able to work with the underlying concepts for which it is an indicator. Understanding between a speaker and a listener occurs when the speaker casts his or her concepts into words and the listener recovers approximately those same concepts. Current models rely on the listener to construct any potential meaning. The diminution of behaviorism as a psychological paradigm and the rise of cognitivism provide examples of many experimental methods that can be used to determine whether and to what extent a machine might understand and to make suggestions about how that understanding might be instantiated.
Authors: Changliang Zhou, Xi Lin, Zhenkun Wang, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Qingfu Zhang
Abstract: The neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) approach has shown great potential for solving routing problems without the requirement of expert knowledge. However, existing constructive NCO methods cannot directly solve large-scale instances, which significantly limits their application prospects. To address these crucial shortcomings, this work proposes a novel Instance-Conditioned Adaptation Model (ICAM) for better large-scale generalization of neural combinatorial optimization. In particular, we design a powerful yet lightweight instance-conditioned adaptation module for the NCO model to generate better solutions for instances across different scales. In addition, we develop an efficient three-stage reinforcement learning-based training scheme that enables the model to learn cross-scale features without any labeled optimal solution. Experimental results show that our proposed method is capable of obtaining excellent results with a very fast inference time in solving Traveling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRPs) across different scales. To the best of our knowledge, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance among all RL-based constructive methods for TSP and CVRP with up to 1,000 nodes.
Authors: Frederic Renard, Cyprien Courtot, Alfredo Reichlin, Oliver Bent
Abstract: Designing protein nanomaterials of predefined shape and characteristics has the potential to dramatically impact the medical industry. Machine learning (ML) has proven successful in protein design, reducing the need for expensive wet lab experiment rounds. However, challenges persist in efficiently exploring the protein fitness landscapes to identify optimal protein designs. In response, we propose the use of AlphaZero to generate protein backbones, meeting shape and structural scoring requirements. We extend an existing Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) framework by incorporating a novel threshold-based reward and secondary objectives to improve design precision. This innovation considerably outperforms existing approaches, leading to protein backbones that better respect structural scores. The application of AlphaZero is novel in the context of protein backbone design and demonstrates promising performance. AlphaZero consistently surpasses baseline MCTS by more than 100% in top-down protein design tasks. Additionally, our application of AlphaZero with secondary objectives uncovers further promising outcomes, indicating the potential of model-based reinforcement learning (RL) in navigating the intricate and nuanced aspects of protein design
Authors: Simon Fl\"ugel, Martin Glauer, Till Mossakowski, Fabian Neuhaus
Abstract: Deep learning models are often unaware of the inherent constraints of the task they are applied to. However, many downstream tasks require logical consistency. For ontology classification tasks, such constraints include subsumption and disjointness relations between classes. In order to increase the consistency of deep learning models, we propose a semantic loss that combines label-based loss with terms penalising subsumption- or disjointness-violations. Our evaluation on the ChEBI ontology shows that the semantic loss is able to decrease the number of consistency violations by several orders of magnitude without decreasing the classification performance. In addition, we use the semantic loss for unsupervised learning. We show that this can further improve consistency on data from a distribution outside the scope of the supervised training.
Authors: Vladyslav Nechakhin, Jennifer D'Souza, Steffen Eger
Abstract: Structured science summaries or research contributions using properties or dimensions beyond traditional keywords enhances science findability. Current methods, such as those used by the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), involve manually curating properties to describe research papers' contributions in a structured manner, but this is labor-intensive and inconsistent between the domain expert human curators. We propose using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically suggest these properties. However, it's essential to assess the readiness of LLMs like GPT-3.5, Llama 2, and Mistral for this task before application. Our study performs a comprehensive comparative analysis between ORKG's manually curated properties and those generated by the aforementioned state-of-the-art LLMs. We evaluate LLM performance through four unique perspectives: semantic alignment and deviation with ORKG properties, fine-grained properties mapping accuracy, SciNCL embeddings-based cosine similarity, and expert surveys comparing manual annotations with LLM outputs. These evaluations occur within a multidisciplinary science setting. Overall, LLMs show potential as recommendation systems for structuring science, but further finetuning is recommended to improve their alignment with scientific tasks and mimicry of human expertise.
Authors: Lu\'is Esp\'irito Santo, Geraint Wiggins, Am\'ilcar Cardoso
Abstract: Formalizing creativity-related concepts has been a long-term goal of Computational Creativity. To the same end, we explore Formal Learning Theory in the context of creativity. We provide an introduction to the main concepts of this framework and a re-interpretation of terms commonly found in creativity discussions, proposing formal definitions for novelty and transformational creativity. This formalisation marks the beginning of a research branch we call Formal Creativity Theory, exploring how learning can be included as preparation for exploratory behaviour and how learning is a key part of transformational creative behaviour. By employing these definitions, we argue that, while novelty is neither necessary nor sufficient for transformational creativity in general, when using an inspiring set, rather than a sequence of experiences, an agent actually requires novelty for transformational creativity to occur.
Authors: Amirreza Esmaeili, Iman Saberi, Fatemeh H. Fard
Abstract: Recently, Large Langauge Models (LLMs) have gained a lot of attention in the Software Engineering (SE) community. LLMs or their variants pre-trained on code are used for many SE tasks. A main approach for adapting LLMs to the downstream task is to fine-tune the models. However, with having billions-parameters-LLMs, fine-tuning the models is not practical. An alternative approach is using Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT), in which the model parameters are frozen and only a few added parameters are trained. Though the LLMs are used for programming languages such as Python and Java widely, their capability for low-resource languages is limited. In this work, we empirically study PEFT methods, LoRA and Compacter, on CodeT5 and CodeLlama. We will assess their performance compared to fully fine-tuned models, whether they can be used for knowledge transfer from natural language models to code (using T5 and Llama models), and their ability to adapt the learned knowledge to an unseen language. For the unseen language, we aim to study R, as it has a wide community. The adaptability with less computational costs makes LLMs accessible in scenarios where heavy computational resources are not available. Moreover, studying R opens new opportunities for using LLMs for other languages. We anticipate our findings to showcase the capabilities of PEFT for code LLMs for R and reveal the improvement areas.
Authors: Junggu Choi, Tak Hur, Daniel K. Park, Na-Young Shin, Seung-Koo Lee, Hakbae Lee, Sanghoon Han
Abstract: Following the recent development of quantum machine learning techniques, the literature has reported several quantum machine learning algorithms for disease detection. This study explores the application of a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for classifying region-of-interest time-series data obtained from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging in patients with early-stage cognitive impairment based on the importance of cognitive decline for dementia or aging. Classical one-dimensional convolutional layers are used together with quantum convolutional neural networks in our hybrid algorithm. In the classical simulation, the proposed hybrid algorithms showed higher balanced accuracies than classical convolutional neural networks under the similar training conditions. Moreover, a total of nine brain regions (left precentral gyrus, right superior temporal gyrus, left rolandic operculum, right rolandic operculum, left parahippocampus, right hippocampus, left medial frontal gyrus, right cerebellum crus, and cerebellar vermis) among 116 brain regions were found to be relatively effective brain regions for the classification based on the model performances. The associations of the selected nine regions with cognitive decline, as found in previous studies, were additionally validated through seed-based functional connectivity analysis. We confirmed both the improvement of model performance with the quantum convolutional neural network and neuroscientific validities of brain regions from our hybrid quantum-classical model.
Authors: Xin Tang, Qian Chen, Rong Yu, Xiaohuan Li
Abstract: To meet the demands for ubiquitous communication and temporary edge computing in 6G networks, aerial mobile edge computing (MEC) networks have been envisioned as a new paradigm. However, dynamic user requests pose challenges for task assignment strategies. Most of the existing research assumes that the strategy is deployed on ground-based stations or UAVs, which will be ineffective in an environment lacking infrastructure and continuous energy supply. Moreover, the resource mutual exclusion problem of dynamic task assignment has not been effectively solved. Toward this end, we introduce the digital twin (DT) into the aerial MEC network to study the resource coalition cooperation approach with the generative model (GM), which provides a preliminary coalition structure for the coalition game. Specifically, we propose a novel network framework that is composed of an application plane, a physical plane, and a virtual plane. After that, the task assignment problem is simplified to convex optimization programming with linear constraints. And then, we also propose a resource coalition cooperation approach that is based on a transferable utility (TU) coalition game to obtain an approximate optimal solution. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach in terms of energy consumption and utilization of resources.
Authors: Ananya Singha, Bhavya Chopra, Anirudh Khatry, Sumit Gulwani, Austin Z. Henley, Vu Le, Chris Parnin, Mukul Singh, Gust Verbruggen
Abstract: Automated insight generation is a common tactic for helping knowledge workers, such as data scientists, to quickly understand the potential value of new and unfamiliar data. Unfortunately, automated insights produced by large-language models can generate code that does not correctly correspond (or align) to the insight. In this paper, we leverage the semantic knowledge of large language models to generate targeted and insightful questions about data and the corresponding code to answer those questions. Then through an empirical study on data from Open-WikiTable, we show that embeddings can be effectively used for filtering out semantically unaligned pairs of question and code. Additionally, we found that generating questions and code together yields more diverse questions.
Authors: Jaida Gao, Calab Su, Etai Miller, Kevin Lu, Yu Meng
Abstract: The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands as a pivotal force shaping our society, finding applications across diverse domains such as education, sustainability, and safety. Leveraging AI within mobile applications makes it easily accessible to the public, catalyzing its transformative potential. In this paper, we present a methodology for the rapid development of AI agent applications using the development platform provided by MIT App Inventor. To demonstrate its efficacy, we share the development journey of three distinct mobile applications: SynchroNet for fostering sustainable communities; ProductiviTeams for addressing procrastination; and iHELP for enhancing community safety. All three applications seamlessly integrate a spectrum of generative AI features, leveraging OpenAI APIs. Furthermore, we offer insights gleaned from overcoming challenges in integrating diverse tools and AI functionalities, aiming to inspire young developers to join our efforts in building practical AI agent applications.
Authors: Yasin Abbasi Yadkori, Ilja Kuzborskij, David Stutz, Andr\'as Gy\"orgy, Adam Fisch, Arnaud Doucet, Iuliya Beloshapka, Wei-Hung Weng, Yao-Yuan Yang, Csaba Szepesv\'ari, Ali Taylan Cemgil, Nenad Tomasev
Abstract: We develop a principled procedure for determining when a large language model (LLM) should abstain from responding (e.g., by saying "I don't know") in a general domain, instead of resorting to possibly "hallucinating" a non-sensical or incorrect answer. Building on earlier approaches that use self-consistency as a more reliable measure of model confidence, we propose using the LLM itself to self-evaluate the similarity between each of its sampled responses for a given query. We then further leverage conformal prediction techniques to develop an abstention procedure that benefits from rigorous theoretical guarantees on the hallucination rate (error rate). Experimentally, our resulting conformal abstention method reliably bounds the hallucination rate on various closed-book, open-domain generative question answering datasets, while also maintaining a significantly less conservative abstention rate on a dataset with long responses (Temporal Sequences) compared to baselines using log-probability scores to quantify uncertainty, while achieveing comparable performance on a dataset with short answers (TriviaQA). To evaluate the experiments automatically, one needs to determine if two responses are equivalent given a question. Following standard practice, we use a thresholded similarity function to determine if two responses match, but also provide a method for calibrating the threshold based on conformal prediction, with theoretical guarantees on the accuracy of the match prediction, which might be of independent interest.
Authors: Yuhao Zhang, Shiqi Wang, Haifeng Qian, Zijian Wang, Mingyue Shang, Linbo Liu, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Baishakhi Ray, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Xiaofei Ma, Anoop Deoras
Abstract: Code generation models are not robust to small perturbations, which often lead to inconsistent and incorrect generations and significantly degrade the performance of these models. Improving the robustness of code generation models is crucial to better user experience when these models are deployed in real-world applications. However, existing efforts have not addressed this issue for code generation models. To fill this gap, we propose CodeFort, a framework to improve the robustness of code generation models, generalizing a large variety of code perturbations to enrich the training data and enabling various robust training strategies, mixing data augmentation, batch augmentation, adversarial logits pairing, and contrastive learning, all carefully designed to support high-throughput training. Extensive evaluations show that we improve the average robust pass rates of baseline CodeGen models from 14.79 to 21.74. Notably, the improvement in robustness against code-syntax perturbations is evidenced by a significant decrease in pass rate drop from 95.04% to 53.35%
Authors: Aman Kumar, Sebastian Simon
Abstract: Nowadays, a majority of System-on-Chips (SoCs) make use of Intellectual Property (IP) in order to shorten development cycles. When such IPs are developed, one of the main focuses lies in the high configurability of the design. This flexibility on the design side introduces the challenge of covering a huge state space of IP configurations on the verification side to ensure the functional correctness under every possible parameter setting. The vast number of possibilities does not allow a brute-force approach, and therefore, only a selected number of settings based on typical and extreme assumptions are usually verified. Especially in automotive applications, which need to follow the ISO 26262 functional safety standard, the requirement of covering all significant variants needs to be fulfilled in any case. State-of-the-Art existing verification techniques such as simulation-based verification and formal verification have challenges such as time-space explosion and state-space explosion respectively and therefore, lack behind in verifying highly configurable digital designs efficiently. This paper is focused on a semi-formal verification methodology for efficient configuration coverage of highly configurable digital designs. The methodology focuses on reduced runtime based on simulative and formal methods that allow high configuration coverage. The paper also presents the results when the developed methodology was applied on a highly configurable microprocessor IP and discusses the gained benefits.
Authors: Ajinkya Deshpande, Anmol Agarwal, Shashank Shet, Arun Iyer, Aditya Kanade, Ramakrishna Bairi, Suresh Parthasarathy
Abstract: LLMs have demonstrated significant potential in code generation tasks, achieving promising results at the function or statement level in various benchmarks. However, the complexities associated with creating code artifacts like classes, particularly within the context of real-world software repositories, remain underexplored. Existing research often treats class-level generation as an isolated task, neglecting the intricate dependencies and interactions that characterize real-world software development environments. To address this gap, we introduce RepoClassBench, a benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs in generating complex, class-level code within real-world repositories. RepoClassBench includes natural language to class generation tasks across Java and Python, from a selection of public repositories. We ensure that each class in our dataset not only has cross-file dependencies within the repository but also includes corresponding test cases to verify its functionality. We find that current models struggle with the realistic challenges posed by our benchmark, primarily due to their limited exposure to relevant repository contexts. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Retrieve-Repotools-Reflect (RRR), a novel approach that equips LLMs with static analysis tools to iteratively navigate & reason about repository-level context in an agent-based framework. Our experiments demonstrate that RRR significantly outperforms existing baselines on RepoClassBench, showcasing its effectiveness across programming languages and in various settings. Our findings emphasize the need for benchmarks that incorporate repository-level dependencies to more accurately reflect the complexities of software development. Our work illustrates the benefits of leveraging specialized tools to enhance LLMs understanding of repository context. We plan to make our dataset and evaluation harness public.
Authors: \"Onder G\"urcan
Abstract: There is a need for a simulation framework, which is develop as a software using modern engineering approaches (e.g., modularity --i.e., model reuse--, testing, continuous development and continuous integration, automated management of builds, dependencies and documentation) and agile principles, (1) to make rapid prototyping of industrial cases and (2) to carry out their feasibility analysis in a realistic manner (i.e., to test hypothesis by simulating complex experiments involving large numbers of participants of different types acting in one or several blockchain systems).
Authors: Thuy Nguyen Thi, Anh Nguyen Viet, Thin Dang Van, Ngan Nguyen Luu Thuy
Abstract: This paper describes our systems for the sub-task I in the Software Mention Detection in Scholarly Publications shared-task. We propose three approaches leveraging different pre-trained language models (BERT, SciBERT, and XLM-R) to tackle this challenge. Our bestperforming system addresses the named entity recognition (NER) problem through a three-stage framework. (1) Entity Sentence Classification - classifies sentences containing potential software mentions; (2) Entity Extraction - detects mentions within classified sentences; (3) Entity Type Classification - categorizes detected mentions into specific software types. Experiments on the official dataset demonstrate that our three-stage framework achieves competitive performance, surpassing both other participating teams and our alternative approaches. As a result, our framework based on the XLM-R-based model achieves a weighted F1-score of 67.80%, delivering our team the 3rd rank in Sub-task I for the Software Mention Recognition task.
Authors: Olli J\"arviniemi, Evan Hubinger
Abstract: We study the tendency of AI systems to deceive by constructing a realistic simulation setting of a company AI assistant. The simulated company employees provide tasks for the assistant to complete, these tasks spanning writing assistance, information retrieval and programming. We then introduce situations where the model might be inclined to behave deceptively, while taking care to not instruct or otherwise pressure the model to do so. Across different scenarios, we find that Claude 3 Opus 1) complies with a task of mass-generating comments to influence public perception of the company, later deceiving humans about it having done so, 2) lies to auditors when asked questions, and 3) strategically pretends to be less capable than it is during capability evaluations. Our work demonstrates that even models trained to be helpful, harmless and honest sometimes behave deceptively in realistic scenarios, without notable external pressure to do so.
Authors: Atharva Naik
Abstract: The task of code generation from natural language (NL2Code) has become extremely popular, especially with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, efforts to quantify and track this progress have suffered due to a lack of reliable metrics for functional correctness. While popular benchmarks like HumanEval have test cases to enable reliable evaluation of correctness, it is time-consuming and requires human effort to collect test cases. As an alternative several reference-based evaluation metrics have been proposed, with embedding-based metrics like CodeBERTScore being touted as having a high correlation with human preferences and functional correctness. In our work, we analyze the ability of embedding-based metrics like CodeBERTScore to measure functional correctness and other helpful constructs like editing effort by analyzing outputs of ten models over two popular code generation benchmarks. Our results show that while they have a weak correlation with functional correctness (0.16), they are strongly correlated (0.72) with editing effort.
Authors: Nele K\"ohler, Fabian Neuhaus
Abstract: In our work, we systematize and analyze implicit ontological commitments in the responses generated by large language models (LLMs), focusing on ChatGPT 3.5 as a case study. We investigate how LLMs, despite having no explicit ontology, exhibit implicit ontological categorizations that are reflected in the texts they generate. The paper proposes an approach to understanding the ontological commitments of LLMs by defining ontology as a theory that provides a systematic account of the ontological commitments of some text. We investigate the ontological assumptions of ChatGPT and present a systematized account, i.e., GPT's top-level ontology. This includes a taxonomy, which is available as an OWL file, as well as a discussion about ontological assumptions (e.g., about its mereology or presentism). We show that in some aspects GPT's top-level ontology is quite similar to existing top-level ontologies. However, there are significant challenges arising from the flexible nature of LLM-generated texts, including ontological overload, ambiguity, and inconsistency.
Authors: Vasu Sharma, Karthik Padthe, Newsha Ardalani, Kushal Tirumala, Russell Howes, Hu Xu, Po-Yao Huang, Shang-Wen Li, Armen Aghajanyan, Gargi Ghosh
Abstract: In recent times training Language Models (LMs) have relied on computationally heavy training over massive datasets which makes this training process extremely laborious. In this paper we propose a novel method for numerically evaluating text quality in large unlabelled NLP datasets in a model agnostic manner to assign the text instances a "quality score". By proposing the text quality metric, the paper establishes a framework to identify and eliminate low-quality text instances, leading to improved training efficiency for LM models. Experimental results over multiple models and datasets demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, showcasing substantial gains in training effectiveness and highlighting the potential for resource-efficient LM training. For example, we observe an absolute accuracy improvement of 0.9% averaged over 14 downstream evaluation tasks for multiple LM models while using 40% lesser data and training 42% faster when training on the OpenWebText dataset and 0.8% average absolute accuracy improvement while using 20% lesser data and training 21% faster on the Wikipedia dataset.
Authors: Nadia Saeed
Abstract: The MEDIQA-M3G 2024 challenge necessitates novel solutions for Multilingual & Multimodal Medical Answer Generation in dermatology (wai Yim et al., 2024a). This paper addresses the limitations of traditional methods by proposing a weakly supervised learning approach for open-ended medical question-answering (QA). Our system leverages readily available MEDIQA-M3G images via a VGG16-CNN-SVM model, enabling multilingual (English, Chinese, Spanish) learning of informative skin condition representations. Using pre-trained QA models, we further bridge the gap between visual and textual information through multimodal fusion. This approach tackles complex, open-ended questions even without predefined answer choices. We empower the generation of comprehensive answers by feeding the ViT-CLIP model with multiple responses alongside images. This work advances medical QA research, paving the way for clinical decision support systems and ultimately improving healthcare delivery.
Authors: Nidhi Kamal, Saurabh Yadav, Jorawar Singh, Aditi Avasthi
Abstract: Providing fast and accurate resolution to the student's query is an essential solution provided by Edtech organizations. This is generally provided with a chat-bot like interface to enable students to ask their doubts easily. One preferred format for student queries is images, as it allows students to capture and post questions without typing complex equations and information. However, this format also presents difficulties, as images may contain multiple questions or textual noise that lowers the accuracy of existing single-query answering solutions. In this paper, we propose a method for extracting questions from text or images using a BERT-based deep learning model and compare it to the other rule-based and layout-based methods. Our method aims to improve the accuracy and efficiency of student query resolution in Edtech organizations.
Authors: Yongjin Yang, Sihyeon Kim, SangMook Kim, Gyubok Lee, Se-Young Yun, Edward Choi
Abstract: Incorporating unanswerable questions into EHR QA systems is crucial for testing the trustworthiness of a system, as providing non-existent responses can mislead doctors in their diagnoses. The EHRSQL dataset stands out as a promising benchmark because it is the only dataset that incorporates unanswerable questions in the EHR QA system alongside practical questions. However, in this work, we identify a data bias in these unanswerable questions; they can often be discerned simply by filtering with specific N-gram patterns. Such biases jeopardize the authenticity and reliability of QA system evaluations. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple debiasing method of adjusting the split between the validation and test sets to neutralize the undue influence of N-gram filtering. By experimenting on the MIMIC-III dataset, we demonstrate both the existing data bias in EHRSQL and the effectiveness of our data split strategy in mitigating this bias.
Authors: Jakub Pokrywka, Jeremi Kaczmarek, Edward Gorzela\'nczyk
Abstract: Introduction: Recently, the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased rapidly, allowing them to be used in a great number of applications. However, the risks posed by the generation of false information through LLMs significantly limit their applications in sensitive areas such as healthcare, highlighting the necessity for rigorous validations to determine their utility and reliability. To date, no study has extensively compared the performance of LLMs on Polish medical examinations across a broad spectrum of specialties on a very large dataset. Objectives: This study evaluated the performance of three Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models on the Polish Board Certification Exam (Pa\'nstwowy Egzamin Specjalizacyjny, PES) dataset, which consists of 297 tests. Methods: We developed a software program to download and process PES exams and tested the performance of GPT models using OpenAI Application Programming Interface. Results: Our findings reveal that GPT-3.5 did not pass any of the analyzed exams. In contrast, the GPT-4 models demonstrated the capability to pass the majority of the exams evaluated, with the most recent model, gpt-4-0125, successfully passing 222 (75%) of them. The performance of the GPT models varied significantly, displaying excellence in exams related to certain specialties while completely failing others. Conclusions: The significant progress and impressive performance of LLM models hold great promise for the increased application of AI in the field of medicine in Poland. For instance, this advancement could lead to the development of AI-based medical assistants for healthcare professionals, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of medical services.
Authors: Seonhee Cho, Choonghan Kim, Jiho Lee, Chetan Chilkunda, Sujin Choi, Joo Heung Yoon
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have attracted interest in their generalization capability with only a few samples in the prompt. This progress is particularly relevant to the medical domain, where the quality and sensitivity of data pose unique challenges for model training and application. However, the dependency on high-quality data for effective in-context learning raises questions about the feasibility of these models when encountering with the inevitable variations and errors inherent in real-world medical data. In this paper, we introduce MID-M, a novel framework that leverages the in-context learning capabilities of a general-domain Large Language Model (LLM) to process multimodal data via image descriptions. MID-M achieves a comparable or superior performance to task-specific fine-tuned LMMs and other general-domain ones, without the extensive domain-specific training or pre-training on multimodal data, with significantly fewer parameters. This highlights the potential of leveraging general-domain LLMs for domain-specific tasks and offers a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to traditional LMM developments. Moreover, the robustness of MID-M against data quality issues demonstrates its practical utility in real-world medical domain applications.
Authors: Gondy Leroy, David Kauchak, Philip Harber, Ankit Pal, Akash Shukla
Abstract: Text and audio simplification to increase information comprehension are important in healthcare. With the introduction of ChatGPT, an evaluation of its simplification performance is needed. We provide a systematic comparison of human and ChatGPT simplified texts using fourteen metrics indicative of text difficulty. We briefly introduce our online editor where these simplification tools, including ChatGPT, are available. We scored twelve corpora using our metrics: six text, one audio, and five ChatGPT simplified corpora. We then compare these corpora with texts simplified and verified in a prior user study. Finally, a medical domain expert evaluated these texts and five, new ChatGPT simplified versions. We found that simple corpora show higher similarity with the human simplified texts. ChatGPT simplification moves metrics in the right direction. The medical domain expert evaluation showed a preference for the ChatGPT style, but the text itself was rated lower for content retention.
Authors: Xinyi Li, Yongfeng Zhang, Edward C. Malthouse
Abstract: In the current digital era, the rapid spread of misinformation on online platforms presents significant challenges to societal well-being, public trust, and democratic processes, influencing critical decision making and public opinion. To address these challenges, there is a growing need for automated fake news detection mechanisms. Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, prompting exploration into their potential for verifying news claims. Instead of employing LLMs in a non-agentic way, where LLMs generate responses based on direct prompts in a single shot, our work introduces FactAgent, an agentic approach of utilizing LLMs for fake news detection. FactAgent enables LLMs to emulate human expert behavior in verifying news claims without any model training, following a structured workflow. This workflow breaks down the complex task of news veracity checking into multiple sub-steps, where LLMs complete simple tasks using their internal knowledge or external tools. At the final step of the workflow, LLMs integrate all findings throughout the workflow to determine the news claim's veracity. Compared to manual human verification, FactAgent offers enhanced efficiency. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of FactAgent in verifying claims without the need for any training process. Moreover, FactAgent provides transparent explanations at each step of the workflow and during final decision-making, offering insights into the reasoning process of fake news detection for end users. FactAgent is highly adaptable, allowing for straightforward updates to its tools that LLMs can leverage within the workflow, as well as updates to the workflow itself using domain knowledge. This adaptability enables FactAgent's application to news verification across various domains.
Authors: Benjamin Sykes, Loic Simon, Julien Rabin
Abstract: With the recent success of generative models in image and text, the evaluation of generative models has gained a lot of attention. Whereas most generative models are compared in terms of scalar values such as Frechet Inception Distance (FID) or Inception Score (IS), in the last years (Sajjadi et al., 2018) proposed a definition of precision-recall curve to characterize the closeness of two distributions. Since then, various approaches to precision and recall have seen the light (Kynkaanniemi et al., 2019; Naeem et al., 2020; Park & Kim, 2023). They center their attention on the extreme values of precision and recall, but apart from this fact, their ties are elusive. In this paper, we unify most of these approaches under the same umbrella, relying on the work of (Simon et al., 2019). Doing so, we were able not only to recover entire curves, but also to expose the sources of the accounted pitfalls of the concerned metrics. We also provide consistency results that go well beyond the ones presented in the corresponding literature. Last, we study the different behaviors of the curves obtained experimentally.
Authors: Christian Marius Lillelund, Fernando Pannullo, Morten Opprud Jakobsen, Manuel Morante, Christian Fischer Pedersen
Abstract: Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of ball bearings plays an important role in predictive maintenance. A common definition of the RUL is the time until a bearing is no longer functional, which we denote as an event, and many data-driven methods have been proposed to predict the RUL. However, few studies have addressed the problem of censored data, where this event of interest is not observed, and simply ignoring these observations can lead to an overestimation of the failure risk. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic estimation of RUL using survival analysis that supports censored data. First, we analyze sensor readings from ball bearings in the frequency domain and annotate when a bearing starts to deteriorate by calculating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the probability density function (PDF) of the current process and a reference PDF. Second, we train several survival models on the annotated bearing dataset, capable of predicting the RUL over a finite time horizon using the survival function. This function is guaranteed to be strictly monotonically decreasing and is an intuitive estimation of the remaining lifetime. We demonstrate our approach in the XJTU-SY dataset using cross-validation and find that Random Survival Forests consistently outperforms both non-neural networks and neural networks in terms of the mean absolute error (MAE). Our work encourages the inclusion of censored data in predictive maintenance models and highlights the unique advantages that survival analysis offers when it comes to probabilistic RUL estimation and early fault detection.
Authors: Maksym Korablyov, Cheng-Hao Liu, Moksh Jain, Almer M. van der Sloot, Eric Jolicoeur, Edward Ruediger, Andrei Cristian Nica, Emmanuel Bengio, Kostiantyn Lapchevskyi, Daniel St-Cyr, Doris Alexandra Schuetz, Victor Ion Butoi, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Simon Blackburn, Leo Feng, Hadi Nekoei, SaiKrishna Gottipati, Priyesh Vijayan, Prateek Gupta, Ladislav Ramp\'a\v{s}ek, Sasikanth Avancha, Pierre-Luc Bacon, William L. Hamilton, Brooks Paige, Sanchit Misra, Stanislaw Kamil Jastrzebski, Bharat Kaul, Doina Precup, Jos\'e Miguel Hern\'andez-Lobato, Marwin Segler, Michael Bronstein, Anne Marinier, Mike Tyers, Yoshua Bengio
Abstract: Despite substantial progress in machine learning for scientific discovery in recent years, truly de novo design of small molecules which exhibit a property of interest remains a significant challenge. We introduce LambdaZero, a generative active learning approach to search for synthesizable molecules. Powered by deep reinforcement learning, LambdaZero learns to search over the vast space of molecules to discover candidates with a desired property. We apply LambdaZero with molecular docking to design novel small molecules that inhibit the enzyme soluble Epoxide Hydrolase 2 (sEH), while enforcing constraints on synthesizability and drug-likeliness. LambdaZero provides an exponential speedup in terms of the number of calls to the expensive molecular docking oracle, and LambdaZero de novo designed molecules reach docking scores that would otherwise require the virtual screening of a hundred billion molecules. Importantly, LambdaZero discovers novel scaffolds of synthesizable, drug-like inhibitors for sEH. In in vitro experimental validation, a series of ligands from a generated quinazoline-based scaffold were synthesized, and the lead inhibitor N-(4,6-di(pyrrolidin-1-yl)quinazolin-2-yl)-N-methylbenzamide (UM0152893) displayed sub-micromolar enzyme inhibition of sEH.
Authors: Tolga Buz, Benjamin Frost, Nikola Genchev, Moritz Schneider, Lucie-Aim\'ee Kaffee, Gerard de Melo
Abstract: Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the ability to generate content that is difficult or impossible to distinguish from human writing. We investigate the ability of differently-sized LLMs to replicate human writing style in short, creative texts in the domain of Showerthoughts, thoughts that may occur during mundane activities. We compare GPT-2 and GPT-Neo fine-tuned on Reddit data as well as GPT-3.5 invoked in a zero-shot manner, against human-authored texts. We measure human preference on the texts across the specific dimensions that account for the quality of creative, witty texts. Additionally, we compare the ability of humans versus fine-tuned RoBERTa classifiers to detect AI-generated texts. We conclude that human evaluators rate the generated texts slightly worse on average regarding their creative quality, but they are unable to reliably distinguish between human-written and AI-generated texts. We further provide a dataset for creative, witty text generation based on Reddit Showerthoughts posts.
Authors: Yufei Jin, Xingquan Zhu
Abstract: Oversmoothing is a commonly observed challenge in graph neural network (GNN) learning, where, as layers increase, embedding features learned from GNNs quickly become similar/indistinguishable, making them incapable of differentiating network proximity. A GNN with shallow layer architectures can only learn short-term relation or localized structure information, limiting its power of learning long-term connection, evidenced by their inferior learning performance on heterophilous graphs. Tackling oversmoothing is crucial to harness deep-layer architectures for GNNs. To date, many methods have been proposed to alleviate oversmoothing. The vast difference behind their design principles, combined with graph complications, make it difficult to understand and even compare their difference in tackling the oversmoothing. In this paper, we propose ATNPA, a unified view with five key steps: Augmentation, Transformation, Normalization, Propagation, and Aggregation, to summarize GNN oversmoothing alleviation approaches. We first outline three themes to tackle oversmoothing, and then separate all methods into six categories, followed by detailed reviews of representative methods, including their relation to the ATNPA, and discussion about their niche, strength, and weakness. The review not only draws in-depth understanding of existing methods in the field, but also shows a clear road map for future study.
Authors: Shangding Gu, Bilgehan Sel, Yuhao Ding, Lu Wang, Qingwei Lin, Ming Jin, Alois Knoll
Abstract: Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving reward performance through policy adjustments may adversely affect safety performance. In this study, we aim to address this conflicting relation by leveraging the theory of gradient manipulation. Initially, we analyze the conflict between reward and safety gradients. Subsequently, we tackle the balance between reward and safety optimization by proposing a soft switching policy optimization method, for which we provide convergence analysis. Based on our theoretical examination, we provide a safe RL framework to overcome the aforementioned challenge, and we develop a Safety-MuJoCo Benchmark to assess the performance of safe RL algorithms. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the Safety-MuJoCo Benchmark and a popular safe benchmark, Omnisafe. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms outperform several state-of-the-art baselines in terms of balancing reward and safety optimization.
Authors: Liam Hazan, Gili Focht, Naama Gavrielov, Roi Reichart, Talar Hagopian, Mary-Louise C. Greer, Ruth Cytter Kuint, Dan Turner, Moti Freiman
Abstract: Automatic conversion of free-text radiology reports into structured data using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques is crucial for analyzing diseases on a large scale. While effective for tasks in widely spoken languages like English, generative large language models (LLMs) typically underperform with less common languages and can pose potential risks to patient privacy. Fine-tuning local NLP models is hindered by the skewed nature of real-world medical datasets, where rare findings represent a significant data imbalance. We introduce SMP-BERT, a novel prompt learning method that leverages the structured nature of reports to overcome these challenges. In our studies involving a substantial collection of Crohn's disease radiology reports in Hebrew (over 8,000 patients and 10,000 reports), SMP-BERT greatly surpassed traditional fine-tuning methods in performance, notably in detecting infrequent conditions (AUC: 0.99 vs 0.94, F1: 0.84 vs 0.34). SMP-BERT empowers more accurate AI diagnostics available for low-resource languages.
Authors: Darshan Patil, Janarthanan Rajendran, Glen Berseth, Sarath Chandar
Abstract: In the real world, the strong episode resetting mechanisms that are needed to train agents in simulation are unavailable. The \textit{resetting} assumption limits the potential of reinforcement learning in the real world, as providing resets to an agent usually requires the creation of additional handcrafted mechanisms or human interventions. Recent work aims to train agents (\textit{forward}) with learned resets by constructing a second (\textit{backward}) agent that returns the forward agent to the initial state. We find that the termination and timing of the transitions between these two agents are crucial for algorithm success. With this in mind, we create a new algorithm, Reset Free RL with Intelligently Switching Controller (RISC) which intelligently switches between the two agents based on the agent's confidence in achieving its current goal. Our new method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging environments for reset-free RL.
Authors: Hye Sun Yun, David Pogrebitskiy, Iain J. Marshall, Byron C. Wallace
Abstract: Meta-analyses statistically aggregate the findings of different randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to assess treatment effectiveness. Because this yields robust estimates of treatment effectiveness, results from meta-analyses are considered the strongest form of evidence. However, rigorous evidence syntheses are time-consuming and labor-intensive, requiring manual extraction of data from individual trials to be synthesized. Ideally, language technologies would permit fully automatic meta-analysis, on demand. This requires accurately extracting numerical results from individual trials, which has been beyond the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP) models to date. In this work, we evaluate whether modern large language models (LLMs) can reliably perform this task. We annotate (and release) a modest but granular evaluation dataset of clinical trial reports with numerical findings attached to interventions, comparators, and outcomes. Using this dataset, we evaluate the performance of seven LLMs applied zero-shot for the task of conditionally extracting numerical findings from trial reports. We find that massive LLMs that can accommodate lengthy inputs are tantalizingly close to realizing fully automatic meta-analysis, especially for dichotomous (binary) outcomes (e.g., mortality). However, LLMs -- including ones trained on biomedical texts -- perform poorly when the outcome measures are complex and tallying the results requires inference. This work charts a path toward fully automatic meta-analysis of RCTs via LLMs, while also highlighting the limitations of existing models for this aim.
Authors: Tushar Verma, Jyotsna Singh, Yash Bhartari, Rishi Jarwal, Suraj Singh, Shubhkarman Singh
Abstract: Small object detection in aerial imagery presents significant challenges in computer vision due to the minimal data inherent in small-sized objects and their propensity to be obscured by larger objects and background noise. Traditional methods using transformer-based models often face limitations stemming from the lack of specialized databases, which adversely affect their performance with objects of varying orientations and scales. This underscores the need for more adaptable, lightweight models. In response, this paper introduces two innovative approaches that significantly enhance detection and segmentation capabilities for small aerial objects. Firstly, we explore the use of the SAHI framework on the newly introduced lightweight YOLO v9 architecture, which utilizes Programmable Gradient Information (PGI) to reduce the substantial information loss typically encountered in sequential feature extraction processes. The paper employs the Vision Mamba model, which incorporates position embeddings to facilitate precise location-aware visual understanding, combined with a novel bidirectional State Space Model (SSM) for effective visual context modeling. This State Space Model adeptly harnesses the linear complexity of CNNs and the global receptive field of Transformers, making it particularly effective in remote sensing image classification. Our experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in detection accuracy and processing efficiency, validating the applicability of these approaches for real-time small object detection across diverse aerial scenarios. This paper also discusses how these methodologies could serve as foundational models for future advancements in aerial object recognition technologies. The source code will be made accessible here.
Authors: Rafael Elberg, Denis Parra, Mircea Petrache
Abstract: Image and multimodal machine learning tasks are very challenging to solve in the case of poorly distributed data. In particular, data availability and privacy restrictions exacerbate these hurdles in the medical domain. The state of the art in image generation quality is held by Latent Diffusion models, making them prime candidates for tackling this problem. However, a few key issues still need to be solved, such as the difficulty in generating data from under-represented classes and a slow inference process. To mitigate these issues, we propose a new method for image augmentation in long-tailed data based on leveraging the rich latent space of pre-trained Stable Diffusion Models. We create a modified separable latent space to mix head and tail class examples. We build this space via Iterated Learning of underlying sparsified embeddings, which we apply to task-specific saliency maps via a K-NN approach. Code is available at https://github.com/SugarFreeManatee/Feature-Space-Augmentation-and-Iterated-Learning
URLs: https://github.com/SugarFreeManatee/Feature-Space-Augmentation-and-Iterated-Learning
Authors: Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, Lea Goetz, Russ Altman
Abstract: Inherent bias within society can be amplified and perpetuated by artificial intelligence (AI) systems. To address this issue, a wide range of solutions have been proposed to identify and mitigate bias and enforce fairness for individuals and groups. Recently, Graph Laplacian Regularizer (GLR), a regularization technique from the semi-supervised learning literature has been used as a substitute for the common Lipschitz condition to enhance individual fairness (IF). Notable prior work has shown that enforcing IF through a GLR can improve the transfer learning accuracy of AI models under covariate shifts. However, the prior work defines a GLR on the source and target data combined, implicitly assuming that the target data are available at train time, which might not hold in practice. In this work, we investigated whether defining a GLR independently on the train and target data could maintain similar accuracy compared to the prior work model. Furthermore, we introduced the Normalized Fairness Gain score (FGN) to measure IF for in-processing algorithmic fairness techniques. FGN quantifies the amount of gained fairness when a GLR is used versus not. We evaluated the new and original methods under FGN, the Prediction Consistency (PC), and traditional classification metrics on the German Credit Approval dataset. The results showed that the two models achieved similar statistical mean performances over five-fold cross-validation. Furthermore, the proposed metric showed that PC scores can be misleading as the scores can be high and statistically similar to fairness-enhanced models while FGN scores are small. This work therefore provides new insights into when a GLR effectively enhances IF and the pitfalls of PC.
Authors: Yuwei Liu, Chen Dan, Anubhav Bhatti, Bingjie Shen, Divij Gupta, Suraj Parmar, San Lee
Abstract: Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality in intensive care units (ICUs), representing a substantial medical challenge. The complexity of analyzing diverse vital signs to predict sepsis further aggravates this issue. While deep learning techniques have been advanced for early sepsis prediction, their 'black-box' nature obscures the internal logic, impairing interpretability in critical settings like ICUs. This paper introduces a framework that combines a deep learning model with an attention mechanism that highlights the critical time steps in the forecasting process, thus improving model interpretability and supporting clinical decision-making. We show that the attention mechanism could be adapted to various black box time series forecasting models such as N-HiTS and N-BEATS. Our method preserves the accuracy of conventional deep learning models while enhancing interpretability through attention-weight-generated heatmaps. We evaluated our model on the eICU-CRD dataset, focusing on forecasting vital signs for sepsis patients. We assessed its performance using mean squared error (MSE) and dynamic time warping (DTW) metrics. We explored the attention maps of N-HiTS and N-BEATS, examining the differences in their performance and identifying crucial factors influencing vital sign forecasting.
Authors: Yuxiang Huang, Yuhao Chen, John Zelek
Abstract: Detecting and segmenting moving objects from a moving monocular camera is challenging in the presence of unknown camera motion, diverse object motions and complex scene structures. Most existing methods rely on a single motion cue to perform motion segmentation, which is usually insufficient when facing different complex environments. While a few recent deep learning based methods are able to combine multiple motion cues to achieve improved accuracy, they depend heavily on vast datasets and extensive annotations, making them less adaptable to new scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel monocular dense segmentation method that achieves state-of-the-art motion segmentation results in a zero-shot manner. The proposed method synergestically combines the strengths of deep learning and geometric model fusion methods by performing geometric model fusion on object proposals. Experiments show that our method achieves competitive results on several motion segmentation datasets and even surpasses some state-of-the-art supervised methods on certain benchmarks, while not being trained on any data. We also present an ablation study to show the effectiveness of combining different geometric models together for motion segmentation, highlighting the value of our geometric model fusion strategy.
Authors: Rickard Stureborg, Dimitris Alikaniotis, Yoshi Suhara
Abstract: The zero-shot capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled highly flexible, reference-free metrics for various tasks, making LLM evaluators common tools in NLP. However, the robustness of these LLM evaluators remains relatively understudied; existing work mainly pursued optimal performance in terms of correlating LLM scores with human expert scores. In this paper, we conduct a series of analyses using the SummEval dataset and confirm that LLMs are biased evaluators as they: (1) exhibit familiarity bias-a preference for text with lower perplexity, (2) show skewed and biased distributions of ratings, and (3) experience anchoring effects for multi-attribute judgments. We also found that LLMs are inconsistent evaluators, showing low "inter-sample" agreement and sensitivity to prompt differences that are insignificant to human understanding of text quality. Furthermore, we share recipes for configuring LLM evaluators to mitigate these limitations. Experimental results on the RoSE dataset demonstrate improvements over the state-of-the-art LLM evaluators.
Authors: Ankush Jain, Rinav Gupta, Jai Singhal
Abstract: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a prevalent complication in diabetes patients, can lead to vision impairment due to lesions formed on the retina. Detecting DR at an advanced stage often results in irreversible blindness. The traditional process of diagnosing DR through retina fundus images by ophthalmologists is not only time-intensive but also expensive. While classical transfer learning models have been widely adopted for computer-aided detection of DR, their high maintenance costs can hinder their detection efficiency. In contrast, Quantum Transfer Learning offers a more effective solution to this challenge. This approach is notably advantageous because it operates on heuristic principles, making it highly optimized for the task. Our proposed methodology leverages this hybrid quantum transfer learning technique to detect DR. To construct our model, we utilize the APTOS 2019 Blindness Detection dataset, available on Kaggle. We employ the ResNet-18, ResNet34, ResNet50, ResNet101, ResNet152 and Inception V3, pre-trained classical neural networks, for the initial feature extraction. For the classification stage, we use a Variational Quantum Classifier. Our hybrid quantum model has shown remarkable results, achieving an accuracy of 97% for ResNet-18. This demonstrates that quantum computing, when integrated with quantum machine learning, can perform tasks with a level of power and efficiency unattainable by classical computers alone. By harnessing these advanced technologies, we can significantly improve the detection and diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy, potentially saving many from the risk of blindness. Keywords: Diabetic Retinopathy, Quantum Transfer Learning, Deep Learning
Authors: Xun Jiao, Fred Lin, Harish D. Dixit, Joel Coburn, Abhinav Pandey, Han Wang, Jianyu Huang, Venkat Ramesh, Wang Xu, Daniel Moore, Sriram Sankar
Abstract: Reliability of AI systems is a fundamental concern for the successful deployment and widespread adoption of AI technologies. Unfortunately, the escalating complexity and heterogeneity of AI hardware systems make them inevitably and increasingly susceptible to hardware faults (e.g., bit flips) that can potentially corrupt model parameters. Given this challenge, this paper aims to answer a critical question: How likely is a parameter corruption to result in an incorrect model output? To systematically answer this question, we propose a novel quantitative metric, Parameter Vulnerability Factor (PVF), inspired by architectural vulnerability factor (AVF) in computer architecture community, aiming to standardize the quantification of AI model resilience/vulnerability against parameter corruptions. We define a model parameter's PVF as the probability that a corruption in that particular model parameter will result in an incorrect output. Similar to AVF, this statistical concept can be derived from statistically extensive and meaningful fault injection (FI) experiments. In this paper, we present several use cases on applying PVF to three types of tasks/models during inference -- recommendation (DLRM), vision classification (CNN), and text classification (BERT). PVF can provide pivotal insights to AI hardware designers in balancing the tradeoff between fault protection and performance/efficiency such as mapping vulnerable AI parameter components to well-protected hardware modules. PVF metric is applicable to any AI model and has a potential to help unify and standardize AI vulnerability/resilience evaluation practice.
Authors: Elahe Khatibi, Mahyar Abbasian, Zhongqi Yang, Iman Azimi, Amir M. Rahmani
Abstract: To perform effective causal inference in high-dimensional datasets, initiating the process with causal discovery is imperative, wherein a causal graph is generated based on observational data. However, obtaining a complete and accurate causal graph poses a formidable challenge, recognized as an NP-hard problem. Recently, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in a new era, indicating their emergent capabilities and widespread applicability in facilitating causal reasoning across diverse domains, such as medicine, finance, and science. The expansive knowledge base of LLMs holds the potential to elevate the field of causal reasoning by offering interpretability, making inferences, generalizability, and uncovering novel causal structures. In this paper, we introduce a new framework, named Autonomous LLM-Augmented Causal Discovery Framework (ALCM), to synergize data-driven causal discovery algorithms and LLMs, automating the generation of a more resilient, accurate, and explicable causal graph. The ALCM consists of three integral components: causal structure learning, causal wrapper, and LLM-driven causal refiner. These components autonomously collaborate within a dynamic environment to address causal discovery questions and deliver plausible causal graphs. We evaluate the ALCM framework by implementing two demonstrations on seven well-known datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that ALCM outperforms existing LLM methods and conventional data-driven causal reasoning mechanisms. This study not only shows the effectiveness of the ALCM but also underscores new research directions in leveraging the causal reasoning capabilities of LLMs.
Authors: Amirhosein Toosi, Isaac Shiri, Habib Zaidi, Arman Rahmim
Abstract: We introduce an innovative, simple, effective segmentation-free approach for outcome prediction in head \& neck cancer (HNC) patients. By harnessing deep learning-based feature extraction techniques and multi-angle maximum intensity projections (MA-MIPs) applied to Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) volumes, our proposed method eliminates the need for manual segmentations of regions-of-interest (ROIs) such as primary tumors and involved lymph nodes. Instead, a state-of-the-art object detection model is trained to perform automatic cropping of the head and neck region on the PET volumes. A pre-trained deep convolutional neural network backbone is then utilized to extract deep features from MA-MIPs obtained from 72 multi-angel axial rotations of the cropped PET volumes. These deep features extracted from multiple projection views of the PET volumes are then aggregated and fused, and employed to perform recurrence-free survival analysis on a cohort of 489 HNC patients. The proposed approach outperforms the best performing method on the target dataset for the task of recurrence-free survival analysis. By circumventing the manual delineation of the malignancies on the FDG PET-CT images, our approach eliminates the dependency on subjective interpretations and highly enhances the reproducibility of the proposed survival analysis method.
Authors: Marzi Heidari, Hanping Zhang, Yuhong Guo
Abstract: In recent years, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has gained significant attention due to its ability to leverage both labeled and unlabeled data to improve model performance, especially when labeled data is scarce. However, most current SSL methods rely on heuristics or predefined rules for generating pseudo-labels and leveraging unlabeled data. They are limited to exploiting loss functions and regularization methods within the standard norm. In this paper, we propose a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) Guided SSL method, RLGSSL, that formulates SSL as a one-armed bandit problem and deploys an innovative RL loss based on weighted reward to adaptively guide the learning process of the prediction model. RLGSSL incorporates a carefully designed reward function that balances the use of labeled and unlabeled data to enhance generalization performance. A semi-supervised teacher-student framework is further deployed to increase the learning stability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RLGSSL through extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets and show that our approach achieves consistent superior performance compared to state-of-the-art SSL methods.
Authors: Jerry Zhi-Yang He, Sashrika Pandey, Mariah L. Schrum, Anca Dragan
Abstract: When querying a large language model (LLM), the context, i.e. personal, demographic, and cultural information specific to an end-user, can significantly shape the response of the LLM. For example, asking the model to explain Newton's second law with the context "I am a toddler" yields a different answer compared to the context "I am a physics professor." Proper usage of the context enables the LLM to generate personalized responses, whereas inappropriate contextual influence can lead to stereotypical and potentially harmful generations (e.g. associating "female" with "housekeeper"). In practice, striking the right balance when leveraging context is a nuanced and challenging problem that is often situation-dependent. One common approach to address this challenge is to fine-tune LLMs on contextually appropriate responses. However, this approach is expensive, time-consuming, and not controllable for end-users in different situations. In this work, we propose Context Steering (CoS) - a simple training-free method that can be easily applied to autoregressive LLMs at inference time. By measuring the contextual influence in terms of token prediction likelihood and modulating it, our method enables practitioners to determine the appropriate level of contextual influence based on their specific use case and end-user base. We showcase a variety of applications of CoS including amplifying the contextual influence to achieve better personalization and mitigating unwanted influence for reducing model bias. In addition, we show that we can combine CoS with Bayesian Inference to quantify the extent of hate speech on the internet. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoS on state-of-the-art LLMs and benchmarks.
Authors: Leon Eisemann, Mirjam Fehling-Kaschek, Henrik Gommel, David Hermann, Marvin Klemp, Martin Lauer, Benjamin Lickert, Florian Luettner, Robin Moss, Nicole Neis, Maria Pohle, Simon Romanski, Daniel Stadler, Alexander Stolz, Jens Ziehn, Jingxing Zhou
Abstract: With growing complexity and criticality of automated driving functions in road traffic and their operational design domains (ODD), there is increasing demand for covering significant proportions of development, validation, and verification in virtual environments and through simulation models. If, however, simulations are meant not only to augment real-world experiments, but to replace them, quantitative approaches are required that measure to what degree and under which preconditions simulation models adequately represent reality, and thus, using their results accordingly. Especially in R&D areas related to the safety impact of the "open world", there is a significant shortage of real-world data to parameterize and/or validate simulations - especially with respect to the behavior of human traffic participants, whom automated driving functions will meet in mixed traffic. We present an approach to systematically acquire data in public traffic by heterogeneous means, transform it into a unified representation, and use it to automatically parameterize traffic behavior models for use in data-driven virtual validation of automated driving functions.
Authors: Saikat Chakraborty, Gabriel Ebner, Siddharth Bhat, Sarah Fakhoury, Sakina Fatima, Shuvendu Lahiri, Nikhil Swamy
Abstract: Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux, to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem -- producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program-fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.
Authors: Olubusayo Olabisi, Ameeta Agrawal
Abstract: Text summarization models have typically focused on optimizing aspects of quality such as fluency, relevance, and coherence, particularly in the context of news articles. However, summarization models are increasingly being used to summarize diverse sources of text, such as social media data, that encompass a wide demographic user base. It is thus crucial to assess not only the quality of the generated summaries, but also the extent to which they can fairly represent the opinions of diverse social groups. Position bias, a long-known issue in news summarization, has received limited attention in the context of social multi-document summarization. We deeply investigate this phenomenon by analyzing the effect of group ordering in input documents when summarizing tweets from three distinct linguistic communities: African-American English, Hispanic-aligned Language, and White-aligned Language. Our empirical analysis shows that although the textual quality of the summaries remains consistent regardless of the input document order, in terms of fairness, the results vary significantly depending on how the dialect groups are presented in the input data. Our results suggest that position bias manifests differently in social multi-document summarization, severely impacting the fairness of summarization models.
Authors: Chuanbo Hu, Wenqi Li, Mindi Ruan, Xiangxu Yu, Lynn K. Paul, Shuo Wang, Xin Li
Abstract: Diagnosing language disorders associated with autism is a complex and nuanced challenge, often hindered by the subjective nature and variability of traditional assessment methods. Traditional diagnostic methods not only require intensive human effort but also often result in delayed interventions due to their lack of speed and specificity. In this study, we explored the application of ChatGPT, a state of the art large language model, to overcome these obstacles by enhancing diagnostic accuracy and profiling specific linguistic features indicative of autism. Leveraging ChatGPT advanced natural language processing capabilities, this research aims to streamline and refine the diagnostic process. Specifically, we compared ChatGPT's performance with that of conventional supervised learning models, including BERT, a model acclaimed for its effectiveness in various natural language processing tasks. We showed that ChatGPT substantially outperformed these models, achieving over 13% improvement in both accuracy and F1 score in a zero shot learning configuration. This marked enhancement highlights the model potential as a superior tool for neurological diagnostics. Additionally, we identified ten distinct features of autism associated language disorders that vary significantly across different experimental scenarios. These features, which included echolalia, pronoun reversal, and atypical language usage, were crucial for accurately diagnosing ASD and customizing treatment plans. Together, our findings advocate for adopting sophisticated AI tools like ChatGPT in clinical settings to assess and diagnose developmental disorders. Our approach not only promises greater diagnostic precision but also aligns with the goals of personalized medicine, potentially transforming the evaluation landscape for autism and similar neurological conditions.
Authors: Tian Xie, Xuwei Tan, Xueru Zhang
Abstract: This paper studies algorithmic decision-making under human's strategic behavior, where a decision maker uses an algorithm to make decisions about human agents, and the latter with information about the algorithm may exert effort strategically and improve to receive favorable decisions. Unlike prior works that assume agents benefit from their efforts immediately, we consider realistic scenarios where the impacts of these efforts are persistent and agents benefit from efforts by making improvements gradually. We first develop a dynamic model to characterize persistent improvements and based on this construct a Stackelberg game to model the interplay between agents and the decision-maker. We analytically characterize the equilibrium strategies and identify conditions under which agents have incentives to improve. With the dynamics, we then study how the decision-maker can design an optimal policy to incentivize the largest improvements inside the agent population. We also extend the model to settings where 1) agents may be dishonest and game the algorithm into making favorable but erroneous decisions; 2) honest efforts are forgettable and not sufficient to guarantee persistent improvements. With the extended models, we further examine conditions under which agents prefer honest efforts over dishonest behavior and the impacts of forgettable efforts.
Authors: Linh Vu, Thu Tran, Wern-Han Lim, Raphael Phan
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel convolutional neural networks (CNN) framework tailored for end-to-end audio deep learning models, presenting advancements in efficiency and explainability. By benchmarking experiments on three standard speech emotion recognition datasets with five-fold cross-validation, our framework outperforms Mel spectrogram features by up to seven percent. It can potentially replace the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) while remaining lightweight. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficiency and interpretability of the front-end layer using the PhysioNet Heart Sound Database, illustrating its ability to handle and capture intricate long waveform patterns. Our contributions offer a portable solution for building efficient and interpretable models for raw waveform data.
Authors: Cedric Deslandes Whitney, Justin Norman
Abstract: Machine learning systems require representations of the real world for training and testing - they require data, and lots of it. Collecting data at scale has logistical and ethical challenges, and synthetic data promises a solution to these challenges. Instead of needing to collect photos of real people's faces to train a facial recognition system, a model creator could create and use photo-realistic, synthetic faces. The comparative ease of generating this synthetic data rather than relying on collecting data has made it a common practice. We present two key risks of using synthetic data in model development. First, we detail the high risk of false confidence when using synthetic data to increase dataset diversity and representation. We base this in the examination of a real world use-case of synthetic data, where synthetic datasets were generated for an evaluation of facial recognition technology. Second, we examine how using synthetic data risks circumventing consent for data usage. We illustrate this by considering the importance of consent to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's regulation of data collection and affected models. Finally, we discuss how these two risks exemplify how synthetic data complicates existing governance and ethical practice; by decoupling data from those it impacts, synthetic data is prone to consolidating power away those most impacted by algorithmically-mediated harm.
Authors: Wee Kiat Chan, PengWei Wang, Raye Chen-Hua Yeow
Abstract: Soft robotics has emerged as a promising field with the potential to revolutionize industries such as healthcare and manufacturing. However, designing effective soft robots presents challenges, particularly in managing the complex interplay of material properties, structural design, and control strategies. Traditional design methods are often time-consuming and may not yield optimal designs. In this paper, we explore the use of generative AI to create 3D models of soft actuators. We create a dataset of over 70 text-shape pairings of soft pneumatic robot actuator designs, and adapt a latent diffusion model (SDFusion) to learn the data distribution and generate novel designs from it. By employing transfer learning and data augmentation techniques, we significantly improve the performance of the diffusion model. These findings highlight the potential of generative AI in designing complex soft robotic systems, paving the way for future advancements in the field.
Authors: Mudit Gaur, Vaneet Aggarwal, Amrit Singh Bedi, Di Wang
Abstract: The current state-of-the-art theoretical analysis of Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms significantly lags in addressing the practical aspects of AC implementations. This crucial gap needs bridging to bring the analysis in line with practical implementations of AC. To address this, we advocate for considering the MMCLG criteria: \textbf{M}ulti-layer neural network parametrization for actor/critic, \textbf{M}arkovian sampling, \textbf{C}ontinuous state-action spaces, the performance of the \textbf{L}ast iterate, and \textbf{G}lobal optimality. These aspects are practically significant and have been largely overlooked in existing theoretical analyses of AC algorithms. In this work, we address these gaps by providing the first comprehensive theoretical analysis of AC algorithms that encompasses all five crucial practical aspects (covers MMCLG criteria). We establish global convergence sample complexity bounds of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left({\epsilon^{-3}}\right)$. We achieve this result through our novel use of the weak gradient domination property of MDP's and our unique analysis of the error in critic estimation.
Authors: Peilun Zhou, Xiaoxiao Xu, Lantao Hu, Han Li, Peng Jiang
Abstract: Recommender selects and presents top-K items to the user at each online request, and a recommendation session consists of several sequential requests. Formulating a recommendation session as a Markov decision process and solving it by reinforcement learning (RL) framework has attracted increasing attention from both academic and industry communities. In this paper, we propose a RL-based industrial short-video recommender ranking framework, which models and maximizes user watch-time in an environment of user multi-aspect preferences by a collaborative multi-agent formulization. Moreover, our proposed framework adopts a model-based learning approach to alleviate the sample selection bias which is a crucial but intractable problem in industrial recommender system. Extensive offline evaluations and live experiments confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method over alternatives. Our proposed approach has been deployed in our real large-scale short-video sharing platform, successfully serving over hundreds of millions users.
Authors: Sicong Liu, Wentao Zhou, Zimu Zhou, Bin Guo, Minfan Wang, Cheng Fang, Zheng Lin, Zhiwen Yu
Abstract: There is a growing demand to deploy computation-intensive deep learning (DL) models on resource-constrained mobile devices for real-time intelligent applications. Equipped with a variety of processing units such as CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, the mobile devices hold potential to accelerate DL inference via parallel execution across heterogeneous processors. Various efficient parallel methods have been explored to optimize computation distribution, achieve load balance, and minimize communication cost across processors. Yet their practical effectiveness in the dynamic and diverse real-world mobile environment is less explored. This paper presents a holistic empirical study to assess the capabilities and challenges associated with parallel DL inference on heterogeneous mobile processors. Through carefully designed experiments covering various DL models, mobile software/hardware environments, workload patterns, and resource availability, we identify limitations of existing techniques and highlight opportunities for cross-level optimization.
Authors: Riley Simmons-Edler, Ryan Badman, Shayne Longpre, Kanaka Rajan
Abstract: The recent embrace of machine learning (ML) in the development of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) creates serious risks to geopolitical stability and the free exchange of ideas in AI research. This topic has received comparatively little attention of late compared to risks stemming from superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI), but requires fewer assumptions about the course of technological development and is thus a nearer-future issue. ML is already enabling the substitution of AWS for human soldiers in many battlefield roles, reducing the upfront human cost, and thus political cost, of waging offensive war. In the case of peer adversaries, this increases the likelihood of "low intensity" conflicts which risk escalation to broader warfare. In the case of non-peer adversaries, it reduces the domestic blowback to wars of aggression. This effect can occur regardless of other ethical issues around the use of military AI such as the risk of civilian casualties, and does not require any superhuman AI capabilities. Further, the military value of AWS raises the specter of an AI-powered arms race and the misguided imposition of national security restrictions on AI research. Our goal in this paper is to raise awareness among the public and ML researchers on the near-future risks posed by full or near-full autonomy in military technology, and we provide regulatory suggestions to mitigate these risks. We call upon AI policy experts and the defense AI community in particular to embrace transparency and caution in their development and deployment of AWS to avoid the negative effects on global stability and AI research that we highlight here.
Authors: Zhanzhong Gu, Xiangjian He, Gengfa Fang, Chengpei Xu, Feng Xia, Wenjing Jia
Abstract: Healthcare monitoring is crucial, especially for the daily care of elderly individuals living alone. It can detect dangerous occurrences, such as falls, and provide timely alerts to save lives. Non-invasive millimeter wave (mmWave) radar-based healthcare monitoring systems using advanced human activity recognition (HAR) models have recently gained significant attention. However, they encounter challenges in handling sparse point clouds, achieving real-time continuous classification, and coping with limited monitoring ranges when statically mounted. To overcome these limitations, we propose RobHAR, a movable robot-mounted mmWave radar system with lightweight deep neural networks for real-time monitoring of human activities. Specifically, we first propose a sparse point cloud-based global embedding to learn the features of point clouds using the light-PointNet (LPN) backbone. Then, we learn the temporal pattern with a bidirectional lightweight LSTM model (BiLiLSTM). In addition, we implement a transition optimization strategy, integrating the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to improve the accuracy and robustness of the continuous HAR. Our experiments on three datasets indicate that our method significantly outperforms the previous studies in both discrete and continuous HAR tasks. Finally, we deploy our system on a movable robot-mounted edge computing platform, achieving flexible healthcare monitoring in real-world scenarios.
Authors: Ashwin Kumar Gururajan, Enrique Lopez-Cuena, Jordi Bayarri-Planas, Adrian Tormos, Daniel Hinjos, Pablo Bernabeu-Perez, Anna Arias-Duart, Pablo Agustin Martin-Torres, Lucia Urcelay-Ganzabal, Marta Gonzalez-Mallo, Sergio Alvarez-Napagao, Eduard Ayguad\'e-Parra, Ulises Cort\'es Dario Garcia-Gasulla
Abstract: As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare and medicine continue to advance, there is a growing need for competitive open-source models that can safeguard public interest. With the increasing availability of highly competitive open base models, the impact of continued pre-training is increasingly uncertain. In this work, we explore the role of instruct tuning, model merging, alignment, red teaming and advanced inference schemes, as means to improve current open models. To that end, we introduce the Aloe family, a set of open medical LLMs highly competitive within its scale range. Aloe models are trained on the current best base models (Mistral, LLaMA 3), using a new custom dataset which combines public data sources improved with synthetic Chain of Thought (CoT). Aloe models undergo an alignment phase, becoming one of the first few policy-aligned open healthcare LLM using Direct Preference Optimization, setting a new standard for ethical performance in healthcare LLMs. Model evaluation expands to include various bias and toxicity datasets, a dedicated red teaming effort, and a much-needed risk assessment for healthcare LLMs. Finally, to explore the limits of current LLMs in inference, we study several advanced prompt engineering strategies to boost performance across benchmarks, yielding state-of-the-art results for open healthcare 7B LLMs, unprecedented at this scale.
Authors: Jiawei Zhou, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Lei Chen
Abstract: The landscape of information retrieval has broadened from search services to a critical component in various advanced applications, where indexing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and freshness are increasingly important yet remain less explored. To address these demands, we introduce Semi-parametric Vocabulary Disentangled Retrieval (SVDR). SVDR is a novel semi-parametric retrieval framework that supports two types of indexes: an embedding-based index for high effectiveness, akin to existing neural retrieval methods; and a binary token index that allows for quick and cost-effective setup, resembling traditional term-based retrieval. In our evaluation on three open-domain question answering benchmarks with the entire Wikipedia as the retrieval corpus, SVDR consistently demonstrates superiority. It achieves a 3% higher top-1 retrieval accuracy compared to the dense retriever DPR when using an embedding-based index and an 9% higher top-1 accuracy compared to BM25 when using a binary token index. Specifically, the adoption of a binary token index reduces index preparation time from 30 GPU hours to just 2 CPU hours and storage size from 31 GB to 2 GB, achieving a 90% reduction compared to an embedding-based index.
Authors: Firuz Juraev, Mohammed Abuhamad, Simon S. Woo, George K Thiruvathukal, Tamer Abuhmed
Abstract: Rapid advancements of deep learning are accelerating adoption in a wide variety of applications, including safety-critical applications such as self-driving vehicles, drones, robots, and surveillance systems. These advancements include applying variations of sophisticated techniques that improve the performance of models. However, such models are not immune to adversarial manipulations, which can cause the system to misbehave and remain unnoticed by experts. The frequency of modifications to existing deep learning models necessitates thorough analysis to determine the impact on models' robustness. In this work, we present an experimental evaluation of the effects of model modifications on deep learning model robustness using adversarial attacks. Our methodology involves examining the robustness of variations of models against various adversarial attacks. By conducting our experiments, we aim to shed light on the critical issue of maintaining the reliability and safety of deep learning models in safety- and security-critical applications. Our results indicate the pressing demand for an in-depth assessment of the effects of model changes on the robustness of models.
Authors: Zhiyu Guo, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Wanatnabe
Abstract: The rapid advancement in Large Language Models (LLMs) has markedly enhanced the capabilities of language understanding and generation. However, the substantial model size poses hardware challenges, affecting both memory size for serving and inference latency for token generation. To address those challenges, we propose Dependency-aware Semi-structured Sparsity (DaSS), a novel method for the recent prevalent SwiGLU-based LLMs pruning. Our approach incorporates structural dependency into the weight magnitude-based unstructured pruning. We introduce an MLP-specific pruning metric that evaluates the importance of each weight by jointly considering its magnitude and its corresponding MLP intermediate activation norms. DaSS facilitates a balance between the adaptability offered by unstructured pruning and the structural consistency inherent in dependency-based structured pruning. Empirical evaluations on Mistral and LLaMA2 model families demonstrate that DaSS not only outperforms both SparseGPT and Wanda in achieving hardware-friendly N:M sparsity patterns but also maintains the computational efficiency of Wanda.
Authors: Weigutian Ou, Philipp Schenkel, Helmut B\"olcskei
Abstract: We establish the fundamental limits in the approximation of Lipschitz functions by deep ReLU neural networks with finite-precision weights. Specifically, three regimes, namely under-, over-, and proper quantization, in terms of minimax approximation error behavior as a function of network weight precision, are identified. This is accomplished by deriving nonasymptotic tight lower and upper bounds on the minimax approximation error. Notably, in the proper-quantization regime, neural networks exhibit memory-optimality in the approximation of Lipschitz functions. Deep networks have an inherent advantage over shallow networks in achieving memory-optimality. We also develop the notion of depth-precision tradeoff, showing that networks with high-precision weights can be converted into functionally equivalent deeper networks with low-precision weights, while preserving memory-optimality. This idea is reminiscent of sigma-delta analog-to-digital conversion, where oversampling rate is traded for resolution in the quantization of signal samples. We improve upon the best-known ReLU network approximation results for Lipschitz functions and describe a refinement of the bit extraction technique which could be of independent general interest.
Authors: Firuz Juraev, Mohammed Abuhamad, Eric Chan-Tin, George K. Thiruvathukal, Tamer Abuhmed
Abstract: Deep Learning (DL) is rapidly maturing to the point that it can be used in safety- and security-crucial applications. However, adversarial samples, which are undetectable to the human eye, pose a serious threat that can cause the model to misbehave and compromise the performance of such applications. Addressing the robustness of DL models has become crucial to understanding and defending against adversarial attacks. In this study, we perform comprehensive experiments to examine the effect of adversarial attacks and defenses on various model architectures across well-known datasets. Our research focuses on black-box attacks such as SimBA, HopSkipJump, MGAAttack, and boundary attacks, as well as preprocessor-based defensive mechanisms, including bits squeezing, median smoothing, and JPEG filter. Experimenting with various models, our results demonstrate that the level of noise needed for the attack increases as the number of layers increases. Moreover, the attack success rate decreases as the number of layers increases. This indicates that model complexity and robustness have a significant relationship. Investigating the diversity and robustness relationship, our experiments with diverse models show that having a large number of parameters does not imply higher robustness. Our experiments extend to show the effects of the training dataset on model robustness. Using various datasets such as ImageNet-1000, CIFAR-100, and CIFAR-10 are used to evaluate the black-box attacks. Considering the multiple dimensions of our analysis, e.g., model complexity and training dataset, we examined the behavior of black-box attacks when models apply defenses. Our results show that applying defense strategies can significantly reduce attack effectiveness. This research provides in-depth analysis and insight into the robustness of DL models against various attacks, and defenses.
Authors: Sung Moon Ko, Sumin Lee, Dae-Woong Jeong, Hyunseung Kim, Chanhui Lee, Soorin Yim, Sehui Han
Abstract: Molecular datasets often suffer from a lack of data. It is well-known that gathering data is difficult due to the complexity of experimentation or simulation involved. Here, we leverage mutual information across different tasks in molecular data to address this issue. We extend an algorithm that utilizes the geometric characteristics of the encoding space, known as the Geometrically Aligned Transfer Encoder (GATE), to a multi-task setup. Thus, we connect multiple molecular tasks by aligning the curved coordinates onto locally flat coordinates, ensuring the flow of information from source tasks to support performance on target data.
Authors: Ksenija Stepanovic, Wendelin B\"ohmer, Mathijs de Weerdt
Abstract: Traditional mathematical programming solvers require long computational times to solve constrained minimization problems of complex and large-scale physical systems. Therefore, these problems are often transformed into unconstrained ones, and solved with computationally efficient optimization approaches based on first-order information, such as the gradient descent method. However, for unconstrained problems, balancing the minimization of the objective function with the reduction of constraint violations is challenging. We consider the class of time-dependent minimization problems with increasing (possibly) nonlinear and non-convex objective function and non-decreasing (possibly) nonlinear and non-convex inequality constraints. To efficiently solve them, we propose a penalty-based guardrail algorithm (PGA). This algorithm adapts a standard penalty-based method by dynamically updating the right-hand side of the constraints with a guardrail variable which adds a margin to prevent violations. We evaluate PGA on two novel application domains: a simplified model of a district heating system and an optimization model derived from learned deep neural networks. Our method significantly outperforms mathematical programming solvers and the standard penalty-based method, and achieves better performance and faster convergence than a state-of-the-art algorithm (IPDD) within a specified time limit.
Authors: Lea Schaab, Anna Kruspe
Abstract: Sentiment or mood can express themselves on various levels in music. In automatic analysis, the actual audio data is usually analyzed, but the lyrics can also play a crucial role in the perception of moods. We first evaluate various models for sentiment analysis based on lyrics and audio separately. The corresponding approaches already show satisfactory results, but they also exhibit weaknesses, the causes of which we examine in more detail. Furthermore, different approaches to combining the audio and lyrics results are proposed and evaluated. Considering both modalities generally leads to improved performance. We investigate misclassifications and (also intentional) contradictions between audio and lyrics sentiment more closely, and identify possible causes. Finally, we address fundamental problems in this research area, such as high subjectivity, lack of data, and inconsistency in emotion taxonomies.
Authors: Mahmoud Masoud, Ahmed Abdelhay, Mohammed Elhenawy
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are deep learning models designed to generate text based on textual input. Although researchers have been developing these models for more complex tasks such as code generation and general reasoning, few efforts have explored how LLMs can be applied to combinatorial problems. In this research, we investigate the potential of LLMs to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). Utilizing GPT-3.5 Turbo, we conducted experiments employing various approaches, including zero-shot in-context learning, few-shot in-context learning, and chain-of-thoughts (CoT). Consequently, we fine-tuned GPT-3.5 Turbo to solve a specific problem size and tested it using a set of various instance sizes. The fine-tuned models demonstrated promising performance on problems identical in size to the training instances and generalized well to larger problems. Furthermore, to improve the performance of the fine-tuned model without incurring additional training costs, we adopted a self-ensemble approach to improve the quality of the solutions.
Authors: Shaghayegh Najari, Davood Rafiee, Mostafa Salehi, Reza Farahbakhsh
Abstract: Social bots play a significant role in many online social networks (OSN) as they imitate human behavior. This fact raises difficult questions about their capabilities and potential risks. Given the recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI), social bots are capable of producing highly realistic and complex content that mimics human creativity. As the malicious social bots emerge to deceive people with their unrealistic content, identifying them and distinguishing the content they produce has become an actual challenge for numerous social platforms. Several approaches to this problem have already been proposed in the literature, but the proposed solutions have not been widely evaluated. To address this issue, we evaluate the behavior of a text-based bot detector in a competitive environment where some scenarios are proposed: \textit{First}, the tug-of-war between a bot and a bot detector is examined. It is interesting to analyze which party is more likely to prevail and which circumstances influence these expectations. In this regard, we model the problem as a synthetic adversarial game in which a conversational bot and a bot detector are engaged in strategic online interactions. \textit{Second}, the bot detection model is evaluated under attack examples generated by a social bot; to this end, we poison the dataset with attack examples and evaluate the model performance under this condition. \textit{Finally}, to investigate the impact of the dataset, a cross-domain analysis is performed. Through our comprehensive evaluation of different categories of social bots using two benchmark datasets, we were able to demonstrate some achivement that could be utilized in future works.
Authors: Patrick Krauss, Jannik H\"osch, Claus Metzner, Andreas Maier, Peter Uhrig, Achim Schilling
Abstract: The ability to transmit and receive complex information via language is unique to humans and is the basis of traditions, culture and versatile social interactions. Through the disruptive introduction of transformer based large language models (LLMs) humans are not the only entity to "understand" and produce language any more. In the present study, we have performed the first steps to use LLMs as a model to understand fundamental mechanisms of language processing in neural networks, in order to make predictions and generate hypotheses on how the human brain does language processing. Thus, we have used ChatGPT to generate seven different stylistic variations of ten different narratives (Aesop's fables). We used these stories as input for the open source LLM BERT and have analyzed the activation patterns of the hidden units of BERT using multi-dimensional scaling and cluster analysis. We found that the activation vectors of the hidden units cluster according to stylistic variations in earlier layers of BERT (1) than narrative content (4-5). Despite the fact that BERT consists of 12 identical building blocks that are stacked and trained on large text corpora, the different layers perform different tasks. This is a very useful model of the human brain, where self-similar structures, i.e. different areas of the cerebral cortex, can have different functions and are therefore well suited to processing language in a very efficient way. The proposed approach has the potential to open the black box of LLMs on the one hand, and might be a further step to unravel the neural processes underlying human language processing and cognition in general.
Authors: Anton Plaksin, Vitaly Kalev
Abstract: Robust Reinforcement Learning (RRL) is a promising Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm aimed at training robust to uncertainty or disturbances models, making them more efficient for real-world applications. Following this paradigm, uncertainty or disturbances are interpreted as actions of a second adversarial agent, and thus, the problem is reduced to seeking the agents' policies robust to any opponent's actions. This paper is the first to propose considering the RRL problems within the positional differential game theory, which helps us to obtain theoretically justified intuition to develop a centralized Q-learning approach. Namely, we prove that under Isaacs's condition (sufficiently general for real-world dynamical systems), the same Q-function can be utilized as an approximate solution of both minimax and maximin Bellman equations. Based on these results, we present the Isaacs Deep Q-Network algorithms and demonstrate their superiority compared to other baseline RRL and Multi-Agent RL algorithms in various environments.
Authors: Dmytro Mozolevskyi, Waseem AlShikh
Abstract: This research paper presents a comprehensive analysis of integrating advanced language models with search and retrieval systems in the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing. The objective is to evaluate and compare various state-of-the-art methods based on their performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The analysis explores different combinations of technologies, including Azure Cognitive Search Retriever with GPT-4, Pinecone's Canopy framework, Langchain with Pinecone and different language models (OpenAI, Cohere), LlamaIndex with Weaviate Vector Store's hybrid search, Google's RAG implementation on Cloud VertexAI-Search, Amazon SageMaker's RAG, and a novel approach called KG-FID Retrieval. The motivation for this analysis arises from the increasing demand for robust and responsive question-answering systems in various domains. The RobustQA metric is used to evaluate the performance of these systems under diverse paraphrasing of questions. The report aims to provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each method, facilitating informed decisions in the deployment and development of AI-driven search and retrieval systems.
Authors: Gabriel Freedman, Adam Dejl, Deniz Gorur, Xiang Yin, Antonio Rago, Francesca Toni
Abstract: The diversity of knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to apply this knowledge zero-shot in a range of settings makes them a promising candidate for use in decision-making. However, they are currently limited by their inability to reliably provide outputs which are explainable and contestable. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile these strengths and weaknesses by introducing a method for supplementing LLMs with argumentative reasoning. Concretely, we introduce argumentative LLMs, a method utilising LLMs to construct argumentation frameworks, which then serve as the basis for formal reasoning in decision-making. The interpretable nature of these argumentation frameworks and formal reasoning means that any decision made by the supplemented LLM may be naturally explained to, and contested by, humans. We demonstrate the effectiveness of argumentative LLMs experimentally in the decision-making task of claim verification. We obtain results that are competitive with, and in some cases surpass, comparable state-of-the-art techniques.
Authors: Nicolas Dewolf
Abstract: In the past decades, most work in the area of data analysis and machine learning was focused on optimizing predictive models and getting better results than what was possible with existing models. To what extent the metrics with which such improvements were measured were accurately capturing the intended goal, whether the numerical differences in the resulting values were significant, or whether uncertainty played a role in this study and if it should have been taken into account, was of secondary importance. Whereas probability theory, be it frequentist or Bayesian, used to be the gold standard in science before the advent of the supercomputer, it was quickly replaced in favor of black box models and sheer computing power because of their ability to handle large data sets. This evolution sadly happened at the expense of interpretability and trustworthiness. However, while people are still trying to improve the predictive power of their models, the community is starting to realize that for many applications it is not so much the exact prediction that is of importance, but rather the variability or uncertainty. The work in this dissertation tries to further the quest for a world where everyone is aware of uncertainty, of how important it is and how to embrace it instead of fearing it. A specific, though general, framework that allows anyone to obtain accurate uncertainty estimates is singled out and analysed. Certain aspects and applications of the framework -- dubbed `conformal prediction' -- are studied in detail. Whereas many approaches to uncertainty quantification make strong assumptions about the data, conformal prediction is, at the time of writing, the only framework that deserves the title `distribution-free'. No parametric assumptions have to be made and the nonparametric results also hold without having to resort to the law of large numbers in the asymptotic regime.
Authors: Jorge Martinez-Gil
Abstract: The capability of accurately determining code similarity is crucial in many tasks related to software development. For example, it might be essential to identify code duplicates for performing software maintenance. This research introduces a novel ensemble learning approach for code similarity assessment, combining the strengths of multiple unsupervised similarity measures. The key idea is that the strengths of a diverse set of similarity measures can complement each other and mitigate individual weaknesses, leading to improved performance. Preliminary results show that while Transformers-based CodeBERT and its variant GraphCodeBERT are undoubtedly the best option in the presence of abundant training data, in the case of specific small datasets (up to 500 samples), our ensemble achieves similar results, without prejudice to the interpretability of the resulting solution, and with a much lower associated carbon footprint due to training. The source code of this novel approach can be downloaded from https://github.com/jorge-martinez-gil/ensemble-codesim.
URLs: https://github.com/jorge-martinez-gil/ensemble-codesim.
Authors: No\'e Tits, Prernna Bhatnagar, Thierry Dutoit
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel approach for text independent phone-to-audio alignment based on phoneme recognition, representation learning and knowledge transfer. Our method leverages a self-supervised model (wav2vec2) fine-tuned for phoneme recognition using a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss, a dimension reduction model and a frame-level phoneme classifier trained thanks to forced-alignment labels (using Montreal Forced Aligner) to produce multi-lingual phonetic representations, thus requiring minimal additional training. We evaluate our model using synthetic native data from the TIMIT dataset and the SCRIBE dataset for American and British English, respectively. Our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art (charsiu) in statistical metrics and has applications in language learning and speech processing systems. We leave experiments on other languages for future work but the design of the system makes it easily adaptable to other languages.
Authors: Federica Fieramosca, Vittorio Rampa, Michele D'Amico, Stefano Savazzi
Abstract: Electromagnetic (EM) body models designed to predict Radio-Frequency (RF) propagation are time-consuming methods which prevent their adoption in strict real-time computational imaging problems, such as human body localization and sensing. Physics-informed Generative Neural Network (GNN) models have been recently proposed to reproduce EM effects, namely to simulate or reconstruct missing data or samples by incorporating relevant EM principles and constraints. The paper discusses a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) model which is trained to reproduce the effects of human motions on the EM field and incorporate EM body diffraction principles. Proposed physics-informed generative neural network models are verified against both classical diffraction-based EM tools and full-wave EM body simulations.
Authors: Yu Pan, Yuguang Yang, Heng Lu, Lei Ma, Jianjun Zhao
Abstract: The continuous evolution of pre-trained speech models has greatly advanced Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). However, there is still potential for enhancement in the performance of these methods. In this paper, we present GMP-ATL (Gender-augmented Multi-scale Pseudo-label Adaptive Transfer Learning), a novel HuBERT-based adaptive transfer learning framework for SER. Specifically, GMP-ATL initially employs the pre-trained HuBERT, implementing multi-task learning and multi-scale k-means clustering to acquire frame-level gender-augmented multi-scale pseudo-labels. Then, to fully leverage both obtained frame-level and utterance-level emotion labels, we incorporate model retraining and fine-tuning methods to further optimize GMP-ATL. Experiments on IEMOCAP show that our GMP-ATL achieves superior recognition performance, with a WAR of 80.0\% and a UAR of 82.0\%, surpassing state-of-the-art unimodal SER methods, while also yielding comparable results with multimodal SER approaches.
Authors: Simone Brusatin, Tommaso Padoan, Andrea Coletta, Domenico Delli Gatti, Aldo Glielmo
Abstract: Agent-based models (ABMs) are simulation models used in economics to overcome some of the limitations of traditional frameworks based on general equilibrium assumptions. However, agents within an ABM follow predetermined, not fully rational, behavioural rules which can be cumbersome to design and difficult to justify. Here we leverage multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) to expand the capabilities of ABMs with the introduction of fully rational agents that learn their policy by interacting with the environment and maximising a reward function. Specifically, we propose a 'Rational macro ABM' (R-MABM) framework by extending a paradigmatic macro ABM from the economic literature. We show that gradually substituting ABM firms in the model with RL agents, trained to maximise profits, allows for a thorough study of the impact of rationality on the economy. We find that RL agents spontaneously learn three distinct strategies for maximising profits, with the optimal strategy depending on the level of market competition and rationality. We also find that RL agents with independent policies, and without the ability to communicate with each other, spontaneously learn to segregate into different strategic groups, thus increasing market power and overall profits. Finally, we find that a higher degree of rationality in the economy always improves the macroeconomic environment as measured by total output, depending on the specific rational policy, this can come at the cost of higher instability. Our R-MABM framework is general, it allows for stable multi-agent learning, and represents a principled and robust direction to extend existing economic simulators.
Authors: Mohamad Al Mdfaa, Raghad Salameh, Sergey Zagoruyko, Gonzalo Ferrer
Abstract: In the field of robotics and computer vision, efficient and accurate semantic mapping remains a significant challenge due to the growing demand for intelligent machines that can comprehend and interact with complex environments. Conventional panoptic mapping methods, however, are limited by predefined semantic classes, thus making them ineffective for handling novel or unforeseen objects. In response to this limitation, we introduce the Unified Promptable Panoptic Mapping (UPPM) method. UPPM utilizes recent advances in foundation models to enable real-time, on-demand label generation using natural language prompts. By incorporating a dynamic labeling strategy into traditional panoptic mapping techniques, UPPM provides significant improvements in adaptability and versatility while maintaining high performance levels in map reconstruction. We demonstrate our approach on real-world and simulated datasets. Results show that UPPM can accurately reconstruct scenes and segment objects while generating rich semantic labels through natural language interactions. A series of ablation experiments validated the advantages of foundation model-based labeling over fixed label sets.
Authors: Hanwen Liu, Daniel Hajialigol, Benny Antony, Aiguo Han, Xuan Wang
Abstract: Deciphering the intricacies of the human brain has captivated curiosity for centuries. Recent strides in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology, particularly using motor imagery, have restored motor functions such as reaching, grasping, and walking in paralyzed individuals. However, unraveling natural language from brain signals remains a formidable challenge. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique used to record electrical activity in the brain by placing electrodes on the scalp. Previous studies of EEG-to-text decoding have achieved high accuracy on small closed vocabularies, but still fall short of high accuracy when dealing with large open vocabularies. We propose a novel method, EEG2TEXT, to improve the accuracy of open vocabulary EEG-to-text decoding. Specifically, EEG2TEXT leverages EEG pre-training to enhance the learning of semantics from EEG signals and proposes a multi-view transformer to model the EEG signal processing by different spatial regions of the brain. Experiments show that EEG2TEXT has superior performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline methods by a large margin of up to 5% in absolute BLEU and ROUGE scores. EEG2TEXT shows great potential for a high-performance open-vocabulary brain-to-text system to facilitate communication.
Authors: Hsuvas Borkakoty, Luis Espinosa-Anke
Abstract: Hoaxes are a recognised form of disinformation created deliberately, with potential serious implications in the credibility of reference knowledge resources such as Wikipedia. What makes detecting Wikipedia hoaxes hard is that they often are written according to the official style guidelines. In this work, we first provide a systematic analysis of the similarities and discrepancies between legitimate and hoax Wikipedia articles, and introduce Hoaxpedia, a collection of 311 Hoax articles (from existing literature as well as official Wikipedia lists) alongside semantically similar real articles. We report results of binary classification experiments in the task of predicting whether a Wikipedia article is real or hoax, and analyze several settings as well as a range of language models. Our results suggest that detecting deceitful content in Wikipedia based on content alone, despite not having been explored much in the past, is a promising direction.
Authors: Negar Arabzadeh, Siging Huo, Nikhil Mehta, Qinqyun Wu, Chi Wang, Ahmed Awadallah, Charles L. A. Clarke, Julia Kiseleva
Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a surge in applications that facilitate collaboration among multiple agents, assisting humans in their daily tasks. However, a significant gap remains in assessing to what extent LLM-powered applications genuinely enhance user experience and task execution efficiency. This highlights the need to verify utility of LLM-powered applications, particularly by ensuring alignment between the application's functionality and end-user needs. We introduce AgentEval, a novel framework designed to simplify the utility verification process by automatically proposing a set of criteria tailored to the unique purpose of any given application. This allows for a comprehensive assessment, quantifying the utility of an application against the suggested criteria. We present a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness and robustness of AgentEval for two open source datasets including Math Problem solving and ALFWorld House-hold related tasks. For reproducibility purposes, we make the data, code and all the logs publicly available at https://bit.ly/3w3yKcS .
URLs: https://bit.ly/3w3yKcS
Authors: Sang Bin Moon, Abolfazl Hashemi
Abstract: The Adversarial Markov Decision Process (AMDP) is a learning framework that deals with unknown and varying tasks in decision-making applications like robotics and recommendation systems. A major limitation of the AMDP formalism, however, is pessimistic regret analysis results in the sense that although the cost function can change from one episode to the next, the evolution in many settings is not adversarial. To address this, we introduce and study a new variant of AMDP, which aims to minimize regret while utilizing a set of cost predictors. For this setting, we develop a new policy search method that achieves a sublinear optimistic regret with high probability, that is a regret bound which gracefully degrades with the estimation power of the cost predictors. Establishing such optimistic regret bounds is nontrivial given that (i) as we demonstrate, the existing importance-weighted cost estimators cannot establish optimistic bounds, and (ii) the feedback model of AMDP is different (and more realistic) than the existing optimistic online learning works. Our result, in particular, hinges upon developing a novel optimistically biased cost estimator that leverages cost predictors and enables a high-probability regret analysis without imposing restrictive assumptions. We further discuss practical extensions of the proposed scheme and demonstrate its efficacy numerically.
Authors: Michael R. Lyu, Baishakhi Ray, Abhik Roychoudhury, Shin Hwei Tan, Patanamon Thongtanunam
Abstract: Automatic programming has seen increasing popularity due to the emergence of tools like GitHub Copilot which rely on Large Language Models (LLMs). At the same time, automatically generated code faces challenges during deployment due to concerns around quality and trust. In this article, we study automated coding in a general sense and study the concerns around code quality, security and related issues of programmer responsibility. These are key issues for organizations while deciding on the usage of automatically generated code. We discuss how advances in software engineering such as program repair and analysis can enable automatic programming. We conclude with a forward looking view, focusing on the programming environment of the near future, where programmers may need to switch to different roles to fully utilize the power of automatic programming. Automated repair of automatically generated programs from LLMs, can help produce higher assurance code from LLMs, along with evidence of assurance
Authors: Lujing Zhang, Aaron Roth, Linjun Zhang
Abstract: This paper introduces a framework for post-processing machine learning models so that their predictions satisfy multi-group fairness guarantees. Based on the celebrated notion of multicalibration, we introduce $(\mathbf{s},\mathcal{G}, \alpha)-$GMC (Generalized Multi-Dimensional Multicalibration) for multi-dimensional mappings $\mathbf{s}$, constraint set $\mathcal{G}$, and a pre-specified threshold level $\alpha$. We propose associated algorithms to achieve this notion in general settings. This framework is then applied to diverse scenarios encompassing different fairness concerns, including false negative rate control in image segmentation, prediction set conditional uncertainty quantification in hierarchical classification, and de-biased text generation in language models. We conduct numerical studies on several datasets and tasks.
Authors: Deepa Tilwani, Yash Saxena, Ali Mohammadi, Edward Raff, Amit Sheth, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Manas Gaur
Abstract: Automatic citation generation for sentences in a document or report is paramount for intelligence analysts, cybersecurity, news agencies, and education personnel. In this research, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating references based on two forms of sentence queries: (a) Direct Queries, LLMs are asked to provide author names of the given research article, and (b) Indirect Queries, LLMs are asked to provide the title of a mentioned article when given a sentence from a different article. To demonstrate where LLM stands in this task, we introduce a large dataset called REASONS comprising abstracts of the 12 most popular domains of scientific research on arXiv. From around 20K research articles, we make the following deductions on public and proprietary LLMs: (a) State-of-the-art, often called anthropomorphic GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, suffers from high pass percentage (PP) to minimize the hallucination rate (HR). When tested with Perplexity.ai (7B), they unexpectedly made more errors; (b) Augmenting relevant metadata lowered the PP and gave the lowest HR; (c) Advance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) using Mistral demonstrates consistent and robust citation support on indirect queries and matched performance to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. The HR across all domains and models decreased by an average of 41.93% and the PP was reduced to 0% in most cases. In terms of generation quality, the average F1 Score and BLEU were 68.09% and 57.51%, respectively; (d) Testing with adversarial samples showed that LLMs, including the Advance RAG Mistral, struggle to understand context, but the extent of this issue was small in Mistral and GPT-4-Preview. Our study con tributes valuable insights into the reliability of RAG for automated citation generation tasks.
Authors: Hugo Lauren\c{c}on, L\'eo Tronchon, Matthieu Cord, Victor Sanh
Abstract: The growing interest in vision-language models (VLMs) has been driven by improvements in large language models and vision transformers. Despite the abundance of literature on this subject, we observe that critical decisions regarding the design of VLMs are often not justified. We argue that these unsupported decisions impede progress in the field by making it difficult to identify which choices improve model performance. To address this issue, we conduct extensive experiments around pre-trained models, architecture choice, data, and training methods. Our consolidation of findings includes the development of Idefics2, an efficient foundational VLM of 8 billion parameters. Idefics2 achieves state-of-the-art performance within its size category across various multimodal benchmarks, and is often on par with models four times its size. We release the model (base, instructed, and chat) along with the datasets created for its training.
Authors: Piotr Padlewski, Max Bain, Matthew Henderson, Zhongkai Zhu, Nishant Relan, Hai Pham, Donovan Ong, Kaloyan Aleksiev, Aitor Ormazabal, Samuel Phua, Ethan Yeo, Eugenie Lamprecht, Qi Liu, Yuqi Wang, Eric Chen, Deyu Fu, Lei Li, Che Zheng, Cyprien de Masson d'Autume, Dani Yogatama, Mikel Artetxe, Yi Tay
Abstract: We introduce Vibe-Eval: a new open benchmark and framework for evaluating multimodal chat models. Vibe-Eval consists of 269 visual understanding prompts, including 100 of hard difficulty, complete with gold-standard responses authored by experts. Vibe-Eval is open-ended and challenging with dual objectives: (i) vibe checking multimodal chat models for day-to-day tasks and (ii) rigorously testing and probing the capabilities of present frontier models. Notably, our hard set contains >50% questions that all frontier models answer incorrectly. We explore the nuances of designing, evaluating, and ranking models on ultra challenging prompts. We also discuss trade-offs between human and automatic evaluation, and show that automatic model evaluation using Reka Core roughly correlates to human judgment. We offer free API access for the purpose of lightweight evaluation and plan to conduct formal human evaluations for public models that perform well on the Vibe-Eval's automatic scores. We release the evaluation code and data, see https://github.com/reka-ai/reka-vibe-eval
Authors: Matthew Hausknecht, Peter Stone
Abstract: Recent work has shown that deep neural networks are capable of approximating both value functions and policies in reinforcement learning domains featuring continuous state and action spaces. However, to the best of our knowledge no previous work has succeeded at using deep neural networks in structured (parameterized) continuous action spaces. To fill this gap, this paper focuses on learning within the domain of simulated RoboCup soccer, which features a small set of discrete action types, each of which is parameterized with continuous variables. The best learned agent can score goals more reliably than the 2012 RoboCup champion agent. As such, this paper represents a successful extension of deep reinforcement learning to the class of parameterized action space MDPs.
Authors: Robin Bloomfield, John Rushby
Abstract: An assurance case is intended to provide justifiable confidence in the truth of its top claim, which typically concerns safety or security. A natural question is then "how much" confidence does the case provide? We argue that confidence cannot be reduced to a single attribute or measurement. Instead, we suggest it should be based on attributes that draw on three different perspectives: positive, negative, and residual doubts. Positive Perspectives consider the extent to which the evidence and overall argument of the case combine to make a positive statement justifying belief in its claims. We set a high bar for justification, requiring it to be indefeasible. The primary positive measure for this is soundness, which interprets the argument as a logical proof. Confidence in evidence can be expressed probabilistically and we use confirmation measures to ensure that the "weight" of evidence crosses some threshold. In addition, probabilities can be aggregated from evidence through the steps of the argument using probability logics to yield what we call probabilistic valuations for the claims. Negative Perspectives record doubts and challenges to the case, typically expressed as defeaters, and their exploration and resolution. Assurance developers must guard against confirmation bias and should vigorously explore potential defeaters as they develop the case, and should record them and their resolution to avoid rework and to aid reviewers. Residual Doubts: the world is uncertain so not all potential defeaters can be resolved. We explore risks and may deem them acceptable or unavoidable. It is crucial however that these judgments are conscious ones and that they are recorded in the assurance case. This report examines the perspectives in detail and indicates how Clarissa, our prototype toolset for Assurance 2.0, assists in their evaluation.
Authors: Stephen B. Broomell, Christian Wagner
Abstract: Information aggregation is a vital tool for human and machine decision making in the presence of uncertainty. Traditionally, approaches to aggregation broadly diverge into two categories, those which attribute a worth or weight to information sources and those which attribute said worth to the evidence arising from said sources. The latter is pervasive in the physical sciences, underpinning linear order statistics and enabling non-linear aggregation. The former is popular in the social sciences, providing interpretable insight on the sources. While prior work has identified the need to apply both approaches simultaneously, it has yet to conceptually integrate both approaches and provide a semantic interpretation of the arising aggregation approach. Here, we conceptually integrate both approaches in a novel joint weighted averaging operator. We leverage compositional geometry to underpin this integration, showing how it provides a systematic basis for the combination of weighted aggregation operators--which has thus far not been considered in the literature. We proceed to show how the resulting operator systematically integrates a priori beliefs about the worth of both sources and evidence, reflecting the semantic integration of both weighting strategies. We conclude and highlight the potential of the operator across disciplines, from machine learning to psychology.
Authors: Arvid Becker, Pedro Cabalar, Mart\'in Di\'eguez, Torsten Schaub, Anna Schuhmann
Abstract: In temporal extensions of Answer Set Programming (ASP) based on linear-time, the behavior of dynamic systems is captured by sequences of states. While this representation reflects their relative order, it abstracts away the specific times associated with each state. However, timing constraints are important in many applications like, for instance, when planning and scheduling go hand in hand. We address this by developing a metric extension of linear-time temporal equilibrium logic, in which temporal operators are constrained by intervals over natural numbers. The resulting Metric Equilibrium Logic provides the foundation of an ASP-based approach for specifying qualitative and quantitative dynamic constraints. To this end, we define a translation of metric formulas into monadic first-order formulas and give a correspondence between their models in Metric Equilibrium Logic and Monadic Quantified Equilibrium Logic, respectively. Interestingly, our translation provides a blue print for implementation in terms of ASP modulo difference constraints.
Authors: Dino Pedreschi, Luca Pappalardo, Emanuele Ferragina, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Frank Dignum, Virginia Dignum, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Fosca Giannotti, Janos Kertesz, Alistair Knott, Yannis Ioannidis, Paul Lukowicz, Andrea Passarella, Alex Sandy Pentland, John Shawe-Taylor, Alessandro Vespignani
Abstract: Human-AI coevolution, defined as a process in which humans and AI algorithms continuously influence each other, increasingly characterises our society, but is understudied in artificial intelligence and complexity science literature. Recommender systems and assistants play a prominent role in human-AI coevolution, as they permeate many facets of daily life and influence human choices on online platforms. The interaction between users and AI results in a potentially endless feedback loop, wherein users' choices generate data to train AI models, which, in turn, shape subsequent user preferences. This human-AI feedback loop has peculiar characteristics compared to traditional human-machine interaction and gives rise to complex and often ``unintended'' social outcomes. This paper introduces Coevolution AI as the cornerstone for a new field of study at the intersection between AI and complexity science focused on the theoretical, empirical, and mathematical investigation of the human-AI feedback loop. In doing so, we: (i) outline the pros and cons of existing methodologies and highlight shortcomings and potential ways for capturing feedback loop mechanisms; (ii) propose a reflection at the intersection between complexity science, AI and society; (iii) provide real-world examples for different human-AI ecosystems; and (iv) illustrate challenges to the creation of such a field of study, conceptualising them at increasing levels of abstraction, i.e., technical, epistemological, legal and socio-political.
Authors: Wanpeng Zhang, Zongqing Lu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success across various domains. However, their application in complex decision-making tasks frequently necessitates intricate prompt engineering or fine-tuning, leading to challenges in unseen downstream tasks and heavy demands on computational resources. Meanwhile, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been recognized as effective in decision-making problems but struggles in environments with sparse rewards, such as open-world games. To overcome these challenges, we introduce AdaRefiner, a novel framework designed to enhance the synergy between LLMs and RL feedback. The key component of AdaRefiner is a lightweight Adapter Language Model (LM), which automatically refines task comprehension based on feedback from RL agents. This method mitigates the need for intricate prompt engineering and intensive LLM fine-tuning while maintaining the LLMs' generalization abilities and enhancing their decision-making capabilities in downstream tasks. Empirical evaluations of AdaRefiner on 22 diverse tasks within the open-world game Crafter have demonstrated its superior effectiveness, especially in guiding agents towards higher-level and common-sense skills. Our work makes contributions to the automatic self-refinement of LLMs with RL feedback, offering a more adaptable and efficient solution for complex decision-making problems.
Authors: Jae Hee Lee, Sergio Lanza, Stefan Wermter
Abstract: In this paper, we review recent approaches for explaining concepts in neural networks. Concepts can act as a natural link between learning and reasoning: once the concepts are identified that a neural learning system uses, one can integrate those concepts with a reasoning system for inference or use a reasoning system to act upon them to improve or enhance the learning system. On the other hand, knowledge can not only be extracted from neural networks but concept knowledge can also be inserted into neural network architectures. Since integrating learning and reasoning is at the core of neuro-symbolic AI, the insights gained from this survey can serve as an important step towards realizing neuro-symbolic AI based on explainable concepts.
Authors: Shaokun Zhang, Jieyu Zhang, Jiale Liu, Linxin Song, Chi Wang, Ranjay Krishna, Qingyun Wu
Abstract: Researchers and practitioners have recently reframed powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents, enabling them to automate complex tasks largely via the use of specialized functions. To facilitate the development of LLM agents, we present a novel paradigm of training LLM agents without modifying the LLM weights, which is particularly useful when the LLMs are difficult or inaccessible for modifications. Inspired by how humans continuously forge tools to adapt to real-world tasks, rather than change our biological structure to fit a static set of tools, we propose to progressively forge agent's functions to better solve the downstream tasks instead of modifying the LLM weights. By treating the functions as learnable `agent parameters' and leveraging the fundamental idea of model training in artificial intelligence, we develop AgentOptimizer that employs the LLM to update agents' functions and devise an agent training algorithm with two strategies, roll-back, and early-stop, to streamline the training process. With extensive experiments, we showcase that the agent training paradigm could significantly improve the performance of representative LLM agents in various downstream tasks. We also study the behavior of the agent training regarding aspects like the learning curve and domain transferability.
Authors: Juan G. Colonna, Ahmed A. Fares, M\'arcio Duarte, Ricardo Sousa
Abstract: Process mining offers powerful techniques for discovering, analyzing, and enhancing real-world business processes. In this context, Petri nets provide an expressive means of modeling process behavior. However, directly analyzing and comparing intricate Petri net presents challenges. This study introduces PetriNet2Vec, a novel unsupervised methodology based on Natural Language Processing concepts inspired by Doc2Vec and designed to facilitate the effective comparison, clustering, and classification of process models represented as embedding vectors. These embedding vectors allow us to quantify similarities and relationships between different process models. Our methodology was experimentally validated using the PDC Dataset, featuring 96 diverse Petri net models. We performed cluster analysis, created UMAP visualizations, and trained a decision tree to provide compelling evidence for the capability of PetriNet2Vec to discern meaningful patterns and relationships among process models and their constituent tasks. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrated that PetriNet2Vec was capable of learning the structure of Petri nets, as well as the main properties used to simulate the process models of our dataset. Furthermore, our results showcase the utility of the learned embeddings in two crucial downstream tasks within process mining enhancement: process classification and process retrieval.
Authors: Gangshan Jing, He Bai, Jemin George, Aranya Chakrabortty, Piyush K. Sharma
Abstract: Recently introduced distributed zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) algorithms have shown their utility in distributed reinforcement learning (RL). Unfortunately, in the gradient estimation process, almost all of them require random samples with the same dimension as the global variable and/or require evaluation of the global cost function, which may induce high estimation variance for large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed zeroth-order algorithm by leveraging the network structure inherent in the optimization objective, which allows each agent to estimate its local gradient by local cost evaluation independently, without use of any consensus protocol. The proposed algorithm exhibits an asynchronous update scheme, and is designed for stochastic non-convex optimization with a possibly non-convex feasible domain based on the block coordinate descent method. The algorithm is later employed as a distributed model-free RL algorithm for distributed linear quadratic regulator design, where a learning graph is designed to describe the required interaction relationship among agents in distributed learning. We provide an empirical validation of the proposed algorithm to benchmark its performance on convergence rate and variance against a centralized ZOO algorithm.
Authors: Siddhant Kharbanda, Atmadeep Banerjee, Devaansh Gupta, Akash Palrecha, Rohit Babbar
Abstract: Automatic annotation of short-text data to a large number of target labels, referred to as Short Text Extreme Classification, has found numerous applications including prediction of related searches and product recommendation. In this paper, we propose a convolutional architecture InceptionXML which is light-weight, yet powerful, and robust to the inherent lack of word-order in short-text queries encountered in search and recommendation. We demonstrate the efficacy of applying convolutions by recasting the operation along the embedding dimension instead of the word dimension as applied in conventional CNNs for text classification. Towards scaling our model to datasets with millions of labels, we also propose SyncXML pipeline which improves upon the shortcomings of the recently proposed dynamic hard-negative mining technique for label short-listing by synchronizing the label-shortlister and extreme classifier. SyncXML not only reduces the inference time to half but is also an order of magnitude smaller than state-of-the-art Astec in terms of model size. Through a comprehensive empirical comparison, we show that not only can InceptionXML outperform existing approaches on benchmark datasets but also the transformer baselines requiring only 2% FLOPs. The code for InceptionXML is available at https://github.com/xmc-aalto/inceptionxml.
Authors: Jon Donnelly, Alina Jade Barnett, Chaofan Chen
Abstract: We present a deformable prototypical part network (Deformable ProtoPNet), an interpretable image classifier that integrates the power of deep learning and the interpretability of case-based reasoning. This model classifies input images by comparing them with prototypes learned during training, yielding explanations in the form of "this looks like that." However, while previous methods use spatially rigid prototypes, we address this shortcoming by proposing spatially flexible prototypes. Each prototype is made up of several prototypical parts that adaptively change their relative spatial positions depending on the input image. Consequently, a Deformable ProtoPNet can explicitly capture pose variations and context, improving both model accuracy and the richness of explanations provided. Compared to other case-based interpretable models using prototypes, our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and gives an explanation with greater context. The code is available at https://github.com/jdonnelly36/Deformable-ProtoPNet.
Authors: Xin Wang, Ziwei Zhang, Haoyang Li, Wenwu Zhu
Abstract: Graph machine learning has been extensively studied in both academic and industry. However, as the literature on graph learning booms with a vast number of emerging methods and techniques, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually design the optimal machine learning algorithm for different graph-related tasks. To tackle the challenge, automated graph machine learning, which aims at discovering the best hyper-parameter and neural architecture configuration for different graph tasks/data without manual design, is gaining an increasing number of attentions from the research community. In this paper, we extensively discuss automated graph machine learning approaches, covering hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) and neural architecture search (NAS) for graph machine learning. We briefly overview existing libraries designed for either graph machine learning or automated machine learning respectively, and further in depth introduce AutoGL, our dedicated and the world's first open-source library for automated graph machine learning. Also, we describe a tailored benchmark that supports unified, reproducible, and efficient evaluations. Last but not least, we share our insights on future research directions for automated graph machine learning. This paper is the first systematic and comprehensive discussion of approaches, libraries as well as directions for automated graph machine learning.
Authors: Denise Moussa, Germans Hirsch, Christian Riess
Abstract: Freely available and easy-to-use audio editing tools make it straightforward to perform audio splicing. Convincing forgeries can be created by combining various speech samples from the same person. Detection of such splices is important both in the public sector when considering misinformation, and in a legal context to verify the integrity of evidence. Unfortunately, most existing detection algorithms for audio splicing use handcrafted features and make specific assumptions. However, criminal investigators are often faced with audio samples from unconstrained sources with unknown characteristics, which raises the need for more generally applicable methods. With this work, we aim to take a first step towards unconstrained audio splicing detection to address this need. We simulate various attack scenarios in the form of post-processing operations that may disguise splicing. We propose a Transformer sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) network for splicing detection and localization. Our extensive evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms existing dedicated approaches for splicing detection [3, 10] as well as the general-purpose networks EfficientNet [28] and RegNet [25].
Authors: Denise Moussa, Anatol Maier, Andreas Spruck, J\"urgen Seiler, Christian Riess
Abstract: Forensic license plate recognition (FLPR) remains an open challenge in legal contexts such as criminal investigations, where unreadable license plates (LPs) need to be deciphered from highly compressed and/or low resolution footage, e.g., from surveillance cameras. In this work, we propose a side-informed Transformer architecture that embeds knowledge on the input compression level to improve recognition under strong compression. We show the effectiveness of Transformers for license plate recognition (LPR) on a low-quality real-world dataset. We also provide a synthetic dataset that includes strongly degraded, illegible LP images and analyze the impact of knowledge embedding on it. The network outperforms existing FLPR methods and standard state-of-the art image recognition models while requiring less parameters. For the severest degraded images, we can improve recognition by up to 8.9 percent points.
Authors: Tsung-Wei Ke, Sangwoo Mo, Stella X. Yu
Abstract: Large vision and language models learned directly through image-text associations often lack detailed visual substantiation, whereas image segmentation tasks are treated separately from recognition, supervisedly learned without interconnections. Our key observation is that, while an image can be recognized in multiple ways, each has a consistent part-and-whole visual organization. Segmentation thus should be treated not as an end task to be mastered through supervised learning, but as an internal process that evolves with and supports the ultimate goal of recognition. We propose to integrate a hierarchical segmenter into the recognition process, train and adapt the entire model solely on image-level recognition objectives. We learn hierarchical segmentation for free alongside recognition, automatically uncovering part-to-whole relationships that not only underpin but also enhance recognition. Enhancing the Vision Transformer (ViT) with adaptive segment tokens and graph pooling, our model surpasses ViT in unsupervised part-whole discovery, semantic segmentation, image classification, and efficiency. Notably, our model (trained on unlabeled 1M ImageNet images) outperforms SAM (trained on 11M images and 1 billion masks) by absolute 8% in mIoU on PartImageNet object segmentation.
Authors: Silvia Beddar-Wiesing, Giuseppe Alessio D'Inverno, Caterina Graziani, Veronica Lachi, Alice Moallemy-Oureh, Franco Scarselli, Josephine Maria Thomas
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a large class of relational models for graph processing. Recent theoretical studies on the expressive power of GNNs have focused on two issues. On the one hand, it has been proven that GNNs are as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman test (1-WL) in their ability to distinguish graphs. Moreover, it has been shown that the equivalence enforced by 1-WL equals unfolding equivalence. On the other hand, GNNs turned out to be universal approximators on graphs modulo the constraints enforced by 1-WL/unfolding equivalence. However, these results only apply to Static Attributed Undirected Homogeneous Graphs (SAUHG) with node attributes. In contrast, real-life applications often involve a much larger variety of graph types. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical analysis of the expressive power of GNNs for two other graph domains that are particularly interesting in practical applications, namely dynamic graphs and SAUGHs with edge attributes. Dynamic graphs are widely used in modern applications; hence, the study of the expressive capability of GNNs in this domain is essential for practical reasons and, in addition, it requires a new analyzing approach due to the difference in the architecture of dynamic GNNs compared to static ones. On the other hand, the examination of SAUHGs is of particular relevance since they act as a standard form for all graph types: it has been shown that all graph types can be transformed without loss of information to SAUHGs with both attributes on nodes and edges. This paper considers generic GNN models and appropriate 1-WL tests for those domains. Then, the known results on the expressive power of GNNs are extended to the mentioned domains: it is proven that GNNs have the same capability as the 1-WL test, the 1-WL equivalence equals unfolding equivalence and that GNNs are universal approximators modulo 1-WL/unfolding equivalence.
Authors: Juyoung Yun, Byungkon Kang, Zhoulai Fu
Abstract: Lowering the precision of neural networks from the prevalent 32-bit precision has long been considered harmful to performance, despite the gain in space and time. Many works propose various techniques to implement half-precision neural networks, but none study pure 16-bit settings. This paper investigates the unexpected performance gain of pure 16-bit neural networks over the 32-bit networks in classification tasks. We present extensive experimental results that favorably compare various 16-bit neural networks' performance to those of the 32-bit models. In addition, a theoretical analysis of the efficiency of 16-bit models is provided, which is coupled with empirical evidence to back it up. Finally, we discuss situations in which low-precision training is indeed detrimental.
Authors: Xiyuan Wang, Haotong Yang, Muhan Zhang
Abstract: In this work, we propose a novel link prediction model and further boost it by studying graph incompleteness. First, we introduce MPNN-then-SF, an innovative architecture leveraging structural feature (SF) to guide MPNN's representation pooling, with its implementation, namely Neural Common Neighbor (NCN). NCN exhibits superior expressiveness and scalability compared with existing models, which can be classified into two categories: SF-then-MPNN, augmenting MPNN's input with SF, and SF-and-MPNN, decoupling SF and MPNN. Second, we investigate the impact of graph incompleteness -- the phenomenon that some links are unobserved in the input graph -- on SF, like the common neighbor. Through dataset visualization, we observe that incompleteness reduces common neighbors and induces distribution shifts, significantly affecting model performance. To address this issue, we propose to use a link prediction model to complete the common neighbor structure. Combining this method with NCN, we propose Neural Common Neighbor with Completion (NCNC). NCN and NCNC outperform recent strong baselines by large margins, and NCNC further surpasses state-of-the-art models in standard link prediction benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/GraphPKU/NeuralCommonNeighbor.
Authors: Yong Qing, Ke Li, Peng-Fei Zhou, Shi-Ju Ran
Abstract: Neural network (NN) designed for challenging machine learning tasks is in general a highly nonlinear mapping that contains massive variational parameters. High complexity of NN, if unbounded or unconstrained, might unpredictably cause severe issues including over-fitting, loss of generalization power, and unbearable cost of hardware. In this work, we propose a general compression scheme that significantly reduces the variational parameters of NN by encoding them to deep automatically-differentiable tensor network (ADTN) that contains exponentially-fewer free parameters. Superior compression performance of our scheme is demonstrated on several widely-recognized NN's (FC-2, LeNet-5, AlextNet, ZFNet and VGG-16) and datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100). For instance, we compress two linear layers in VGG-16 with approximately $10^{7}$ parameters to two ADTN's with just 424 parameters, where the testing accuracy on CIFAR-10 is improved from $90.17 \%$ to $91.74\%$. Our work suggests TN as an exceptionally efficient mathematical structure for representing the variational parameters of NN's, which exhibits superior compressibility over the commonly-used matrices and multi-way arrays.
Authors: Haozhe Jiang, Qiwen Cui, Zhihan Xiong, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
Abstract: We investigate learning the equilibria in non-stationary multi-agent systems and address the challenges that differentiate multi-agent learning from single-agent learning. Specifically, we focus on games with bandit feedback, where testing an equilibrium can result in substantial regret even when the gap to be tested is small, and the existence of multiple optimal solutions (equilibria) in stationary games poses extra challenges. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a versatile black-box approach applicable to a broad spectrum of problems, such as general-sum games, potential games, and Markov games, when equipped with appropriate learning and testing oracles for stationary environments. Our algorithms can achieve $\widetilde{O}\left(\Delta^{1/4}T^{3/4}\right)$ regret when the degree of nonstationarity, as measured by total variation $\Delta$, is known, and $\widetilde{O}\left(\Delta^{1/5}T^{4/5}\right)$ regret when $\Delta$ is unknown, where $T$ is the number of rounds. Meanwhile, our algorithm inherits the favorable dependence on number of agents from the oracles. As a side contribution that may be independent of interest, we show how to test for various types of equilibria by a black-box reduction to single-agent learning, which includes Nash equilibria, correlated equilibria, and coarse correlated equilibria.
Authors: Allan Jabri, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Emiel Hoogeboom, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Thomas Kipf
Abstract: Recent progress in 3D scene understanding enables scalable learning of representations across large datasets of diverse scenes. As a consequence, generalization to unseen scenes and objects, rendering novel views from just a single or a handful of input images, and controllable scene generation that supports editing, is now possible. However, training jointly on a large number of scenes typically compromises rendering quality when compared to single-scene optimized models such as NeRFs. In this paper, we leverage recent progress in diffusion models to equip 3D scene representation learning models with the ability to render high-fidelity novel views, while retaining benefits such as object-level scene editing to a large degree. In particular, we propose DORSal, which adapts a video diffusion architecture for 3D scene generation conditioned on frozen object-centric slot-based representations of scenes. On both complex synthetic multi-object scenes and on the real-world large-scale Street View dataset, we show that DORSal enables scalable neural rendering of 3D scenes with object-level editing and improves upon existing approaches.
Authors: Joern Ploennigs, Markus Berger
Abstract: AI image generators based on diffusion models have recently garnered attention for their capability to create images from simple text prompts. However, for practical use in civil engineering they need to be able to create specific construction plans for given constraints. This paper investigates the potential of current AI generators in addressing such challenges, specifically for the creation of simple floor plans. We explain how the underlying diffusion-models work and propose novel refinement approaches to improve semantic encoding and generation quality. In several experiments we show that we can improve validity of generated floor plans from 6% to 90%. Based on these results we derive future research challenges considering building information modelling. With this we provide: (i) evaluation of current generative AIs; (ii) propose improved refinement approaches; (iii) evaluate them on various examples; (iv) derive future directions for diffusion models in civil engineering.
Authors: Zijun Lin, Haidi Azaman, M Ganesh Kumar, Cheston Tan
Abstract: Children can rapidly generalize compositionally-constructed rules to unseen test sets. On the other hand, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be trained over millions of episodes, and their ability to generalize to unseen combinations remains unclear. Hence, we investigate the compositional abilities of RL agents, using the task of navigating to specified color-shape targets in synthetic 3D environments. First, we show that when RL agents are naively trained to navigate to target color-shape combinations, they implicitly learn to decompose the combinations, allowing them to (re-)compose these and succeed at held-out test combinations ("compositional learning"). Second, when agents are pretrained to learn invariant shape and color concepts ("concept learning"), the number of episodes subsequently needed for compositional learning decreased by 20 times. Furthermore, only agents trained on both concept and compositional learning could solve a more complex, out-of-distribution environment in zero-shot fashion. Finally, we verified that only text encoders pretrained on image-text datasets (e.g. CLIP) reduced the number of training episodes needed for our agents to demonstrate compositional learning, and also generalized to 5 unseen colors in zero-shot fashion. Overall, our results are the first to demonstrate that RL agents can be trained to implicitly learn concepts and compositionality, to solve more complex environments in zero-shot fashion.
Authors: Kush R. Varshney
Abstract: Prior work has explicated the coloniality of artificial intelligence (AI) development and deployment through mechanisms such as extractivism, automation, sociological essentialism, surveillance, and containment. However, that work has not engaged much with alignment: teaching behaviors to a large language model (LLM) in line with desired values, and has not considered a mechanism that arises within that process: moral absolutism -- a part of the coloniality of knowledge. Colonialism has a history of altering the beliefs and values of colonized peoples; in this paper, I argue that this history is recapitulated in current LLM alignment practices and technologies. Furthermore, I suggest that AI alignment be decolonialized using three forms of openness: openness of models, openness to society, and openness to excluded knowledges. This suggested approach to decolonial AI alignment uses ideas from the argumentative moral philosophical tradition of Hinduism, which has been described as an open-source religion. One concept used is vi\'{s}e\d{s}a-dharma, or particular context-specific notions of right and wrong. At the end of the paper, I provide a suggested reference architecture to work toward the proposed framework.
Authors: Longhui Yu, Weisen Jiang, Han Shi, Jincheng Yu, Zhengying Liu, Yu Zhang, James T. Kwok, Zhenguo Li, Adrian Weller, Weiyang Liu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have pushed the limits of natural language understanding and exhibited excellent problem-solving ability. Despite the great success, most existing open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2) are still far away from satisfactory for solving mathematical problem due to the complex reasoning procedures. To bridge this gap, we propose MetaMath, a fine-tuned language model that specializes in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we start by bootstrapping mathematical questions by rewriting the question from multiple perspectives without extra knowledge, which results in a new dataset called MetaMathQA. Then we fine-tune the LLaMA-2 models on MetaMathQA. Experimental results on two popular benchmarks (i.e., GSM8K and MATH) for mathematical reasoning demonstrate that MetaMath outperforms a suite of open-source LLMs by a significant margin. Our MetaMath-7B model achieves 66.4% on GSM8K and 19.4% on MATH, exceeding the state-of-the-art models of the same size by 11.5% and 8.7%. Particularly, MetaMath-70B achieves an accuracy of 82.3% on GSM8K, slightly better than GPT-3.5-Turbo. We release all the MetaMathQA dataset, the MetaMath models with different model sizes and the training code for public use.
Authors: Vaigarai Sathi, Sabahat Shaik, Jaswanth Nidamanuri
Abstract: Cooperation is fundamental in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), often requiring agents to balance individual gains with collective rewards. In this regard, this paper aims to investigate strategies to invoke cooperation in game-theoretic scenarios, namely the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where agents must optimize both individual and group outcomes. Existing cooperative strategies are analyzed for their effectiveness in promoting group-oriented behavior in repeated games. Modifications are proposed where encouraging group rewards will also result in a higher individual gain, addressing real-world dilemmas seen in distributed systems. The study extends to scenarios with exponentially growing agent populations ($N \longrightarrow +\infty$), where traditional computation and equilibrium determination are challenging. Leveraging mean-field game theory, equilibrium solutions and reward structures are established for infinitely large agent sets in repeated games. Finally, practical insights are offered through simulations using the Multi Agent-Posthumous Credit Assignment trainer, and the paper explores adapting simulation algorithms to create scenarios favoring cooperation for group rewards. These practical implementations bridge theoretical concepts with real-world applications.
Authors: Qingqing Cao, Sewon Min, Yizhong Wang, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Abstract: Retrieval augmentation addresses many critical problems in large language models such as hallucination, staleness, and privacy leaks. However, running retrieval-augmented language models (LMs) is slow and difficult to scale due to processing large amounts of retrieved text. We introduce binary token representations (BTR), which use 1-bit vectors to precompute every token in passages, significantly reducing computation during inference. Despite the potential loss of accuracy, our new calibration techniques and training objectives restore performance. Combined with offline and runtime compression, this only requires 127GB of disk space for encoding 3 billion tokens in Wikipedia. Our experiments show that on five knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, BTR accelerates state-of-the-art inference by up to 4x and reduces storage by over 100x while maintaining over 95% task performance.
Authors: Olaf Lipinski, Adam J. Sobey, Federico Cerutti, Timothy J. Norman
Abstract: Emergent communication studies the development of language between autonomous agents, aiming to improve understanding of natural language evolution and increase communication efficiency. While temporal aspects of language have been considered in computational linguistics, there has been no research on temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential influences for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural changes. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. However, a minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis indicates that over 95\% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, yielding a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. Our readily transferable architectural insights provide the basis for their incorporation into other emergent communication settings.
Authors: Paarth Neekhara, Shehzeen Hussain, Rafael Valle, Boris Ginsburg, Rishabh Ranjan, Shlomo Dubnov, Farinaz Koushanfar, Julian McAuley
Abstract: We propose SelfVC, a training strategy to iteratively improve a voice conversion model with self-synthesized examples. Previous efforts on voice conversion focus on factorizing speech into explicitly disentangled representations that separately encode speaker characteristics and linguistic content. However, disentangling speech representations to capture such attributes using task-specific loss terms can lead to information loss. In this work, instead of explicitly disentangling attributes with loss terms, we present a framework to train a controllable voice conversion model on entangled speech representations derived from self-supervised learning (SSL) and speaker verification models. First, we develop techniques to derive prosodic information from the audio signal and SSL representations to train predictive submodules in the synthesis model. Next, we propose a training strategy to iteratively improve the synthesis model for voice conversion, by creating a challenging training objective using self-synthesized examples. We demonstrate that incorporating such self-synthesized examples during training improves the speaker similarity of generated speech as compared to a baseline voice conversion model trained solely on heuristically perturbed inputs. Our framework is trained without any text and achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot voice conversion on metrics evaluating naturalness, speaker similarity, and intelligibility of synthesized audio.
Authors: R\=uta Binkyt\.e, Carlos Pinz\'on, Szilvia Lesty\'an, Kangsoo Jung, H\'eber H. Arcolezi, Catuscia Palamidessi
Abstract: Differential privacy is a widely adopted framework designed to safeguard the sensitive information of data providers within a data set. It is based on the application of controlled noise at the interface between the server that stores and processes the data, and the data consumers. Local differential privacy is a variant that allows data providers to apply the privatization mechanism themselves on their data individually. Therefore it provides protection also in contexts in which the server, or even the data collector, cannot be trusted. The introduction of noise, however, inevitably affects the utility of the data, particularly by distorting the correlations between individual data components. This distortion can prove detrimental to tasks such as causal discovery. In this paper, we consider various well-known locally differentially private mechanisms and compare the trade-off between the privacy they provide, and the accuracy of the causal structure produced by algorithms for causal learning when applied to data obfuscated by these mechanisms. Our analysis yields valuable insights for selecting appropriate local differentially private protocols for causal discovery tasks. We foresee that our findings will aid researchers and practitioners in conducting locally private causal discovery.
Authors: Dipanjyoti Paul, Arpita Chowdhury, Xinqi Xiong, Feng-Ju Chang, David Carlyn, Samuel Stevens, Kaiya L. Provost, Anuj Karpatne, Bryan Carstens, Daniel Rubenstein, Charles Stewart, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Yu Su, Wei-Lun Chao
Abstract: We present a novel usage of Transformers to make image classification interpretable. Unlike mainstream classifiers that wait until the last fully connected layer to incorporate class information to make predictions, we investigate a proactive approach, asking each class to search for itself in an image. We realize this idea via a Transformer encoder-decoder inspired by DEtection TRansformer (DETR). We learn "class-specific" queries (one for each class) as input to the decoder, enabling each class to localize its patterns in an image via cross-attention. We name our approach INterpretable TRansformer (INTR), which is fairly easy to implement and exhibits several compelling properties. We show that INTR intrinsically encourages each class to attend distinctively; the cross-attention weights thus provide a faithful interpretation of the prediction. Interestingly, via "multi-head" cross-attention, INTR could identify different "attributes" of a class, making it particularly suitable for fine-grained classification and analysis, which we demonstrate on eight datasets. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly accessible at the Imageomics Institute GitHub site: https://github.com/Imageomics/INTR.
Authors: Joohyung Lee, Mohamed Seif, Jungchan Cho, H. Vincent Poor
Abstract: Split Federated Learning (SFL) has recently emerged as a promising distributed learning technology, leveraging the strengths of both federated and split learning. It emphasizes the advantages of rapid convergence while addressing privacy concerns. As a result, this innovation has received significant attention from both industry and academia. However, since the model is split at a specific layer, known as a cut layer, into both client-side and server-side models for the SFL, the choice of the cut layer in SFL can have a substantial impact on the energy consumption of clients and their privacy, as it influences the training burden and the output of the client-side models. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of the SFL process and thoroughly analyze energy consumption and privacy. This analysis considers the influence of various system parameters on the cut layer selection strategy. Additionally, we provide an illustrative example of the cut layer selection, aiming to minimize clients' risk of reconstructing the raw data at the server while sustaining energy consumption within the required energy budget, which involves trade-offs. Finally, we address open challenges in this field. These directions represent promising avenues for future research and development.
Authors: Yibin Wang, Weizhong Zhang, Jianwei Zheng, Cheng Jin
Abstract: Current subject-driven image generation methods encounter significant challenges in person-centric image generation. The reason is that they learn the semantic scene and person generation by fine-tuning a common pre-trained diffusion, which involves an irreconcilable training imbalance. Precisely, to generate realistic persons, they need to sufficiently tune the pre-trained model, which inevitably causes the model to forget the rich semantic scene prior and makes scene generation over-fit to the training data. Moreover, even with sufficient fine-tuning, these methods can still not generate high-fidelity persons since joint learning of the scene and person generation also lead to quality compromise. In this paper, we propose Face-diffuser, an effective collaborative generation pipeline to eliminate the above training imbalance and quality compromise. Specifically, we first develop two specialized pre-trained diffusion models, i.e., Text-driven Diffusion Model (TDM) and Subject-augmented Diffusion Model (SDM), for scene and person generation, respectively. The sampling process is divided into three sequential stages, i.e., semantic scene construction, subject-scene fusion, and subject enhancement. The first and last stages are performed by TDM and SDM respectively. The subject-scene fusion stage, that is the collaboration achieved through a novel and highly effective mechanism, Saliency-adaptive Noise Fusion (SNF). Specifically, it is based on our key observation that there exists a robust link between classifier-free guidance responses and the saliency of generated images. In each time step, SNF leverages the unique strengths of each model and allows for the spatial blending of predicted noises from both models automatically in a saliency-aware manner. Extensive experiments confirm the impressive effectiveness and robustness of the Face-diffuser.
Authors: Micha Livne, Zulfat Miftahutdinov, Elena Tutubalina, Maksim Kuznetsov, Daniil Polykovskiy, Annika Brundyn, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Anthony Costa, Alex Aliper, Al\'an Aspuru-Guzik, Alex Zhavoronkov
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially driven scientific progress in various domains, and many papers have demonstrated their ability to tackle complex problems with creative solutions. Our paper introduces a new foundation model, nach0, capable of solving various chemical and biological tasks: biomedical question answering, named entity recognition, molecular generation, molecular synthesis, attributes prediction, and others. nach0 is a multi-domain and multi-task encoder-decoder LLM pre-trained on unlabeled text from scientific literature, patents, and molecule strings to incorporate a range of chemical and linguistic knowledge. We employed instruction tuning, where specific task-related instructions are utilized to fine-tune nach0 for the final set of tasks. To train nach0 effectively, we leverage the NeMo framework, enabling efficient parallel optimization of both base and large model versions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on single-domain and cross-domain tasks. Furthermore, it can generate high-quality outputs in molecular and textual formats, showcasing its effectiveness in multi-domain setups.
Authors: Qiqi Su, Christos Kloukinas, Artur d'Avila Garcez
Abstract: Multivariate time series have many applications, from healthcare and meteorology to life science. Although deep learning models have shown excellent predictive performance for time series, they have been criticised for being "black-boxes" or non-interpretable. This paper proposes a novel modular neural network model for multivariate time series prediction that is interpretable by construction. A recurrent neural network learns the temporal dependencies in the data while an attention-based feature selection component selects the most relevant features and suppresses redundant features used in the learning of the temporal dependencies. A modular deep network is trained from the selected features independently to show the users how features influence outcomes, making the model interpretable. Experimental results show that this approach can outperform state-of-the-art interpretable Neural Additive Models (NAM) and variations thereof in both regression and classification of time series tasks, achieving a predictive performance that is comparable to the top non-interpretable methods for time series, LSTM and XGBoost.
Authors: Lijie Hu, Yixin Liu, Ninghao Liu, Mengdi Huai, Lichao Sun, Di Wang
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for various vision tasks. One reason behind the success lies in their ability to provide plausible innate explanations for the behavior of neural architectures. However, ViTs suffer from issues with explanation faithfulness, as their focal points are fragile to adversarial attacks and can be easily changed with even slight perturbations on the input image. In this paper, we propose a rigorous approach to mitigate these issues by introducing Faithful ViTs (FViTs). Briefly speaking, an FViT should have the following two properties: (1) The top-$k$ indices of its self-attention vector should remain mostly unchanged under input perturbation, indicating stable explanations; (2) The prediction distribution should be robust to perturbations. To achieve this, we propose a new method called Denoised Diffusion Smoothing (DDS), which adopts randomized smoothing and diffusion-based denoising. We theoretically prove that processing ViTs directly with DDS can turn them into FViTs. We also show that Gaussian noise is nearly optimal for both $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$-norm cases. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments and evaluations. Results show that FViTs are more robust against adversarial attacks while maintaining the explainability of attention, indicating higher faithfulness.
Authors: James Seale Smith, Yen-Chang Hsu, Zsolt Kira, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated a remarkable ability to customize text-to-image diffusion models to multiple, fine-grained concepts in a sequential (i.e., continual) manner while only providing a few example images for each concept. This setting is known as continual diffusion. Here, we ask the question: Can we scale these methods to longer concept sequences without forgetting? Although prior work mitigates the forgetting of previously learned concepts, we show that its capacity to learn new tasks reaches saturation over longer sequences. We address this challenge by introducing a novel method, STack-And-Mask INcremental Adapters (STAMINA), which is composed of low-ranked attention-masked adapters and customized MLP tokens. STAMINA is designed to enhance the robust fine-tuning properties of LoRA for sequential concept learning via learnable hard-attention masks parameterized with low rank MLPs, enabling precise, scalable learning via sparse adaptation. Notably, all introduced trainable parameters can be folded back into the model after training, inducing no additional inference parameter costs. We show that STAMINA outperforms the prior SOTA for the setting of text-to-image continual customization on a 50-concept benchmark composed of landmarks and human faces, with no stored replay data. Additionally, we extended our method to the setting of continual learning for image classification, demonstrating that our gains also translate to state-of-the-art performance in this standard benchmark.
Authors: Jiayuan Mao, Tom\'as Lozano-P\'erez, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
Abstract: Goal-conditioned policies are generally understood to be "feed-forward" circuits, in the form of neural networks that map from the current state and the goal specification to the next action to take. However, under what circumstances such a policy can be learned and how efficient the policy will be are not well understood. In this paper, we present a circuit complexity analysis for relational neural networks (such as graph neural networks and transformers) representing policies for planning problems, by drawing connections with serialized goal regression search (S-GRS). We show that there are three general classes of planning problems, in terms of the growth of circuit width and depth as a function of the number of objects and planning horizon, providing constructive proofs. We also illustrate the utility of this analysis for designing neural networks for policy learning.
Authors: Shu Ishida, Gianluca Corrado, George Fedoseev, Hudson Yeo, Lloyd Russell, Jamie Shotton, Jo\~ao F. Henriques, Anthony Hu
Abstract: We propose LangProp, a framework for iteratively optimizing code generated by large language models (LLMs), in both supervised and reinforcement learning settings. While LLMs can generate sensible coding solutions zero-shot, they are often sub-optimal. Especially for code generation tasks, it is likely that the initial code will fail on certain edge cases. LangProp automatically evaluates the code performance on a dataset of input-output pairs, catches any exceptions, and feeds the results back to the LLM in the training loop, so that the LLM can iteratively improve the code it generates. By adopting a metric- and data-driven training paradigm for this code optimization procedure, one could easily adapt findings from traditional machine learning techniques such as imitation learning, DAgger, and reinforcement learning. We show LangProp's applicability to general domains such as Sudoku and CartPole, as well as demonstrate the first proof of concept of automated code optimization for autonomous driving in CARLA. We show that LangProp can generate interpretable and transparent policies that can be verified and improved in a metric- and data-driven way. Our code is available at https://github.com/shuishida/LangProp.
Authors: Michele Caprio, Maryam Sultana, Eleni Elia, Fabio Cuzzolin
Abstract: Statistical learning theory is the foundation of machine learning, providing theoretical bounds for the risk of models learnt from a (single) training set, assumed to issue from an unknown probability distribution. In actual deployment, however, the data distribution may (and often does) vary, causing domain adaptation/generalization issues. In this paper we lay the foundations for a `credal' theory of learning, using convex sets of probabilities (credal sets) to model the variability in the data-generating distribution. Such credal sets, we argue, may be inferred from a finite sample of training sets. Bounds are derived for the case of finite hypotheses spaces (both assuming realizability or not) as well as infinite model spaces, which directly generalize classical results.
Authors: Inyoung Cheong, King Xia, K. J. Kevin Feng, Quan Ze Chen, Amy X. Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of providing users with advice in a wide range of professional domains, including legal advice. However, relying on LLMs for legal queries raises concerns due to the significant expertise required and the potential real-world consequences of the advice. To explore \textit{when} and \textit{why} LLMs should or should not provide advice to users, we conducted workshops with 20 legal experts using methods inspired by case-based reasoning. The provided realistic queries ("cases") allowed experts to examine granular, situation-specific concerns and overarching technical and legal constraints, producing a concrete set of contextual considerations for LLM developers. By synthesizing the factors that impacted LLM response appropriateness, we present a 4-dimension framework: (1) User attributes and behaviors, (2) Nature of queries, (3) AI capabilities, and (4) Social impacts. We share experts' recommendations for LLM response strategies, which center around helping users identify `right questions to ask' and relevant information rather than providing definitive legal judgments. Our findings reveal novel legal considerations, such as unauthorized practice of law, confidentiality, and liability for inaccurate advice, that have been overlooked in the literature. The case-based deliberation method enabled us to elicit fine-grained, practice-informed insights that surpass those from de-contextualized surveys or speculative principles. These findings underscore the applicability of our method for translating domain-specific professional knowledge and practices into policies that can guide LLM behavior in a more responsible direction.
Authors: Alberto Testolin, Kuinan Hou, Marco Zorzi
Abstract: Humans can readily judge the number of objects in a visual scene, even without counting, and such a skill has been documented in many animal species and babies prior to language development and formal schooling. Numerical judgments are error-free for small sets, while for larger collections responses become approximate, with variability increasing proportionally to the target number. This response pattern is observed for items of all kinds, despite variation in object features (such as color or shape), suggesting that our visual number sense relies on abstract representations of numerosity. Here, we investigate whether large-scale generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have a human-like number sense, which should allow them to reliably name the number of objects in simple visual stimuli or generate images containing a target number of items in the 1-10 range. Surprisingly, most of the foundation models considered have a poor number sense: They make striking errors even with small numbers, the response variability does not increase in a systematic way, and the pattern of errors depends on object category. Only the most recent proprietary systems exhibit signatures of a visual number sense. Our findings demonstrate that having an intuitive visual understanding of number remains challenging for foundation models, which in turn might be detrimental to the perceptual grounding of numeracy that in humans is crucial for mathematical learning.
Authors: Junhyun Park, Seonghyeok Jang, Hyojae Park, Seongjun Bae, Minho Hwang
Abstract: Flexible continuum manipulators are valued for minimally invasive surgery, offering access to confined spaces through nonlinear paths. However, cable-driven manipulators face control difficulties due to hysteresis from cabling effects such as friction, elongation, and coupling. These effects are difficult to model due to nonlinearity and the difficulties become even more evident when dealing with long and coupled, multi-segmented manipulator. This paper proposes a data-driven approach based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to capture these nonlinear and previous states-dependent characteristics of cable actuation. We collect physical joint configurations according to command joint configurations using RGBD sensing and 7 fiducial markers to model the hysteresis of the proposed manipulator. Result on a study comparing the estimation performance of four DNN models show that the Temporal Convolution Network (TCN) demonstrates the highest predictive capability. Leveraging trained TCNs, we build a control algorithm to compensate for hysteresis. Tracking tests in task space using unseen trajectories show that the proposed control algorithm reduces the average position and orientation error by 61.39% (from 13.7mm to 5.29 mm) and 64.04% (from 31.17{\deg} to 11.21{\deg}), respectively. This result implies that the proposed calibrated controller effectively reaches the desired configurations by estimating the hysteresis of the manipulator. Applying this method in real surgical scenarios has the potential to enhance control precision and improve surgical performance.
Authors: Evan Gerritz, Luciano Dyballa, Steven W. Zucker
Abstract: Generalization to unseen data is a key desideratum for deep networks, but its relation to classification accuracy is unclear. Using a minimalist vision dataset and a measure of generalizability, we show that popular networks, from deep convolutional networks (CNNs) to transformers, vary in their power to extrapolate to unseen classes both across layers and across architectures. Accuracy is not a good predictor of generalizability, and generalization varies non-monotonically with layer depth.
Authors: Philipp Schoenegger, Indre Tuminauskaite, Peter S. Park, Philip E. Tetlock
Abstract: Human forecasting accuracy in practice relies on the 'wisdom of the crowd' effect, in which predictions about future events are significantly improved by aggregating across a crowd of individual forecasters. Past work on the forecasting ability of large language models (LLMs) suggests that frontier LLMs, as individual forecasters, underperform compared to the gold standard of a human crowd forecasting tournament aggregate. In Study 1, we expand this research by using an LLM ensemble approach consisting of a crowd of twelve LLMs. We compare the aggregated LLM predictions on 31 binary questions to that of a crowd of 925 human forecasters from a three-month forecasting tournament. Our preregistered main analysis shows that the LLM crowd outperforms a simple no-information benchmark and is not statistically different from the human crowd. In exploratory analyses, we find that these two approaches are equivalent with respect to medium-effect-size equivalence bounds. We also observe an acquiescence effect, with mean model predictions being significantly above 50%, despite an almost even split of positive and negative resolutions. Moreover, in Study 2, we test whether LLM predictions (of GPT-4 and Claude 2) can be improved by drawing on human cognitive output. We find that both models' forecasting accuracy benefits from exposure to the median human prediction as information, improving accuracy by between 17% and 28%: though this leads to less accurate predictions than simply averaging human and machine forecasts. Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments: via the simple, practically applicable method of forecast aggregation. This replicates the 'wisdom of the crowd' effect for LLMs, and opens up their use for a variety of applications throughout society.
Authors: Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Yuxin Chen, Jade Nie, Xi Liu, Daifeng Guo, Yanli Zhao, Shen Li, Yuchen Hao, Yantao Yao, Guna Lakshminarayanan, Ellie Dingqiao Wen, Jongsoo Park, Maxim Naumov, Wenlin Chen
Abstract: Scaling laws play an instrumental role in the sustainable improvement in model quality. Unfortunately, recommendation models to date do not exhibit such laws similar to those observed in the domain of large language models, due to the inefficiencies of their upscaling mechanisms. This limitation poses significant challenges in adapting these models to increasingly more complex real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose an effective network architecture based purely on stacked factorization machines, and a synergistic upscaling strategy, collectively dubbed Wukong, to establish a scaling law in the domain of recommendation. Wukong's unique design makes it possible to capture diverse, any-order of interactions simply through taller and wider layers. We conducted extensive evaluations on six public datasets, and our results demonstrate that Wukong consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models quality-wise. Further, we assessed Wukong's scalability on an internal, large-scale dataset. The results show that Wukong retains its superiority in quality over state-of-the-art models, while holding the scaling law across two orders of magnitude in model complexity, extending beyond 100 Gflop or equivalently up to Large Language Model (GPT-3) training compute scale, where prior arts fall short.
Authors: Tingke Shen, Surabhi S Nath, Aenne Brielmann, Peter Dayan
Abstract: The complexity of visual stimuli plays an important role in many cognitive phenomena, including attention, engagement, memorability, time perception and aesthetic evaluation. Despite its importance, complexity is poorly understood and ironically, previous models of image complexity have been quite complex. There have been many attempts to find handcrafted features that explain complexity, but these features are usually dataset specific, and hence fail to generalise. On the other hand, more recent work has employed deep neural networks to predict complexity, but these models remain difficult to interpret, and do not guide a theoretical understanding of the problem. Here we propose to model complexity using segment-based representations of images. We use state-of-the-art segmentation models, SAM and FC-CLIP, to quantify the number of segments at multiple granularities, and the number of classes in an image respectively. We find that complexity is well-explained by a simple linear model with these two features across six diverse image-sets of naturalistic scene and art images. This suggests that the complexity of images can be surprisingly simple.
Authors: Thennal D K, Ganesh Nathan, Suchithra M S
Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained models provides significant advantages in downstream performance. The ubiquitous nature of pre-trained models such as BERT and its derivatives in natural language processing has also led to a proliferation of task-specific fine-tuned models. As these models typically only perform one task well, additional training or ensembling is required in multi-task scenarios. The growing field of model merging provides a solution, dealing with the challenge of combining multiple task-specific models into a single multi-task model. In this study, we introduce a novel model merging method for Transformers, combining insights from previous work in Fisher-weighted averaging and the use of Fisher information in model pruning. Utilizing the Fisher information of mask nodes within the Transformer architecture, we devise a computationally efficient weighted-averaging scheme. Our method exhibits a regular and significant performance increase across various models in the BERT family, outperforming full-scale Fisher-weighted averaging in a fraction of the computational cost, with baseline performance improvements of up to +6.5 and a speedup between 57.4x and 321.7x across models. Our results prove the potential of our method in current multi-task learning environments and suggest its scalability and adaptability to new model architectures and learning scenarios.
Authors: Guangming Huang, Yingya Li, Shoaib Jameel, Yunfei Long, Giorgos Papanastasiou
Abstract: Deep learning (DL) has substantially enhanced natural language processing (NLP) in healthcare research. However, the increasing complexity of DL-based NLP necessitates transparent model interpretability, or at least explainability, for reliable decision-making. This work presents a thorough scoping review of explainable and interpretable DL in healthcare NLP. The term "eXplainable and Interpretable Artificial Intelligence" (XIAI) is introduced to distinguish XAI from IAI. Different models are further categorized based on their functionality (model-, input-, output-based) and scope (local, global). Our analysis shows that attention mechanisms are the most prevalent emerging IAI technique. The use of IAI is growing, distinguishing it from XAI. The major challenges identified are that most XIAI does not explore "global" modelling processes, the lack of best practices, and the lack of systematic evaluation and benchmarks. One important opportunity is to use attention mechanisms to enhance multi-modal XIAI for personalized medicine. Additionally, combining DL with causal logic holds promise. Our discussion encourages the integration of XIAI in Large Language Models (LLMs) and domain-specific smaller models. In conclusion, XIAI adoption in healthcare requires dedicated in-house expertise. Collaboration with domain experts, end-users, and policymakers can lead to ready-to-use XIAI methods across NLP and medical tasks. While challenges exist, XIAI techniques offer a valuable foundation for interpretable NLP algorithms in healthcare.
Authors: Max Rudolph, Caleb Chuck, Kevin Black, Misha Lvovsky, Scott Niekum, Amy Zhang
Abstract: Robust reinforcement learning agents using high-dimensional observations must be able to identify relevant state features amidst many exogeneous distractors. A representation that captures controllability identifies these state elements by determining what affects agent control. While methods such as inverse dynamics and mutual information capture controllability for a limited number of timesteps, capturing long-horizon elements remains a challenging problem. Myopic controllability can capture the moment right before an agent crashes into a wall, but not the control-relevance of the wall while the agent is still some distance away. To address this we introduce action-bisimulation encoding, a method inspired by the bisimulation invariance pseudometric, that extends single-step controllability with a recursive invariance constraint. By doing this, action-bisimulation learns a multi-step controllability metric that smoothly discounts distant state features that are relevant for control. We demonstrate that action-bisimulation pretraining on reward-free, uniformly random data improves sample efficiency in several environments, including a photorealistic 3D simulation domain, Habitat. Additionally, we provide theoretical analysis and qualitative results demonstrating the information captured by action-bisimulation.
Authors: Sean Farhat, Deming Chen
Abstract: In this paper, we propose that small models may not need to absorb the cost of pre-training to reap its benefits. Instead, they can capitalize on the astonishing results achieved by modern, enormous models to a surprising degree. We observe that, when distilled on a task from a pre-trained teacher model, a small model can achieve or surpass the performance it would achieve if it was pre-trained then finetuned on that task. To allow this phenomenon to be easily leveraged, we establish a connection reducing knowledge distillation to modern contrastive learning, opening two doors: (1) vastly different model architecture pairings can work for the distillation, and (2) most contrastive learning algorithms rooted in the theory of Noise Contrastive Estimation can be easily applied and used. We demonstrate this paradigm using pre-trained teacher models from open-source model hubs, Transformer and convolution based model combinations, and a novel distillation algorithm that massages the Alignment/Uniformity perspective of contrastive learning by Wang & Isola (2020) into a distillation objective. We choose this flavor of contrastive learning due to its low computational cost, an overarching theme of this work. We also observe that this phenomenon tends not to occur if the task is data-limited. However, this can be alleviated by leveraging yet another scale-inspired development: large, pre-trained generative models for dataset augmentation. Again, we use an open-source model, and our rudimentary prompts are sufficient to boost the small model`s performance. Thus, we highlight a training method for small models that is up to 94% faster than the standard pre-training paradigm without sacrificing performance. For practitioners discouraged from fully utilizing modern foundation datasets for their small models due to the prohibitive scale, we believe our work keeps that door open.
Authors: Miguel Costa, Sandro Pinto
Abstract: ML is shifting from the cloud to the edge. Edge computing reduces the surface exposing private data and enables reliable throughput guarantees in real-time applications. Of the panoply of devices deployed at the edge, resource-constrained MCUs, e.g., Arm Cortex-M, are more prevalent, orders of magnitude cheaper, and less power-hungry than application processors or GPUs. Thus, enabling intelligence at the deep edge is the zeitgeist, with researchers focusing on unveiling novel approaches to deploy ANNs on these constrained devices. Quantization is a well-established technique that has proved effective in enabling the deployment of neural networks on MCUs; however, it is still an open question to understand the robustness of QNNs in the face of adversarial examples. To fill this gap, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of attacks and defenses from (full-precision) ANNs on (constrained) QNNs. Our evaluation includes three QNNs targeting TinyML applications, ten attacks, and six defenses. With this study, we draw a set of interesting findings. First, quantization increases the point distance to the decision boundary and leads the gradient estimated by some attacks to explode or vanish. Second, quantization can act as a noise attenuator or amplifier, depending on the noise magnitude, and causes gradient misalignment. Regarding adversarial defenses, we conclude that input pre-processing defenses show impressive results on small perturbations; however, they fall short as the perturbation increases. At the same time, train-based defenses increase the average point distance to the decision boundary, which holds after quantization. However, we argue that train-based defenses still need to smooth the quantization-shift and gradient misalignment phenomenons to counteract adversarial example transferability to QNNs. All artifacts are open-sourced to enable independent validation of results.
Authors: Andre R Kuroswiski, Annie S Wu, Angelo Passaro
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach to enhancing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) through the integration of domain knowledge and attention-based policy mechanisms. Our methodology focuses on the incorporation of domain-specific expertise into the learning process, which simplifies the development of collaborative behaviors. This approach aims to reduce the complexity and learning overhead typically associated with MARL by enabling agents to concentrate on essential aspects of complex tasks, thus optimizing the learning curve. The utilization of attention mechanisms plays a key role in our model. It allows for the effective processing of dynamic context data and nuanced agent interactions, leading to more refined decision-making. Applied in standard MARL scenarios, such as the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) Pursuit and Multi-Particle Environments (MPE) Simple Spread, our method has been shown to improve both learning efficiency and the effectiveness of collaborative behaviors. The results indicate that our attention-based approach can be a viable approach for improving the efficiency of MARL training process, integrating domain-specific knowledge at the action level.
Authors: Manav Mishra, Hritik Bana, Saswata Sarkar, Sujeevraja Sanjeevi, PB Sujit, Kaarthik Sundar
Abstract: This article presents a deep reinforcement learning-based approach to tackle a persistent surveillance mission requiring a single unmanned aerial vehicle initially stationed at a depot with fuel or time-of-flight constraints to repeatedly visit a set of targets with equal priority. Owing to the vehicle's fuel or time-of-flight constraints, the vehicle must be regularly refueled, or its battery must be recharged at the depot. The objective of the problem is to determine an optimal sequence of visits to the targets that minimizes the maximum time elapsed between successive visits to any target while ensuring that the vehicle never runs out of fuel or charge. We present a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to solve this problem and present the results of numerical experiments that corroborate the effectiveness of this approach in comparison with common-sense greedy heuristics.
Authors: Cailean Osborne
Abstract: Governments are increasingly funding open source software (OSS) development to support software security, digital sovereignty, and national competitiveness in science and innovation, amongst others. However, little is known about how OSS developers evaluate the relative benefits and drawbacks of governmental funding for OSS. This study explores this question through a case study on scikit-learn, a Python library for machine learning, funded by public research grants, commercial sponsorship, micro-donations, and a 32 euro million grant announced in France's artificial intelligence strategy. Through 25 interviews with scikit-learn's maintainers and funders, this study makes two key contributions. First, it contributes empirical findings about the benefits and drawbacks of public and private funding in an impactful OSS project, and the governance protocols employed by the maintainers to balance the diverse interests of their community and funders. Second, it offers practical lessons on funding for OSS developers, governments, and companies based on the experience of scikit-learn. The paper concludes with key recommendations for practitioners and future research directions.
Authors: Keqin Li, Armando Zhu, Peng Zhao, Jintong Song, Jiabei Liu
Abstract: This study explores the application of deep learning technologies in software development processes, particularly in automating code reviews, error prediction, and test generation to enhance code quality and development efficiency. Through a series of empirical studies, experimental groups using deep learning tools and control groups using traditional methods were compared in terms of code error rates and project completion times. The results demonstrated significant improvements in the experimental group, validating the effectiveness of deep learning technologies. The research also discusses potential optimization points, methodologies, and technical challenges of deep learning in software development, as well as how to integrate these technologies into existing software development workflows.
Authors: Boyang Sun, Yu Yao, Huangyuan Hao, Yumou Qiu, Kun Zhang
Abstract: Testing conditional independence has many applications, such as in Bayesian network learning and causal discovery. Different test methods have been proposed. However, existing methods generally can not work when only discretized observations are available. Specifically, consider $X_1$, $\tilde{X}_2$ and $X_3$ are observed variables, where $\tilde{X}_2$ is a discretization of latent variables $X_2$. Applying existing test methods to the observations of $X_1$, $\tilde{X}_2$ and $X_3$ can lead to a false conclusion about the underlying conditional independence of variables $X_1$, $X_2$ and $X_3$. Motivated by this, we propose a conditional independence test specifically designed to accommodate the presence of such discretization. To achieve this, we design the bridge equations to recover the parameter reflecting the statistical information of the underlying latent continuous variables. An appropriate test statistic and its asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of conditional independence have also been derived. Both theoretical results and empirical validation have been provided, demonstrating the effectiveness of our test methods.
Authors: Shaily Roy, Harshit Sharma, Asif Salekin
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy, making it suitable for decentralized human-centered AI applications. However, a significant research gap remains in ensuring fairness in these systems. Current fairness strategies in FL require knowledge of bias-creating/sensitive attributes, clashing with FL's privacy principles. Moreover, in human-centered datasets, sensitive attributes may remain latent. To tackle these challenges, we present a novel bias mitigation approach inspired by "Fairness without Demographics" in machine learning. The presented approach achieves fairness without needing knowledge of sensitive attributes by minimizing the top eigenvalue of the Hessian matrix during training, ensuring equitable loss landscapes across FL participants. Notably, we introduce a novel FL aggregation scheme that promotes participating models based on error rates and loss landscape curvature attributes, fostering fairness across the FL system. This work represents the first approach to attaining "Fairness without Demographics" in human-centered FL. Through comprehensive evaluation, our approach demonstrates effectiveness in balancing fairness and efficacy across various real-world applications, FL setups, and scenarios involving single and multiple bias-inducing factors, representing a significant advancement in human-centered FL.
Authors: Hugh Zhang, Jeff Da, Dean Lee, Vaughn Robinson, Catherine Wu, Will Song, Tiffany Zhao, Pranav Raja, Dylan Slack, Qin Lyu, Sean Hendryx, Russell Kaplan, Michele Lunati, Summer Yue
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success on many benchmarks for mathematical reasoning. However, there is growing concern that some of this performance actually reflects dataset contamination, where data closely resembling benchmark questions leaks into the training data, instead of true reasoning ability. To investigate this claim rigorously, we commission Grade School Math 1000 (GSM1k). GSM1k is designed to mirror the style and complexity of the established GSM8k benchmark, the gold standard for measuring elementary mathematical reasoning. We ensure that the two benchmarks are comparable across important metrics such as human solve rates, number of steps in solution, answer magnitude, and more. When evaluating leading open- and closed-source LLMs on GSM1k, we observe accuracy drops of up to 13%, with several families of models (e.g., Phi and Mistral) showing evidence of systematic overfitting across almost all model sizes. At the same time, many models, especially those on the frontier, (e.g., Gemini/GPT/Claude) show minimal signs of overfitting. Further analysis suggests a positive relationship (Spearman's r^2=0.32) between a model's probability of generating an example from GSM8k and its performance gap between GSM8k and GSM1k, suggesting that many models may have partially memorized GSM8k.
Authors: Xiaomin Yu, Yezhaohui Wang, Yanfang Chen, Zhen Tao, Dinghao Xi, Shichao Song, Simin Niu, Zhiyu Li
Abstract: In recent years, generative artificial intelligence models, represented by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), have revolutionized content production methods. These artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have become deeply embedded in various aspects of daily life and work. However, these technologies have also led to the emergence of Fake Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (FAIGC), posing new challenges in distinguishing genuine information. It is crucial to recognize that AIGC technology is akin to a double-edged sword; its potent generative capabilities, while beneficial, also pose risks for the creation and dissemination of FAIGC. In this survey, We propose a new taxonomy that provides a more comprehensive breakdown of the space of FAIGC methods today. Next, we explore the modalities and generative technologies of FAIGC. We introduce FAIGC detection methods and summarize the related benchmark from various perspectives. Finally, we discuss outstanding challenges and promising areas for future research.
Authors: Juhwan Choi, Yeonghwa Kim, Seunguk Yu, JungMin Yun, YoungBin Kim
Abstract: Although pre-trained language models have exhibited great flexibility and versatility with prompt-based few-shot learning, they suffer from the extensive parameter size and limited applicability for inference. Recent studies have suggested that PLMs be used as dataset generators and a tiny task-specific model be trained to achieve efficient inference. However, their applicability to various domains is limited because they tend to generate domain-specific datasets. In this work, we propose a novel approach to universal domain generalization that generates a dataset regardless of the target domain. This allows for generalization of the tiny task model to any domain that shares the label space, thus enhancing the real-world applicability of the dataset generation paradigm. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method accomplishes generalizability across various domains while using a parameter set that is orders of magnitude smaller than PLMs.
Authors: Luciano Dyballa, Evan Gerritz, Steven W. Zucker
Abstract: Generalization to unseen data remains poorly understood for deep learning classification and foundation models. How can one assess the ability of networks to adapt to new or extended versions of their input space in the spirit of few-shot learning, out-of-distribution generalization, and domain adaptation? Which layers of a network are likely to generalize best? We provide a new method for evaluating the capacity of networks to represent a sampled domain, regardless of whether the network has been trained on all classes in the domain. Our approach is the following: after fine-tuning state-of-the-art pre-trained models for visual classification on a particular domain, we assess their performance on data from related but distinct variations in that domain. Generalization power is quantified as a function of the latent embeddings of unseen data from intermediate layers for both unsupervised and supervised settings. Working throughout all stages of the network, we find that (i) high classification accuracy does not imply high generalizability; and (ii) deeper layers in a model do not always generalize the best, which has implications for pruning. Since the trends observed across datasets are largely consistent, we conclude that our approach reveals (a function of) the intrinsic capacity of the different layers of a model to generalize.