Authors: Zixu Wang, Zhigang Sun, Juergen Luettin, Lavdim Halilaj
Abstract: Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient autonomous driving. However, most existing methods overlook complex interactions between traffic participants that often govern their future trajectories. In this paper, we propose SocialFormer, an agent interaction-aware trajectory prediction method that leverages the semantic relationship between the target vehicle and surrounding vehicles by making use of the road topology. We also introduce an edge-enhanced heterogeneous graph transformer (EHGT) as the aggregator in a graph neural network (GNN) to encode the semantic and spatial agent interaction information. Additionally, we introduce a temporal encoder based on gated recurrent units (GRU) to model the temporal social behavior of agent movements. Finally, we present an information fusion framework that integrates agent encoding, lane encoding, and agent interaction encoding for a holistic representation of the traffic scene. We evaluate SocialFormer for the trajectory prediction task on the popular nuScenes benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Silvan Ferreira, Ivanovitch Silva, Allan Martins
Abstract: Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly expanded their applications across various domains. However, the effectiveness of LLMs is often constrained when operating individually in complex environments. This paper introduces a transformative approach by organizing LLMs into community-based structures, aimed at enhancing their collective intelligence and problem-solving capabilities. We investigate different organizational models-hierarchical, flat, dynamic, and federated-each presenting unique benefits and challenges for collaborative AI systems. Within these structured communities, LLMs are designed to specialize in distinct cognitive tasks, employ advanced interaction mechanisms such as direct communication, voting systems, and market-based approaches, and dynamically adjust their governance structures to meet changing demands. The implementation of such communities holds substantial promise for improve problem-solving capabilities in AI, prompting an in-depth examination of their ethical considerations, management strategies, and scalability potential. This position paper seeks to lay the groundwork for future research, advocating a paradigm shift from isolated to synergistic operational frameworks in AI research and application.
Authors: Razan Baltaji, Babak Hemmatian, Lav R. Varshney
Abstract: This study explores the sources of instability in maintaining cultural personas and opinions within multi-agent LLM systems. Drawing on simulations of inter-cultural collaboration and debate, we analyze agents' pre- and post-discussion private responses alongside chat transcripts to assess the stability of cultural personas and the impact of opinion diversity on group outcomes. Our findings suggest that multi-agent discussions can encourage collective decisions that reflect diverse perspectives, yet this benefit is tempered by the agents' susceptibility to conformity due to perceived peer pressure and challenges in maintaining consistent personas and opinions. Counterintuitively, instructions that encourage debate in support of one's opinions increase the rate of inconstancy. Without addressing the factors we identify, the full potential of multi-agent frameworks for producing more culturally diverse AI outputs will remain untapped.
Authors: Widad Elouataoui
Abstract: The widespread adoption of big data has ushered in a new era of data-driven decision-making, transforming numerous industries and sectors. However, the efficacy of these decisions hinges on the quality of the underlying data. Poor data quality can result in inaccurate analyses and deceptive conclusions. Managing the vast volume, velocity, and variety of data sources presents significant challenges, heightening the importance of addressing big data quality issues. While there has been increased attention from both academia and industry, current approaches often lack comprehensiveness and universality. They tend to focus on limited metrics, neglecting other dimensions of data quality. Moreover, existing methods are often context-specific, limiting their applicability across different domains. There is a clear need for intelligent, automated approaches leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for advanced data quality corrections. To bridge these gaps, this Ph.D. thesis proposes a novel set of interconnected frameworks aimed at enhancing big data quality comprehensively. Firstly, we introduce new quality metrics and a weighted scoring system for precise data quality assessment. Secondly, we present a generic framework for detecting various quality anomalies using AI models. Thirdly, we propose an innovative framework for correcting detected anomalies through predictive modeling. Additionally, we address metadata quality enhancement within big data ecosystems. These frameworks are rigorously tested on diverse datasets, demonstrating their efficacy in improving big data quality. Finally, the thesis concludes with insights and suggestions for future research directions.
Authors: Ziye Qin, Siyan Li, Guoyuan Wu, Matthew J. Barth, Amr Abdelraouf, Rohit Gupta, Kyungtae Han
Abstract: Dilemma zones at signalized intersections present a commonly occurring but unsolved challenge for both drivers and traffic operators. Onsets of the yellow lights prompt varied responses from different drivers: some may brake abruptly, compromising the ride comfort, while others may accelerate, increasing the risk of red-light violations and potential safety hazards. Such diversity in drivers' stop-or-go decisions may result from not only surrounding traffic conditions, but also personalized driving behaviors. To this end, identifying personalized driving behaviors and integrating them into advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to mitigate the dilemma zone problem presents an intriguing scientific question. In this study, we employ a game engine-based (i.e., CARLA-enabled) driving simulator to collect high-resolution vehicle trajectories, incoming traffic signal phase and timing information, and stop-or-go decisions from four subject drivers in various scenarios. This approach allows us to analyze personalized driving behaviors in dilemma zones and develop a Personalized Transformer Encoder to predict individual drivers' stop-or-go decisions. The results show that the Personalized Transformer Encoder improves the accuracy of predicting driver decision-making in the dilemma zone by 3.7% to 12.6% compared to the Generic Transformer Encoder, and by 16.8% to 21.6% over the binary logistic regression model.
Authors: Aman Priyanshu, Yash Maurya, Suriya Ganesh, Vy Tran
Abstract: Aggregating statistics over geographical regions is important for many applications, such as analyzing income, election results, and disease spread. However, the sensitive nature of this data necessitates strong privacy protections to safeguard individuals. In this work, we present a unified locational differential privacy (DP) framework to enable private aggregation of various data types, including one-hot encoded, boolean, float, and integer arrays, over geographical regions. Our framework employs local DP mechanisms such as randomized response, the exponential mechanism, and the Gaussian mechanism. We evaluate our approach on four datasets representing significant location data aggregation scenarios. Results demonstrate the utility of our framework in providing formal DP guarantees while enabling geographical data analysis.
Authors: Jaesung Park, Sungchul Hong, Yoonseo Cho, Jong-June Jeon
Abstract: Sea ice at the North Pole is vital to global climate dynamics. However, accurately forecasting sea ice poses a significant challenge due to the intricate interaction among multiple variables. Leveraging the capability to integrate multiple inputs and powerful performances seamlessly, many studies have turned to neural networks for sea ice forecasting. This paper introduces a novel deep architecture named Unicorn, designed to forecast weekly sea ice. Our model integrates multiple time series images within its architecture to enhance its forecasting performance. Moreover, we incorporate a bottleneck layer within the U-Net architecture, serving as neural ordinary differential equations with convolution operations, to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics of latent variables. Through real data analysis with datasets spanning from 1998 to 2021, our proposed model demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art models in the sea ice concentration forecasting task. It achieves an average MAE improvement of 12% compared to benchmark models. Additionally, our method outperforms existing approaches in sea ice extent forecasting, achieving a classification performance improvement of approximately 18%. These experimental results show the superiority of our proposed model.
Authors: Tyler Bikaun, Michael Stewart, Wei Liu
Abstract: This paper presents CleanGraph, an interactive web-based tool designed to facilitate the refinement and completion of knowledge graphs. Maintaining the reliability of knowledge graphs, which are grounded in high-quality and error-free facts, is crucial for real-world applications such as question-answering and information retrieval systems. These graphs are often automatically assembled from textual sources by extracting semantic triples via information extraction. However, assuring the quality of these extracted triples, especially when dealing with large or low-quality datasets, can pose a significant challenge and adversely affect the performance of downstream applications. CleanGraph allows users to perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations on their graphs, as well as apply models in the form of plugins for graph refinement and completion tasks. These functionalities enable users to enhance the integrity and reliability of their graph data. A demonstration of CleanGraph and its source code can be accessed at https://github.com/nlp-tlp/CleanGraph under the MIT License.
Authors: Jinghai He, Cheng Hua, Yingfei Wang, Zeyu Zheng
Abstract: Drug discovery is a complex process that involves sequentially screening and examining a vast array of molecules to identify those with the target properties. This process, also referred to as sequential experimentation, faces challenges due to the vast search space, the rarity of target molecules, and constraints imposed by limited data and experimental budgets. To address these challenges, we introduce a human-in-the-loop framework for sequential experiments in drug discovery. This collaborative approach combines human expert knowledge with deep learning algorithms, enhancing the discovery of target molecules within a specified experimental budget. The proposed algorithm processes experimental data to recommend both promising molecules and those that could improve its performance to human experts. Human experts retain the final decision-making authority based on these recommendations and their domain expertise, including the ability to override algorithmic recommendations. We applied our method to drug discovery tasks using real-world data and found that it consistently outperforms all baseline methods, including those which rely solely on human or algorithmic input. This demonstrates the complementarity between human experts and the algorithm. Our results provide key insights into the levels of humans' domain knowledge, the importance of meta-knowledge, and effective work delegation strategies. Our findings suggest that such a framework can significantly accelerate the development of new vaccines and drugs by leveraging the best of both human and artificial intelligence.
Authors: Sohini Roychowdhury, Marko Krema, Anvar Mahammad, Brian Moore, Arijit Mukherjee, Punit Prakashchandra
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with residual augmented-generation (RAG) have been the optimal choice for scalable generative AI solutions in the recent past. However, the choice of use-cases that incorporate RAG with LLMs have been either generic or extremely domain specific, thereby questioning the scalability and generalizability of RAG-LLM approaches. In this work, we propose a unique LLM-based system where multiple LLMs can be invoked to enable data authentication, user query routing, data retrieval and custom prompting for question answering capabilities from data tables that are highly varying and large in size. Our system is tuned to extract information from Enterprise-level data products and furnish real time responses under 10 seconds. One prompt manages user-to-data authentication followed by three prompts to route, fetch data and generate a customizable prompt natural language responses. Additionally, we propose a five metric scoring module that detects and reports hallucinations in the LLM responses. Our proposed system and scoring metrics achieve >90% confidence scores across hundreds of user queries in the sustainability, financial health and social media domains. Extensions to the proposed extreme RAG architectures can enable heterogeneous source querying using LLMs.
Authors: Gustave Florentin Nkoulou Mvondo, Ben Niu
Abstract: Sora promises to redefine the way visual content is created. Despite its numerous forecasted benefits, the drivers of user willingness to use the text-to-video (T2V) model are unknown. This study extends the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) with perceived realism and novelty value. Using a purposive sampling method, we collected data from 940 respondents in the US and analyzed the sample using covariance-based structural equation modeling and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The findings reveal that all hypothesized relationships are supported, with perceived realism emerging as the most influential driver, followed by novelty value. Moreover, fsQCA identifies five configurations leading to high and low willingness to use, and the model demonstrates high predictive validity, contributing to theory advancement. Our study provides valuable insights for developers and marketers, offering guidance for strategic decisions to promote the widespread adoption of T2V models.
Authors: S. Akshay, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Tobias Meggendorfer, {\DJ}or{\dj}e \v{Z}ikeli\'c
Abstract: Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a classical model for decision making in the presence of uncertainty. Often they are viewed as state transformers with planning objectives defined with respect to paths over MDP states. An increasingly popular alternative is to view them as distribution transformers, giving rise to a sequence of probability distributions over MDP states. For instance, reachability and safety properties in modeling robot swarms or chemical reaction networks are naturally defined in terms of probability distributions over states. Verifying such distributional properties is known to be hard and often beyond the reach of classical state-based verification techniques. In this work, we consider the problems of certified policy (i.e. controller) verification and synthesis in MDPs under distributional reach-avoidance specifications. By certified we mean that, along with a policy, we also aim to synthesize a (checkable) certificate ensuring that the MDP indeed satisfies the property. Thus, given the target set of distributions and an unsafe set of distributions over MDP states, our goal is to either synthesize a certificate for a given policy or synthesize a policy along with a certificate, proving that the target distribution can be reached while avoiding unsafe distributions. To solve this problem, we introduce the novel notion of distributional reach-avoid certificates and present automated procedures for (1) synthesizing a certificate for a given policy, and (2) synthesizing a policy together with the certificate, both providing formal guarantees on certificate correctness. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the ability of our method to solve several non-trivial examples, including a multi-agent robot-swarm model, to synthesize certified policies and to certify existing policies.
Authors: Ludan Zhang, Chaoyi Chen, Lei He, Keqiang Li
Abstract: Autonomous driving perception models are typically composed of multiple functional modules that interact through complex relationships to accomplish environment understanding. However, perception models are predominantly optimized as a black box through end-to-end training, lacking independent evaluation of functional modules, which poses difficulties for interpretability and optimization. Pioneering in the issue, we propose an evaluation method based on feature map analysis to gauge the convergence of model, thereby assessing functional modules' training maturity. We construct a quantitative metric named as the Feature Map Convergence Score (FMCS) and develop Feature Map Convergence Evaluation Network (FMCE-Net) to measure and predict the convergence degree of models respectively. FMCE-Net achieves remarkable predictive accuracy for FMCS across multiple image classification experiments, validating the efficacy and robustness of the introduced approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first independent evaluation method for functional modules, offering a new paradigm for the training assessment towards perception models.
Authors: Yanli Yuan, Bingbing Wang, Chuan Zhang, Jingyi Xu, Ximeng Liu, Liehuang Zhu
Abstract: Segmentation of organs of interest in medical CT images is beneficial for diagnosis of diseases. Though recent methods based on Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (F-CNNs) have shown success in many segmentation tasks, fusing features from images with different scales is still a challenge: (1) Due to the lack of spatial awareness, F-CNNs share the same weights at different spatial locations. (2) F-CNNs can only obtain surrounding information through local receptive fields. To address the above challenge, we propose a new segmentation framework based on attention mechanisms, named MFA-Net (Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Attention Network). The proposed framework can learn more meaningful feature maps among multiple scales and result in more accurate automatic segmentation. We compare our proposed MFA-Net with SOTA methods on two 2D liver CT datasets. The experimental results show that our MFA-Net produces more precise segmentation on images with different scales.
Authors: Gianvincenzo Alfano, Sergio Greco, Francesco Parisi, Irina Trubitsyna
Abstract: Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Formal Argumentation have received significant attention in recent years. Argumentation-based systems often lack explainability while supporting decision-making processes. Counterfactual and semifactual explanations are interpretability techniques that provide insights into the outcome of a model by generating alternative hypothetical instances. While there has been important work on counterfactual and semifactual explanations for Machine Learning models, less attention has been devoted to these kinds of problems in argumentation. In this paper, we explore counterfactual and semifactual reasoning in abstract Argumentation Framework. We investigate the computational complexity of counterfactual- and semifactual-based reasoning problems, showing that they are generally harder than classical argumentation problems such as credulous and skeptical acceptance. Finally, we show that counterfactual and semifactual queries can be encoded in weak-constrained Argumentation Framework, and provide a computational strategy through ASP solvers.
Authors: Ziqi Zhou, Jingyue Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang, Boyue Wang, Tianyu Shi, Alaa Khamis
Abstract: One of the key challenges in current Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based Automated Driving (AD) agents is achieving flexible, precise, and human-like behavior cost-effectively. This paper introduces an innovative approach utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to intuitively and effectively optimize RL reward functions in a human-centric way. We developed a framework where instructions and dynamic environment descriptions are input into the LLM. The LLM then utilizes this information to assist in generating rewards, thereby steering the behavior of RL agents towards patterns that more closely resemble human driving. The experimental results demonstrate that this approach not only makes RL agents more anthropomorphic but also reaches better performance. Additionally, various strategies for reward-proxy and reward-shaping are investigated, revealing the significant impact of prompt design on shaping an AD vehicle's behavior. These findings offer a promising direction for the development of more advanced and human-like automated driving systems. Our experimental data and source code can be found here.
Authors: Benjamin Wolff, Eva Seidlmayer, Konrad U. F\"orstner
Abstract: With the rapid expansion of academic literature and the proliferation of preprints, researchers face growing challenges in manually organizing and labeling large volumes of articles. The NSLP 2024 FoRC Shared Task I addresses this challenge organized as a competition. The goal is to develop a classifier capable of predicting one of 123 predefined classes from the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) taxonomy of research fields for a given article.This paper presents our results. Initially, we enrich the dataset (containing English scholarly articles sourced from ORKG and arXiv), then leverage different pre-trained language Models (PLMs), specifically BERT, and explore their efficacy in transfer learning for this downstream task. Our experiments encompass feature-based and fine-tuned transfer learning approaches using diverse PLMs, optimized for scientific tasks, including SciBERT, SciNCL, and SPECTER2. We conduct hyperparameter tuning and investigate the impact of data augmentation from bibliographic databases such as OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and Crossref. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuning pre-trained models substantially enhances classification performance, with SPECTER2 emerging as the most accurate model. Moreover, enriching the dataset with additional metadata improves classification outcomes significantly, especially when integrating information from S2AG, OpenAlex and Crossref. Our best-performing approach achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.7415. Overall, our study contributes to the advancement of reliable automated systems for scholarly publication categorization, offering a potential solution to the laborious manual curation process, thereby facilitating researchers in efficiently locating relevant resources.
Authors: Sondre Glimsdal, Sebastian {\O}stby, Tobias M. Brambo, Eirik M. Vinje
Abstract: Green Tsetlin (GT) is a Tsetlin Machine (TM) framework developed to solve real-world problems using TMs. Several frameworks already exist that provide access to TM implementations. However, these either lack features or have a research-first focus. GT is an easy-to-use framework that aims to lower the complexity and provide a production-ready TM implementation that is great for experienced practitioners and beginners. To this end, GT establishes a clear separation between training and inference. A C++ backend with a Python interface provides competitive training and inference performance, with the option of running in pure Python. It also integrates support for critical components such as exporting trained models, hyper-parameter search, and cross-validation out-of-the-box.
Authors: Elliot Gestrin, Marco Kuhlmann, Jendrik Seipp
Abstract: Today's classical planners are powerful, but modeling input tasks in formats such as PDDL is tedious and error-prone. In contrast, planning with Large Language Models (LLMs) allows for almost any input text, but offers no guarantees on plan quality or even soundness. In an attempt to merge the best of these two approaches, some work has begun to use LLMs to automate parts of the PDDL creation process. However, these methods still require various degrees of expert input. We present NL2Plan, the first domain-agnostic offline LLM-driven planning system. NL2Plan uses an LLM to incrementally extract the necessary information from a short text prompt before creating a complete PDDL description of both the domain and the problem, which is finally solved by a classical planner. We evaluate NL2Plan on four planning domains and find that it solves 10 out of 15 tasks - a clear improvement over a plain chain-of-thought reasoning LLM approach, which only solves 2 tasks. Moreover, in two out of the five failure cases, instead of returning an invalid plan, NL2Plan reports that it failed to solve the task. In addition to using NL2Plan in end-to-end mode, users can inspect and correct all of its intermediate results, such as the PDDL representation, increasing explainability and making it an assistive tool for PDDL creation.
Authors: Xiao Xiang Zhu, Zhitong Xiong, Yi Wang, Adam J. Stewart, Konrad Heidler, Yuanyuan Wang, Zhenghang Yuan, Thomas Dujardin, Qingsong Xu, Yilei Shi
Abstract: Foundation models have enormous potential in advancing Earth and climate sciences, however, current approaches may not be optimal as they focus on a few basic features of a desirable Earth and climate foundation model. Crafting the ideal Earth foundation model, we define eleven features which would allow such a foundation model to be beneficial for any geoscientific downstream application in an environmental- and human-centric manner.We further shed light on the way forward to achieve the ideal model and to evaluate Earth foundation models. What comes after foundation models? Energy efficient adaptation, adversarial defenses, and interpretability are among the emerging directions.
Authors: Xiangpeng Wan, Haicheng Deng, Kai Zou, Shiqi Xu
Abstract: Structured finance, which involves restructuring diverse assets into securities like MBS, ABS, and CDOs, enhances capital market efficiency but presents significant due diligence challenges. This study explores the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with traditional asset review processes to improve efficiency and accuracy in structured finance. Using both open-sourced and close-sourced large language models (LLMs), we demonstrate that AI can automate the verification of information between loan applications and bank statements effectively. While close-sourced models such as GPT-4 show superior performance, open-sourced models like LLAMA3 offer a cost-effective alternative. Dual-agent systems further increase accuracy, though this comes with higher operational costs. This research highlights AI's potential to minimize manual errors and streamline due diligence, suggesting a broader application of AI in financial document analysis and risk management.
Authors: Mustafa F Abdelwahed, Joan Espasa, Alice Toniolo, Ian P. Gent
Abstract: Diverse planning is the problem of generating plans with distinct characteristics. This is valuable for many real-world scenarios, including applications related to plan recognition and business process automation. In this work, we introduce \emph{Behaviour Planning}, a diverse planning toolkit that can characterise and generate diverse plans based on modular diversity models. We present a qualitative framework for describing diversity models, a planning approach for generating plans aligned with any given diversity model, and provide a practical implementation of an SMT-based behaviour planner. We showcase how the qualitative approach offered by Behaviour Planning allows it to overcome various challenges faced by previous approaches. Finally, the experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of Behaviour Planning in generating diverse plans compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors: Alexandra Gobrecht, Felix Tuma, Moritz M\"oller, Thomas Z\"oller, Mark Zakhvatkin, Alexandra Wuttig, Holger Sommerfeldt, Sven Sch\"utt
Abstract: The grading of open-ended questions is a high-effort, high-impact task in education. Automating this task promises a significant reduction in workload for education professionals, as well as more consistent grading outcomes for students, by circumventing human subjectivity and error. While recent breakthroughs in AI technology might facilitate such automation, this has not been demonstrated at scale. It this paper, we introduce a novel automatic short answer grading (ASAG) system. The system is based on a fine-tuned open-source transformer model which we trained on large set of exam data from university courses across a large range of disciplines. We evaluated the trained model's performance against held-out test data in a first experiment and found high accuracy levels across a broad spectrum of unseen questions, even in unseen courses. We further compared the performance of our model with that of certified human domain experts in a second experiment: we first assembled another test dataset from real historical exams - the historic grades contained in that data were awarded to students in a regulated, legally binding examination process; we therefore considered them as ground truth for our experiment. We then asked certified human domain experts and our model to grade the historic student answers again without disclosing the historic grades. Finally, we compared the hence obtained grades with the historic grades (our ground truth). We found that for the courses examined, the model deviated less from the official historic grades than the human re-graders - the model's median absolute error was 44 % smaller than the human re-graders', implying that the model is more consistent than humans in grading. These results suggest that leveraging AI enhanced grading can reduce human subjectivity, improve consistency and thus ultimately increase fairness.
Authors: Mayank Mishra, Matt Stallone, Gaoyuan Zhang, Yikang Shen, Aditya Prasad, Adriana Meza Soria, Michele Merler, Parameswaran Selvam, Saptha Surendran, Shivdeep Singh, Manish Sethi, Xuan-Hong Dang, Pengyuan Li, Kun-Lung Wu, Syed Zawad, Andrew Coleman, Matthew White, Mark Lewis, Raju Pavuluri, Yan Koyfman, Boris Lublinsky, Maximilien de Bayser, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Kinjal Basu, Mayank Agarwal, Yi Zhou, Chris Johnson, Aanchal Goyal, Hima Patel, Yousaf Shah, Petros Zerfos, Heiko Ludwig, Asim Munawar, Maxwell Crouse, Pavan Kapanipathi, Shweta Salaria, Bob Calio, Sophia Wen, Seetharami Seelam, Brian Belgodere, Carlos Fonseca, Amith Singhee, Nirmit Desai, David D. Cox, Ruchir Puri, Rameswar Panda
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on code are revolutionizing the software development process. Increasingly, code LLMs are being integrated into software development environments to improve the productivity of human programmers, and LLM-based agents are beginning to show promise for handling complex tasks autonomously. Realizing the full potential of code LLMs requires a wide range of capabilities, including code generation, fixing bugs, explaining and documenting code, maintaining repositories, and more. In this work, we introduce the Granite series of decoder-only code models for code generative tasks, trained with code written in 116 programming languages. The Granite Code models family consists of models ranging in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters, suitable for applications ranging from complex application modernization tasks to on-device memory-constrained use cases. Evaluation on a comprehensive set of tasks demonstrates that Granite Code models consistently reaches state-of-the-art performance among available open-source code LLMs. The Granite Code model family was optimized for enterprise software development workflows and performs well across a range of coding tasks (e.g. code generation, fixing and explanation), making it a versatile all around code model. We release all our Granite Code models under an Apache 2.0 license for both research and commercial use.
Authors: Hannah Chafetz, Sampriti Saxena, Stefaan G. Verhulst
Abstract: Since late 2022, generative AI has taken the world by storm, with widespread use of tools including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Generative AI and large language model (LLM) applications are transforming how individuals find and access data and knowledge. However, the intricate relationship between open data and generative AI, and the vast potential it holds for driving innovation in this field remain underexplored areas. This white paper seeks to unpack the relationship between open data and generative AI and explore possible components of a new Fourth Wave of Open Data: Is open data becoming AI ready? Is open data moving towards a data commons approach? Is generative AI making open data more conversational? Will generative AI improve open data quality and provenance? Towards this end, we provide a new Spectrum of Scenarios framework. This framework outlines a range of scenarios in which open data and generative AI could intersect and what is required from a data quality and provenance perspective to make open data ready for those specific scenarios. These scenarios include: pertaining, adaptation, inference and insight generation, data augmentation, and open-ended exploration. Through this process, we found that in order for data holders to embrace generative AI to improve open data access and develop greater insights from open data, they first must make progress around five key areas: enhance transparency and documentation, uphold quality and integrity, promote interoperability and standards, improve accessibility and useability, and address ethical considerations.
Authors: Zhihao Wen, Yuan Fang, Pengcheng Wei, Fayao Liu, Zhenghua Chen, Min Wu
Abstract: Predicting Remaining Useful Life (RUL) plays a crucial role in the prognostics and health management of industrial systems that involve a variety of interrelated sensors. Given a constant stream of time series sensory data from such systems, deep learning models have risen to prominence at identifying complex, nonlinear temporal dependencies in these data. In addition to the temporal dependencies of individual sensors, spatial dependencies emerge as important correlations among these sensors, which can be naturally modelled by a temporal graph that describes time-varying spatial relationships. However, the majority of existing studies have relied on capturing discrete snapshots of this temporal graph, a coarse-grained approach that leads to loss of temporal information. Moreover, given the variety of heterogeneous sensors, it becomes vital that such inherent heterogeneity is leveraged for RUL prediction in temporal sensor graphs. To capture the nuances of the temporal and spatial relationships and heterogeneous characteristics in an interconnected graph of sensors, we introduce a novel model named Temporal and Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (THGNN). Specifically, THGNN aggregates historical data from neighboring nodes to accurately capture the temporal dynamics and spatial correlations within the stream of sensor data in a fine-grained manner. Moreover, the model leverages Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) to address the diversity of sensor types, significantly improving the model's capacity to learn the heterogeneity in the data sources. Finally, we have validated the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments. Our empirical findings demonstrate significant advancements on the N-CMAPSS dataset, achieving improvements of up to 19.2% and 31.6% in terms of two different evaluation metrics over state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Chenxi Qiu
Abstract: Metric Differential Privacy (mDP) extends the concept of Differential Privacy (DP) to serve as a new paradigm of data perturbation. It is designed to protect secret data represented in general metric space, such as text data encoded as word embeddings or geo-location data on the road network or grid maps. To derive an optimal data perturbation mechanism under mDP, a widely used method is linear programming (LP), which, however, might suffer from a polynomial explosion of decision variables, rendering it impractical in large-scale mDP. In this paper, our objective is to develop a new computation framework to enhance the scalability of the LP-based mDP. Considering the connections established by the mDP constraints among the secret records, we partition the original secret dataset into various subsets. Building upon the partition, we reformulate the LP problem for mDP and solve it via Benders Decomposition, which is composed of two stages: (1) a master program to manage the perturbation calculation across subsets and (2) a set of subproblems, each managing the perturbation derivation within a subset. Our experimental results on multiple datasets, including geo-location data in the road network/grid maps, text data, and synthetic data, underscore our proposed mechanism's superior scalability and efficiency.
Authors: Antonio Biki\'c, Sayan Mukherjee
Abstract: Artificial neural networks (ANNs) perform extraordinarily on numerous tasks including classification or prediction, e.g., speech processing and image classification. These new functions are based on a computational model that is enabled to select freely all necessary internal model parameters as long as it eventually delivers the functionality it is supposed to exhibit. Here, we review the connection between the model parameter selection in machine learning (ML) algorithms running on ANNs and the epistemological theory of neopragmatism focusing on the theory's utility and anti-representationalist aspects. To understand the consequences of the model parameter selection of an ANN, we suggest using neopragmatist theories whose implications are well studied. Incidentally, neopragmatism's notion of optimization is also based on utility considerations. This means that applying this approach elegantly reveals the inherent connections between optimization in ML, using a numerical method during the learning phase, and optimization in the ethical theory of consequentialism, where it occurs as a maxim of action. We suggest that these connections originate from the way relevance is calculated in ML systems. This could ultimately reveal a tendency for specific actions in ML systems.
Authors: Simon Werner, Katharina Christ, Laura Bernardy, Marion G. M\"uller, Achim Rettinger
Abstract: Aligning machine learning systems with human expectations is mostly attempted by training with manually vetted human behavioral samples, typically explicit feedback. This is done on a population level since the context that is capturing the subjective Point-Of-View (POV) of a concrete person in a specific situational context is not retained in the data. However, we argue that alignment on an individual level can boost the subjective predictive performance for the individual user interacting with the system considerably. Since perception differs for each person, the same situation is observed differently. Consequently, the basis for decision making and the subsequent reasoning processes and observable reactions differ. We hypothesize that individual perception patterns can be used for improving the alignment on an individual level. We test this, by integrating perception information into machine learning systems and measuring their predictive performance wrt.~individual subjective assessments. For our empirical study, we collect a novel data set of multimodal stimuli and corresponding eye tracking sequences for the novel task of Perception-Guided Crossmodal Entailment and tackle it with our Perception-Guided Multimodal Transformer. Our findings suggest that exploiting individual perception signals for the machine learning of subjective human assessments provides a valuable cue for individual alignment. It does not only improve the overall predictive performance from the point-of-view of the individual user but might also contribute to steering AI systems towards every person's individual expectations and values.
Authors: Jiajun Liu, Wenjun Ke, Peng Wang, Ziyu Shang, Jinhua Gao, Guozheng Li, Ke Ji, Yanhe Liu
Abstract: Traditional knowledge graph embedding (KGE) methods typically require preserving the entire knowledge graph (KG) with significant training costs when new knowledge emerges. To address this issue, the continual knowledge graph embedding (CKGE) task has been proposed to train the KGE model by learning emerging knowledge efficiently while simultaneously preserving decent old knowledge. However, the explicit graph structure in KGs, which is critical for the above goal, has been heavily ignored by existing CKGE methods. On the one hand, existing methods usually learn new triples in a random order, destroying the inner structure of new KGs. On the other hand, old triples are preserved with equal priority, failing to alleviate catastrophic forgetting effectively. In this paper, we propose a competitive method for CKGE based on incremental distillation (IncDE), which considers the full use of the explicit graph structure in KGs. First, to optimize the learning order, we introduce a hierarchical strategy, ranking new triples for layer-by-layer learning. By employing the inter- and intra-hierarchical orders together, new triples are grouped into layers based on the graph structure features. Secondly, to preserve the old knowledge effectively, we devise a novel incremental distillation mechanism, which facilitates the seamless transfer of entity representations from the previous layer to the next one, promoting old knowledge preservation. Finally, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm to avoid the over-corruption of old knowledge influenced by under-trained new knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of IncDE over state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, the incremental distillation mechanism contributes to improvements of 0.2%-6.5% in the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) score.
Authors: Mathew Mithra Noel, Yug Oswal
Abstract: This paper introduces a significantly better class of activation functions than the almost universally used ReLU like and Sigmoidal class of activation functions. Two new activation functions referred to as the Cone and Parabolic-Cone that differ drastically from popular activation functions and significantly outperform these on the CIFAR-10 and Imagenette benchmmarks are proposed. The cone activation functions are positive only on a finite interval and are strictly negative except at the end-points of the interval, where they become zero. Thus the set of inputs that produce a positive output for a neuron with cone activation functions is a hyperstrip and not a half-space as is the usual case. Since a hyper strip is the region between two parallel hyper-planes, it allows neurons to more finely divide the input feature space into positive and negative classes than with infinitely wide half-spaces. In particular the XOR function can be learn by a single neuron with cone-like activation functions. Both the cone and parabolic-cone activation functions are shown to achieve higher accuracies with significantly fewer neurons on benchmarks. The results presented in this paper indicate that many nonlinear real-world datasets may be separated with fewer hyperstrips than half-spaces. The Cone and Parabolic-Cone activation functions have larger derivatives than ReLU and are shown to significantly speedup training.
Authors: Jonathan Wilder Lavington, Ke Zhang, Vasileios Lioutas, Matthew Niedoba, Yunpeng Liu, Dylan Green, Saeid Naderiparizi, Xiaoxuan Liang, Setareh Dabiri, Adam \'Scibior, Berend Zwartsenberg, Frank Wood
Abstract: The training, testing, and deployment, of autonomous vehicles requires realistic and efficient simulators. Moreover, because of the high variability between different problems presented in different autonomous systems, these simulators need to be easy to use, and easy to modify. To address these problems we introduce TorchDriveSim and its benchmark extension TorchDriveEnv. TorchDriveEnv is a lightweight reinforcement learning benchmark programmed entirely in Python, which can be modified to test a number of different factors in learned vehicle behavior, including the effect of varying kinematic models, agent types, and traffic control patterns. Most importantly unlike many replay based simulation approaches, TorchDriveEnv is fully integrated with a state of the art behavioral simulation API. This allows users to train and evaluate driving models alongside data driven Non-Playable Characters (NPC) whose initializations and driving behavior are reactive, realistic, and diverse. We illustrate the efficiency and simplicity of TorchDriveEnv by evaluating common reinforcement learning baselines in both training and validation environments. Our experiments show that TorchDriveEnv is easy to use, but difficult to solve.
Authors: Eric Gilbert
Abstract: This article argues that AI Alignment is a type of Human-Centered Computing.
Authors: Kevin Xin, Lizhi Xin
Abstract: Forecasting, to estimate future events, is crucial for business and decision-making. This paper proposes QxEAI, a methodology that produces a probabilistic forecast that utilizes a quantum-like evolutionary algorithm based on training a quantum-like logic decision tree and a classical value tree on a small number of related time series. By using different cycles of the Dow Jones Index (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily), we demonstrate how our methodology produces accurate forecasts while requiring little to none manual work.
Authors: Karim Elmaaroufi, Devan Shankar, Ana Cismaru, Marcell Vazquez-Chanlatte, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Matei Zaharia, Sanjit A. Seshia
Abstract: For cyber-physical systems (CPS), including robotics and autonomous vehicles, mass deployment has been hindered by fatal errors that occur when operating in rare events. To replicate rare events such as vehicle crashes, many companies have created logging systems and employed crash reconstruction experts to meticulously recreate these valuable events in simulation. However, in these methods, "what if" questions are not easily formulated and answered. We present ScenarioNL, an AI System for creating scenario programs from natural language. Specifically, we generate these programs from police crash reports. Reports normally contain uncertainty about the exact details of the incidents which we represent through a Probabilistic Programming Language (PPL), Scenic. By using Scenic, we can clearly and concisely represent uncertainty and variation over CPS behaviors, properties, and interactions. We demonstrate how commonplace prompting techniques with the best Large Language Models (LLM) are incapable of reasoning about probabilistic scenario programs and generating code for low-resource languages such as Scenic. Our system is comprised of several LLMs chained together with several kinds of prompting strategies, a compiler, and a simulator. We evaluate our system on publicly available autonomous vehicle crash reports in California from the last five years and share insights into how we generate code that is both semantically meaningful and syntactically correct.
Authors: Michael Wornow, Avanika Narayan, Krista Opsahl-Ong, Quinn McIntyre, Nigam H. Shah, Christopher Re
Abstract: Automating enterprise workflows could unlock $4 trillion/year in productivity gains. Despite being of interest to the data management community for decades, the ultimate vision of end-to-end workflow automation has remained elusive. Current solutions rely on process mining and robotic process automation (RPA), in which a bot is hard-coded to follow a set of predefined rules for completing a workflow. Through case studies of a hospital and large B2B enterprise, we find that the adoption of RPA has been inhibited by high set-up costs (12-18 months), unreliable execution (60% initial accuracy), and burdensome maintenance (requiring multiple FTEs). Multimodal foundation models (FMs) such as GPT-4 offer a promising new approach for end-to-end workflow automation given their generalized reasoning and planning abilities. To study these capabilities we propose ECLAIR, a system to automate enterprise workflows with minimal human supervision. We conduct initial experiments showing that multimodal FMs can address the limitations of traditional RPA with (1) near-human-level understanding of workflows (93% accuracy on a workflow understanding task) and (2) instant set-up with minimal technical barrier (based solely on a natural language description of a workflow, ECLAIR achieves end-to-end completion rates of 40%). We identify human-AI collaboration, validation, and self-improvement as open challenges, and suggest ways they can be solved with data management techniques. Code is available at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/eclair-agents
Authors: Xiao Hu, Tianshu Wang, Min Gong, Shaoshi Yang
Abstract: Guidance commands of flight vehicles are a series of data sets with fixed time intervals, thus guidance design constitutes a sequential decision problem and satisfies the basic conditions for using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). In this paper, we consider the scenario where the escape flight vehicle (EFV) generates guidance commands based on DRL and the pursuit flight vehicle (PFV) generates guidance commands based on the proportional navigation method. For the EFV, the objective of the guidance design entails progressively maximizing the residual velocity, subject to the constraint imposed by the given evasion distance. Thus an irregular dynamic max-min problem of extremely large-scale is formulated, where the time instant when the optimal solution can be attained is uncertain and the optimum solution depends on all the intermediate guidance commands generated before. For solving this problem, a two-step strategy is conceived. In the first step, we use the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm to generate the guidance commands of the EFV. The results obtained by PPO in the global search space are coarse, despite the fact that the reward function, the neural network parameters and the learning rate are designed elaborately. Therefore, in the second step, we propose to invoke the evolution strategy (ES) based algorithm, which uses the result of PPO as the initial value, to further improve the quality of the solution by searching in the local space. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed guidance design method based on the PPO algorithm is capable of achieving a residual velocity of 67.24 m/s, higher than the residual velocities achieved by the benchmark soft actor-critic and deep deterministic policy gradient algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed ES-enhanced PPO algorithm outperforms the PPO algorithm by 2.7\%, achieving a residual velocity of 69.04 m/s.
Authors: Xiaoyan Su, Yinghao Zhu, Run Li
Abstract: In the past, research on a single low dimensional activation function in networks has led to internal covariate shift and gradient deviation problems. A relatively small research area is how to use function combinations to provide property completion for a single activation function application. We propose a network adversarial method to address the aforementioned challenges. This is the first method to use different activation functions in a network. Based on the existing activation functions in the current network, an adversarial function with opposite derivative image properties is constructed, and the two are alternately used as activation functions for different network layers. For complex situations, we propose a method of high-dimensional function graph decomposition(HD-FGD), which divides it into different parts and then passes through a linear layer. After integrating the inverse of the partial derivatives of each decomposed term, we obtain its adversarial function by referring to the computational rules of the decomposition process. The use of network adversarial methods or the use of HD-FGD alone can effectively replace the traditional MLP+activation function mode. Through the above methods, we have achieved a substantial improvement over standard activation functions regarding both training efficiency and predictive accuracy. The article addresses the adversarial issues associated with several prevalent activation functions, presenting alternatives that can be seamlessly integrated into existing models without any adverse effects. We will release the code as open source after the conference review process is completed.
Authors: Siddhant Kharbanda, Devaansh Gupta, Gururaj K, Pankaj Malhotra, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Rohit Babbar
Abstract: Extreme Multi-label Classification (XMC) involves predicting a subset of relevant labels from an extremely large label space, given an input query and labels with textual features. Models developed for this problem have conventionally used modular approach with (i) a Dual Encoder (DE) to embed the queries and label texts, (ii) a One-vs-All classifier to rerank the shortlisted labels mined through meta-classifier training. While such methods have shown empirical success, we observe two key uncharted aspects, (i) DE training typically uses only a single positive relation even for datasets which offer more, (ii) existing approaches fixate on using only OvA reduction of the multi-label problem. This work aims to explore these aspects by proposing UniDEC, a novel end-to-end trainable framework which trains the dual encoder and classifier in together in a unified fashion using a multi-class loss. For the choice of multi-class loss, the work proposes a novel pick-some-label (PSL) reduction of the multi-label problem with leverages multiple (in come cases, all) positives. The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on a single GPU, while achieving on par results with respect to multi-GPU SOTA methods on various XML benchmark datasets, all while using 4-16x lesser compute and being practically scalable even beyond million label scale datasets.
Authors: Abdallah Namoun, Ahmed Alrehaili, Zaib Un Nisa, Hani Almoamari, Ali Tufail
Abstract: This article proposes the so-called large user interface models (LUIMs) to enable the generation of user interfaces and prediction of usability using artificial intelligence in the context of mobile applications.
Authors: Chenyu Zhang, Xu Chen, Xuan Di
Abstract: Mean field games (MFGs) are a promising framework for modeling the behavior of large-population systems. However, solving MFGs can be challenging due to the coupling of forward population evolution and backward agent dynamics. Typically, obtaining mean field Nash equilibria (MFNE) involves an iterative approach where the forward and backward processes are solved alternately, known as fixed-point iteration (FPI). This method requires fully observed population propagation and agent dynamics over the entire spatial domain, which could be impractical in some real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel online single-agent model-free learning scheme, which enables a single agent to learn MFNE using online samples, without prior knowledge of the state-action space, reward function, or transition dynamics. Specifically, the agent updates its policy through the value function (Q), while simultaneously evaluating the mean field state (M), using the same batch of observations. We develop two variants of this learning scheme: off-policy and on-policy QM iteration. We prove that they efficiently approximate FPI, and a sample complexity guarantee is provided. The efficacy of our methods is confirmed by numerical experiments.
Authors: Nurani Rajagopal Rohan, Vigneswaran C, Sayan Ghosh, Kishore Rajendran, Gaurav A, V Srinivasa Chakravarthy
Abstract: We propose a novel, brain-inspired deep neural network model known as the Deep Oscillatory Neural Network (DONN). Deep neural networks like the Recurrent Neural Networks indeed possess sequence processing capabilities but the internal states of the network are not designed to exhibit brain-like oscillatory activity. With this motivation, the DONN is designed to have oscillatory internal dynamics. Neurons of the DONN are either nonlinear neural oscillators or traditional neurons with sigmoidal or ReLU activation. The neural oscillator used in the model is the Hopf oscillator, with the dynamics described in the complex domain. Input can be presented to the neural oscillator in three possible modes. The sigmoid and ReLU neurons also use complex-valued extensions. All the weight stages are also complex-valued. Training follows the general principle of weight change by minimizing the output error and therefore has an overall resemblance to complex backpropagation. A generalization of DONN to convolutional networks known as the Oscillatory Convolutional Neural Network is also proposed. The two proposed oscillatory networks are applied to a variety of benchmark problems in signal and image/video processing. The performance of the proposed models is either comparable or superior to published results on the same data sets.
Authors: Jinglue Xu, Zhen Liu, Nagar Anthel Venkatesh Suryanarayanan, Hitoshi Iba
Abstract: Recently, code generation driven by large language models (LLMs) has become increasingly popular. However, automatically generating code for machine learning (ML) tasks still poses significant challenges. This paper explores the limits of program synthesis for ML by combining LLMs and automated machine learning (autoML). Specifically, our goal is to fully automate the code generation process for the entire ML workflow, from data preparation to modeling and post-processing, utilizing only textual descriptions of the ML tasks. To manage the length and diversity of ML programs, we propose to break each ML program into smaller, manageable parts. Each part is generated separately by the LLM, with careful consideration of their compatibilities. To implement the approach, we design a testing technique for ML programs. Furthermore, our approach enables integration with autoML. In our approach, autoML serves to numerically assess and optimize the ML programs generated by LLMs. LLMs, in turn, help to bridge the gap between theoretical, algorithm-centered autoML and practical autoML applications. This mutual enhancement underscores the synergy between LLMs and autoML in program synthesis for ML. In experiments across various ML tasks, our method outperforms existing methods in 10 out of 12 tasks for generating ML programs. In addition, autoML significantly improves the performance of the generated ML programs. In the experiments, our method, Text-to-ML, achieves fully automated synthesis of the entire ML pipeline based solely on textual descriptions of the ML tasks.
Authors: Xiaobin Li, Kai Wu, Yujian Betterest Li, Xiaoyu Zhang, Handing Wang, Jing Liu
Abstract: Pretrained Optimization Models (POMs) leverage knowledge gained from optimizing various tasks, providing efficient solutions for new optimization challenges through direct usage or fine-tuning. Despite the inefficiencies and limited generalization abilities observed in current POMs, our proposed model, the general pre-trained optimization model (GPOM), addresses these shortcomings. GPOM constructs a population-based pretrained Black-Box Optimization (BBO) model tailored for continuous optimization. Evaluation on the BBOB benchmark and two robot control tasks demonstrates that GPOM outperforms other pretrained BBO models significantly, especially for high-dimensional tasks. Its direct optimization performance exceeds that of state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms and POMs. Furthermore, GPOM exhibits robust generalization capabilities across diverse task distributions, dimensions, population sizes, and optimization horizons.
Authors: Jinho Kim, Marcel Dominik Nickel, Florian Knoll
Abstract: This study accelerates MR cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) acquisitions using deep learning-based (DL) reconstruction at 3T and 0.55T. Thirty healthy volunteers underwent conventional two-fold MRCP scans at field strengths of 3T or 0.55T. We trained a variational network (VN) using retrospectively six-fold undersampled data obtained at 3T. We then evaluated our method against standard techniques such as parallel imaging (PI) and compressed sensing (CS), focusing on peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) as metrics. Furthermore, considering acquiring fully-sampled MRCP is impractical, we added a self-supervised DL reconstruction (SSDU) to the evaluating group. We also tested our method in a prospective accelerated scenario to reflect real-world clinical applications and evaluated its adaptability to MRCP at 0.55T. Our method demonstrated a remarkable reduction of average acquisition time from 599/542 to 255/180 seconds for MRCP at 3T/0.55T. In both retrospective and prospective undersampling scenarios, the PSNR and SSIM of VN were higher than those of PI, CS, and SSDU. At the same time, VN preserved the image quality of undersampled data, i.e., sharpness and the visibility of hepatobiliary ducts. In addition, VN also produced high quality reconstructions at 0.55T resulting in the highest PSNR and SSIM. In summary, VN trained for highly accelerated MRCP allows to reduce the acquisition time by a factor of 2.4/3.0 at 3T/0.55T while maintaining the image quality of the conventional acquisition.
Authors: Silan Hu, Xiaoning Wang
Abstract: Integrating large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) holds great promise for revolutionizing intelligent education, but challenges remain in achieving personalization, interactivity, and explainability. We propose FOKE, a Forest Of Knowledge and Education framework that synergizes foundation models, knowledge graphs, and prompt engineering to address these challenges. FOKE introduces three key innovations: (1) a hierarchical knowledge forest for structured domain knowledge representation; (2) a multi-dimensional user profiling mechanism for comprehensive learner modeling; and (3) an interactive prompt engineering scheme for generating precise and tailored learning guidance. We showcase FOKE's application in programming education, homework assessment, and learning path planning, demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality. Additionally, we implement Scholar Hero, a real-world instantiation of FOKE. Our research highlights the potential of integrating foundation models, knowledge graphs, and prompt engineering to revolutionize intelligent education practices, ultimately benefiting learners worldwide. FOKE provides a principled and unified approach to harnessing cutting-edge AI technologies for personalized, interactive, and explainable educational services, paving the way for further research and development in this critical direction.
Authors: Tim Franzmeyer, Edith Elkind, Philip Torr, Jakob Foerster, Joao Henriques
Abstract: AI agents are commonly trained with large datasets of demonstrations of human behavior. However, not all behaviors are equally safe or desirable. Desired characteristics for an AI agent can be expressed by assigning desirability scores, which we assume are not assigned to individual behaviors but to collective trajectories. For example, in a dataset of vehicle interactions, these scores might relate to the number of incidents that occurred. We first assess the effect of each individual agent's behavior on the collective desirability score, e.g., assessing how likely an agent is to cause incidents. This allows us to selectively imitate agents with a positive effect, e.g., only imitating agents that are unlikely to cause incidents. To enable this, we propose the concept of an agent's Exchange Value, which quantifies an individual agent's contribution to the collective desirability score. The Exchange Value is the expected change in desirability score when substituting the agent for a randomly selected agent. We propose additional methods for estimating Exchange Values from real-world datasets, enabling us to learn desired imitation policies that outperform relevant baselines. The project website can be found at https://tinyurl.com/select-to-perfect.
Authors: Korn Sooksatra, Greg Hamerly, Pablo Rivas
Abstract: The efficacy of deep learning models has been called into question by the presence of adversarial examples. Addressing the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial examples is crucial for ensuring their continued development and deployment. In this work, we focus on the role of rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation functions in the generation of adversarial examples. ReLU functions are commonly used in deep learning models because they facilitate the training process. However, our empirical analysis demonstrates that ReLU functions are not robust against adversarial examples. We propose a modified version of the ReLU function, which improves robustness against adversarial examples. Our results are supported by an experiment, which confirms the effectiveness of our proposed modification. Additionally, we demonstrate that applying adversarial training to our customized model further enhances its robustness compared to a general model.
Authors: Korn Sooksatra, Bikram Khanal, Pablo Rivas
Abstract: Recently, with the advancement of deep learning, several applications in text classification have advanced significantly. However, this improvement comes with a cost because deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial examples. This weakness indicates that deep learning is not very robust. Fortunately, the input of a text classifier is discrete. Hence, it can prevent the classifier from state-of-the-art attacks. Nonetheless, previous works have generated black-box attacks that successfully manipulate the discrete values of the input to find adversarial examples. Therefore, instead of changing the discrete values, we transform the input into its embedding vector containing real values to perform the state-of-the-art white-box attacks. Then, we convert the perturbed embedding vector back into a text and name it an adversarial example. In summary, we create a framework that measures the robustness of a text classifier by using the gradients of the classifier.
Authors: Bing Hu, Ashish Saragadam, Anita Layton, Helen Chen
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in every stage of drug development. Continuing breakthroughs in AI-based methods for drug discovery require the creation, improvement, and refinement of drug discovery data. We posit a new data challenge that slows the advancement of drug discovery AI: datasets are often collected independently from each other, often with little overlap, creating data sparsity. Data sparsity makes data curation difficult for researchers looking to answer key research questions requiring values posed across multiple datasets. We propose a novel diffusion GNN model Syngand capable of generating ligand and pharmacokinetic data end-to-end. We show and provide a methodology for sampling pharmacokinetic data for existing ligands using our Syngand model. We show the initial promising results on the efficacy of the Syngand-generated synthetic target property data on downstream regression tasks with AqSolDB, LD50, and hERG central. Using our proposed model and methodology, researchers can easily generate synthetic ligand data to help them explore research questions that require data spanning multiple datasets.
Authors: Neo Christopher Chung, Hongkyou Chung, Hearim Lee, Hongbeom Chung, Lennart Brocki, George Dyer
Abstract: A cautious interpretation of AI regulations and policy in the EU and the USA place explainability as a central deliverable of compliant AI systems. However, from a technical perspective, explainable AI (XAI) remains an elusive and complex target where even state of the art methods often reach erroneous, misleading, and incomplete explanations. "Explainability" has multiple meanings which are often used interchangeably, and there are an even greater number of XAI methods - none of which presents a clear edge. Indeed, there are multiple failure modes for each XAI method, which require application-specific development and continuous evaluation. In this paper, we analyze legislative and policy developments in the United States and the European Union, such as the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, the AI Act, the AI Liability Directive, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from a right to explanation perspective. We argue that these AI regulations and current market conditions threaten effective AI governance and safety because the objective of trustworthy, accountable, and transparent AI is intrinsically linked to the questionable ability of AI operators to provide meaningful explanations. Unless governments explicitly tackle the issue of explainability through clear legislative and policy statements that take into account technical realities, AI governance risks becoming a vacuous "box-ticking" exercise where scientific standards are replaced with legalistic thresholds, providing only a false sense of security in XAI.
Authors: Evan King, Haoxiang Yu, Sahil Vartak, Jenna Jacob, Sangsu Lee, Christine Julien
Abstract: Everyday devices like light bulbs and kitchen appliances are now embedded with so many features and automated behaviors that they have become complicated to actually use. While such "smart" capabilities can better support users' goals, the task of learning the "ins and outs" of different devices is daunting. Voice assistants aim to solve this problem by providing a natural language interface to devices, yet such assistants cannot understand loosely-constrained commands, they lack the ability to reason about and explain devices' behaviors to users, and they rely on connectivity to intrusive cloud infrastructure. Toward addressing these issues, we propose thoughtful things: devices that leverage lightweight, on-device language models to take actions and explain their behaviors in response to unconstrained user commands. We propose an end-to-end framework that leverages formal modeling, automated training data synthesis, and generative language models to create devices that are both capable and thoughtful in the presence of unconstrained user goals and inquiries. Our framework requires no labeled data and can be deployed on-device, with no cloud dependency. We implement two thoughtful things (a lamp and a thermostat) and deploy them on real hardware, evaluating their practical performance.
Authors: Christopher Clarke, Roland Daynauth, Charlene Wilkinson, Hubert Devonish, Jason Mars
Abstract: While major languages often enjoy substantial attention and resources, the linguistic diversity across the globe encompasses a multitude of smaller, indigenous, and regional languages that lack the same level of computational support. One such region is the Caribbean. While commonly labeled as "English speaking", the ex-British Caribbean region consists of a myriad of Creole languages thriving alongside English. In this paper, we present Guylingo: a comprehensive corpus designed for advancing NLP research in the domain of Creolese (Guyanese English-lexicon Creole), the most widely spoken language in the culturally rich nation of Guyana. We first outline our framework for gathering and digitizing this diverse corpus, inclusive of colloquial expressions, idioms, and regional variations in a low-resource language. We then demonstrate the challenges of training and evaluating NLP models for machine translation in Creole. Lastly, we discuss the unique opportunities presented by recent NLP advancements for accelerating the formal adoption of Creole languages as official languages in the Caribbean.
Authors: Yuan Ruihao, Huang Kaixuan, Zhang Shunqing
Abstract: Because of the advantages of computation complexity compared with traditional localization algorithms, fingerprint based localization is getting increasing demand. Expanding the fingerprint database from the frequency domain by channel reconstruction can improve localization accuracy. However, in a mobility environment, the channel reconstruction accuracy is limited by the time-varying parameters. In this paper, we proposed a system to extract the time-varying parameters based on space-alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE) algorithm, then used variational auto-encoder (VAE) to reconstruct the channel state information on another channel. The proposed scheme is tested on the data generated by the deep-MIMO channel model. Mathematical analysis for the viability of our system is also shown in this paper.
Authors: Guy Azov, Tatiana Pelc, Adi Fledel Alon, Gila Kamhi
Abstract: Previous studies have demonstrated that proactive interaction with user reviews has a positive impact on the perception of app users and encourages them to submit revised ratings. Nevertheless, developers encounter challenges in managing a high volume of reviews, particularly in the case of popular apps with a substantial influx of daily reviews. Consequently, there is a demand for automated solutions aimed at streamlining the process of responding to user reviews. To address this, we have developed a new system for generating automatic responses by leveraging user-contributed documents with the help of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Our solution, named SCRABLE, represents an adaptive customer review response automation that enhances itself with self-optimizing prompts and a judging mechanism based on LLMs. Additionally, we introduce an automatic scoring mechanism that mimics the role of a human evaluator to assess the quality of responses generated in customer review domains. Extensive experiments and analyses conducted on real-world datasets reveal that our method is effective in producing high-quality responses, yielding improvement of more than 8.5% compared to the baseline. Further validation through manual examination of the generated responses underscores the efficacy our proposed system.
Authors: Anna Penzkofer, Lei Shi, Andreas Bulling
Abstract: While Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) are promising for modelling spatial cognition, their application is currently limited to artificially generated images and simple spatial queries. We propose VSA4VQA - a novel 4D implementation of VSAs that implements a mental representation of natural images for the challenging task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). VSA4VQA is the first model to scale a VSA to complex spatial queries. Our method is based on the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) to encode objects in a hyperdimensional vector space. To encode natural images, we extend the SPA to include dimensions for object's width and height in addition to their spatial location. To perform spatial queries we further introduce learned spatial query masks and integrate a pre-trained vision-language model for answering attribute-related questions. We evaluate our method on the GQA benchmark dataset and show that it can effectively encode natural images, achieving competitive performance to state-of-the-art deep learning methods for zero-shot VQA.
Authors: Weiyu Liu, Geng Chen, Joy Hsu, Jiayuan Mao, Jiajun Wu
Abstract: This paper presents a framework for learning state and action abstractions in sequential decision-making domains. Our framework, planning abstraction from language (PARL), utilizes language-annotated demonstrations to automatically discover a symbolic and abstract action space and induce a latent state abstraction based on it. PARL consists of three stages: 1) recovering object-level and action concepts, 2) learning state abstractions, abstract action feasibility, and transition models, and 3) applying low-level policies for abstract actions. During inference, given the task description, PARL first makes abstract action plans using the latent transition and feasibility functions, then refines the high-level plan using low-level policies. PARL generalizes across scenarios involving novel object instances and environments, unseen concept compositions, and tasks that require longer planning horizons than settings it is trained on.
Authors: Pietro Mazzaglia, Taco Cohen, Daniel Dijkman
Abstract: Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or demonstrations. In this work, we argue that well-directed interactions with the environment can mitigate this problem and propose an information-based measure to augment the agent's objective and accelerate the affordance discovery process. We provide a theoretical justification of our approach and we empirically validate the approach both in simulation and real-world tasks. Our method, which we dub IDA, enables the efficient discovery of visual affordances for several action primitives, such as grasping, stacking objects, or opening drawers, strongly improving data efficiency in simulation, and it allows us to learn grasping affordances in a small number of interactions, on a real-world setup with a UFACTORY XArm 6 robot arm.
Authors: Anshuman Chhabra, Bo Li, Jian Chen, Prasant Mohapatra, Hongfu Liu
Abstract: Influence functions offer a robust framework for assessing the impact of each training data sample on model predictions, serving as a prominent tool in data-centric learning. Despite their widespread use in various tasks, the strong convexity assumption on the model and the computational cost associated with calculating the inverse of the Hessian matrix pose constraints, particularly when analyzing large deep models. This paper focuses on a classical data-centric scenario--trimming detrimental samples--and addresses both challenges within a unified framework. Specifically, we establish an equivalence transformation between identifying detrimental training samples via influence functions and outlier gradient detection. This transformation not only presents a straightforward and Hessian-free formulation but also provides profound insights into the role of the gradient in sample impact. Moreover, it relaxes the convexity assumption of influence functions, extending their applicability to non-convex deep models. Through systematic empirical evaluations, we first validate the correctness of our proposed outlier gradient analysis on synthetic datasets and then demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting mislabeled samples in vision models, selecting data samples for improving performance of transformer models for natural language processing, and identifying influential samples for fine-tuned Large Language Models.
Authors: Huihong Shi, Haikuo Shao, Wendong Mao, Zhongfeng Wang
Abstract: Motivated by the huge success of Transformers in the field of natural language processing (NLP), Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been rapidly developed and achieved remarkable performance in various computer vision tasks. However, their huge model sizes and intensive computations hinder ViTs' deployment on embedded devices, calling for effective model compression methods, such as quantization. Unfortunately, due to the existence of hardware-unfriendly and quantization-sensitive non-linear operations, particularly {Softmax}, it is non-trivial to completely quantize all operations in ViTs, yielding either significant accuracy drops or non-negligible hardware costs. In response to challenges associated with \textit{standard ViTs}, we focus our attention towards the quantization and acceleration for \textit{efficient ViTs}, which not only eliminate the troublesome Softmax but also integrate linear attention with low computational complexity, and propose \emph{Trio-ViT} accordingly. Specifically, at the algorithm level, we develop a {tailored post-training quantization engine} taking the unique activation distributions of Softmax-free efficient ViTs into full consideration, aiming to boost quantization accuracy. Furthermore, at the hardware level, we build an accelerator dedicated to the specific Convolution-Transformer hybrid architecture of efficient ViTs, thereby enhancing hardware efficiency. Extensive experimental results consistently prove the effectiveness of our Trio-ViT framework. {Particularly, we can gain up to $\uparrow$$\mathbf{7.2}\times$ and $\uparrow$$\mathbf{14.6}\times$ FPS under comparable accuracy over state-of-the-art ViT accelerators, as well as $\uparrow$$\mathbf{5.9}\times$ and $\uparrow$$\mathbf{2.0}\times$ DSP efficiency.} Codes will be released publicly upon acceptance.
Authors: Ravikumar Balakrishnan, Marius Arvinte, Nageen Himayat, Hosein Nikopour, Hassnaa Moustafa
Abstract: Adversarial machine learning, focused on studying various attacks and defenses on machine learning (ML) models, is rapidly gaining importance as ML is increasingly being adopted for optimizing wireless systems such as Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN). A comprehensive modeling of the security threats and the demonstration of adversarial attacks and defenses on practical AI based O-RAN systems is still in its nascent stages. We begin by conducting threat modeling to pinpoint attack surfaces in O-RAN using an ML-based Connection management application (xApp) as an example. The xApp uses a Graph Neural Network trained using Deep Reinforcement Learning and achieves on average 54% improvement in the coverage rate measured as the 5th percentile user data rates. We then formulate and demonstrate evasion attacks that degrade the coverage rates by as much as 50% through injecting bounded noise at different threat surfaces including the open wireless medium itself. Crucially, we also compare and contrast the effectiveness of such attacks on the ML-based xApp and a non-ML based heuristic. We finally develop and demonstrate robust training-based defenses against the challenging physical/jamming-based attacks and show a 15% improvement in the coverage rates when compared to employing no defense over a range of noise budgets
Authors: Minjae Cho, Jonathan P. How, Chuangchuang Sun
Abstract: Despite notable successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the prevalent use of an online learning paradigm prevents its widespread adoption, especially in hazardous or costly scenarios. Offline RL has emerged as an alternative solution, learning from pre-collected static datasets. However, this offline learning introduces a new challenge known as distributional shift, degrading the performance when the policy is evaluated on scenarios that are Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) from the training dataset. Most existing offline RL resolves this issue by regularizing policy learning within the information supported by the given dataset. However, such regularization overlooks the potential for high-reward regions that may exist beyond the dataset. This motivates exploring novel offline learning techniques that can make improvements beyond the data support without compromising policy performance, potentially by learning causation (cause-and-effect) instead of correlation from the dataset. In this paper, we propose the MOOD-CRL (Model-based Offline OOD-Adapting Causal RL) algorithm, which aims to address the challenge of extrapolation for offline policy training through causal inference instead of policy-regularizing methods. Specifically, Causal Normalizing Flow (CNF) is developed to learn the transition and reward functions for data generation and augmentation in offline policy evaluation and training. Based on the data-invariant, physics-based qualitative causal graph and the observational data, we develop a novel learning scheme for CNF to learn the quantitative structural causal model. As a result, CNF gains predictive and counterfactual reasoning capabilities for sequential decision-making tasks, revealing a high potential for OOD adaptation. Our CNF-based offline RL approach is validated through empirical evaluations, outperforming model-free and model-based methods by a significant margin.
Authors: Jiahao Nick Li, Yan Xu, Tovi Grossman, Stephanie Santosa, Michelle Li
Abstract: The progression to "Pervasive Augmented Reality" envisions easy access to multimodal information continuously. However, in many everyday scenarios, users are occupied physically, cognitively or socially. This may increase the friction to act upon the multimodal information that users encounter in the world. To reduce such friction, future interactive interfaces should intelligently provide quick access to digital actions based on users' context. To explore the range of possible digital actions, we conducted a diary study that required participants to capture and share the media that they intended to perform actions on (e.g., images or audio), along with their desired actions and other contextual information. Using this data, we generated a holistic design space of digital follow-up actions that could be performed in response to different types of multimodal sensory inputs. We then designed OmniActions, a pipeline powered by large language models (LLMs) that processes multimodal sensory inputs and predicts follow-up actions on the target information grounded in the derived design space. Using the empirical data collected in the diary study, we performed quantitative evaluations on three variations of LLM techniques (intent classification, in-context learning and finetuning) and identified the most effective technique for our task. Additionally, as an instantiation of the pipeline, we developed an interactive prototype and reported preliminary user feedback about how people perceive and react to the action predictions and its errors.
Authors: Bo Yan
Abstract: Graph condensation, which reduces the size of a large-scale graph by synthesizing a small-scale condensed graph as its substitution, has immediately benefited various graph learning tasks. However, existing graph condensation methods rely on centralized data storage, which is unfeasible for real-world decentralized data distribution, and overlook data holders' privacy-preserving requirements. To bridge the gap, we propose and study the novel problem of federated graph condensation for graph neural networks (GNNs). Specifically, we first propose a general framework for federated graph condensation, in which we decouple the typical gradient matching process for graph condensation into client-side gradient calculation and server-side gradient matching. In this way, the burdensome computation cost in client-side is largely alleviated. Besides, our empirical studies show that under the federated setting, the condensed graph will consistently leak data membership privacy, i.e., the condensed graph during the federated training can be utilized to steal the training data under the membership inference attacks (MIA). To tackle this issue, we innovatively incorporate information bottleneck principles into the federated graph condensation, which only needs to extract partial node features in one local pre-training step and utilize the features during federated training. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework can consistently protect membership privacy during training. Meanwhile, it also achieves comparable and even superior performance against existing centralized graph condensation and federated graph learning methods.
Authors: Dainis Boumber, Rakesh M. Verma, Fatima Zahra Qachfar
Abstract: Deception, a prevalent aspect of human communication, has undergone a significant transformation in the digital age. With the globalization of online interactions, individuals are communicating in multiple languages and mixing languages on social media, with varied data becoming available in each language and dialect. At the same time, the techniques for detecting deception are similar across the board. Recent studies have shown the possibility of the existence of universal linguistic cues to deception across domains within the English language; however, the existence of such cues in other languages remains unknown. Furthermore, the practical task of deception detection in low-resource languages is not a well-studied problem due to the lack of labeled data. Another dimension of deception is multimodality. For example, a picture with an altered caption in fake news or disinformation may exist. This paper calls for a comprehensive investigation into the complexities of deceptive language across linguistic boundaries and modalities within the realm of computer security and natural language processing and the possibility of using multilingual transformer models and labeled data in various languages to universally address the task of deception detection.
Authors: Beng Chin Ooi, Shaofeng Cai, Gang Chen, Kian Lee Tan, Yuncheng Wu, Xiaokui Xiao, Naili Xing, Cong Yue, Lingze Zeng, Meihui Zhang, Zhanhao Zhao
Abstract: In the wake of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), we stand on the brink of a transformative leap in data systems. The imminent fusion of AI and DB (AIxDB) promises a new generation of data systems, which will relieve the burden on end-users across all industry sectors by featuring AI-enhanced functionalities, such as personalized and automated in-database AI-powered analytics, self-driving capabilities for improved system performance, etc. In this paper, we explore the evolution of data systems with a focus on deepening the fusion of AI and DB. We present NeurDB, our next-generation data system designed to fully embrace AI design in each major system component and provide in-database AI-powered analytics. We outline the conceptual and architectural overview of NeurDB, discuss its design choices and key components, and report its current development and future plan.
Authors: Jiayuan Chen, Changchang Yin, Yuanlong Wang, Ping Zhang
Abstract: Deep learning-based predictive models, leveraging Electronic Health Records (EHR), are receiving increasing attention in healthcare. An effective representation of a patient's EHR should hierarchically encompass both the temporal relationships between historical visits and medical events, and the inherent structural information within these elements. Existing patient representation methods can be roughly categorized into sequential representation and graphical representation. The sequential representation methods focus only on the temporal relationships among longitudinal visits. On the other hand, the graphical representation approaches, while adept at extracting the graph-structured relationships between various medical events, fall short in effectively integrate temporal information. To capture both types of information, we model a patient's EHR as a novel temporal heterogeneous graph. This graph includes historical visits nodes and medical events nodes. It propagates structured information from medical event nodes to visit nodes and utilizes time-aware visit nodes to capture changes in the patient's health status. Furthermore, we introduce a novel temporal graph transformer (TRANS) that integrates temporal edge features, global positional encoding, and local structural encoding into heterogeneous graph convolution, capturing both temporal and structural information. We validate the effectiveness of TRANS through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The results show that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Qi Zou, Na Yu, Daoliang Zhang, Wei Zhang, Rui Gao
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have excelled in learning from graph-structured data, especially in understanding the relationships within a single graph, i.e., intra-graph relationships. Despite their successes, GNNs are limited by neglecting the context of relationships across graphs, i.e., inter-graph relationships. Recognizing the potential to extend this capability, we introduce Relating-Up, a plug-and-play module that enhances GNNs by exploiting inter-graph relationships. This module incorporates a relation-aware encoder and a feedback training strategy. The former enables GNNs to capture relationships across graphs, enriching relation-aware graph representation through collective context. The latter utilizes a feedback loop mechanism for the recursively refinement of these representations, leveraging insights from refining inter-graph dynamics to conduct feedback loop. The synergy between these two innovations results in a robust and versatile module. Relating-Up enhances the expressiveness of GNNs, enabling them to encapsulate a wider spectrum of graph relationships with greater precision. Our evaluations across 16 benchmark datasets demonstrate that integrating Relating-Up into GNN architectures substantially improves performance, positioning Relating-Up as a formidable choice for a broad spectrum of graph representation learning tasks.
Authors: Joo Young Choi, Jaesung R. Park, Inkyu Park, Jaewoong Cho, Albert No, Ernest K. Ryu
Abstract: Current state-of-the-art diffusion models employ U-Net architectures containing convolutional and (qkv) self-attention layers. The U-Net processes images while being conditioned on the time embedding input for each sampling step and the class or caption embedding input corresponding to the desired conditional generation. Such conditioning involves scale-and-shift operations to the convolutional layers but does not directly affect the attention layers. While these standard architectural choices are certainly effective, not conditioning the attention layers feels arbitrary and potentially suboptimal. In this work, we show that simply adding LoRA conditioning to the attention layers without changing or tuning the other parts of the U-Net architecture improves the image generation quality. For example, a drop-in addition of LoRA conditioning to EDM diffusion model yields FID scores of 1.91/1.75 for unconditional and class-conditional CIFAR-10 generation, improving upon the baseline of 1.97/1.79.
Authors: Ziyu Liu, Tong Zhou, Yukui Luo, Xiaolin Xu
Abstract: Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have become a promising solution to secure DNN models on edge devices. However, the existing solutions either provide inadequate protection or introduce large performance overhead. Taking both security and performance into consideration, this paper presents TBNet, a TEE-based defense framework that protects DNN model from a neural architectural perspective. Specifically, TBNet generates a novel Two-Branch substitution model, to respectively exploit (1) the computational resources in the untrusted Rich Execution Environment (REE) for latency reduction and (2) the physically-isolated TEE for model protection. Experimental results on a Raspberry Pi across diverse DNN model architectures and datasets demonstrate that TBNet achieves efficient model protection at a low cost.
Authors: Rochana R. Obadage, Sarah M. Rajtmajer, Jian Wu
Abstract: The iterative character of work in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) and reliance on comparisons against benchmark datasets emphasize the importance of reproducibility in that literature. Yet, resource constraints and inadequate documentation can make running replications particularly challenging. Our work explores the potential of using downstream citation contexts as a signal of reproducibility. We introduce a sentiment analysis framework applied to citation contexts from papers involved in Machine Learning Reproducibility Challenges in order to interpret the positive or negative outcomes of reproduction attempts. Our contributions include training classifiers for reproducibility-related contexts and sentiment analysis, and exploring correlations between citation context sentiment and reproducibility scores. Study data, software, and an artifact appendix are publicly available at https://github.com/lamps-lab/ccair-ai-reproducibility .
Authors: Jian Jia, Yipei Wang, Yan Li, Honggang Chen, Xuehan Bai, Zhaocheng Liu, Jian Liang, Quan Chen, Han Li, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai
Abstract: Contemporary recommender systems predominantly rely on collaborative filtering techniques, employing ID-embedding to capture latent associations among users and items. However, this approach overlooks the wealth of semantic information embedded within textual descriptions of items, leading to suboptimal performance in cold-start scenarios and long-tail user recommendations. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) pretrained on massive text corpus presents a promising avenue for enhancing recommender systems by integrating open-world domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose an Llm-driven knowlEdge Adaptive RecommeNdation (LEARN) framework that synergizes open-world knowledge with collaborative knowledge. We address computational complexity concerns by utilizing pretrained LLMs as item encoders and freezing LLM parameters to avoid catastrophic forgetting and preserve open-world knowledge. To bridge the gap between the open-world and collaborative domains, we design a twin-tower structure supervised by the recommendation task and tailored for practical industrial application. Through offline experiments on the large-scale industrial dataset and online experiments on A/B tests, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
Authors: Guanqiao Qu, Zheng Lin, Fangming Liu, Xianhao Chen, Kaibin Huang
Abstract: Next-generation mobile networks are expected to facilitate fast AI model downloading to end users. By caching models on edge servers, mobile networks can deliver models to end users with low latency, resulting in a paradigm called edge model caching. In this paper, we develop a novel model placement scheme, called parameter-sharing model caching (TrimCaching). TrimCaching exploits the key observation that a wide range of AI models, such as convolutional neural networks or large language models, can share a significant proportion of parameter blocks containing reusable knowledge, thereby improving storage efficiency. To this end, we formulate a parameter-sharing model placement problem to maximize the cache hit ratio in multi-edge wireless networks by balancing the fundamental tradeoff between storage efficiency and service latency. We show that the formulated problem is a submodular maximization problem with submodular constraints, for which no polynomial-time approximation algorithm exists. To overcome this challenge, we study an important special case, where a small fixed number of parameter blocks are shared across models, which often holds in practice. In such a case, a polynomial-time algorithm with $\left(1-\epsilon\right)/2$-approximation guarantee is developed. Subsequently, we address the original problem for the general case by developing a greedy algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed TrimCaching framework significantly improves the cache hit ratio compared with state-of-the-art content caching without exploiting shared parameters in AI models.
Authors: Long Xu, Yongquan Chen, Rui Huang, Feng Wu, Shiwu Lai
Abstract: Click-point-based interactive segmentation has received widespread attention due to its efficiency. However, it's hard for existing algorithms to obtain precise and robust responses after multiple clicks. In this case, the segmentation results tend to have little change or are even worse than before. To improve the robustness of the response, we propose a structured click intent model based on graph neural networks, which adaptively obtains graph nodes via the global similarity of user-clicked Transformer tokens. Then the graph nodes will be aggregated to obtain structured interaction features. Finally, the dual cross-attention will be used to inject structured interaction features into vision Transformer features, thereby enhancing the control of clicks over segmentation results. Extensive experiments demonstrated the proposed algorithm can serve as a general structure in improving Transformer-based interactive segmenta?tion performance. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/hahamyt/scc.
Authors: Chunyan Zheng, Keke Sun, Wenhao Zhao, Haibo Zhou, Lixin Jiang, Shaoyang Song, Chunlai Zhou
Abstract: Large pretrained language models (LLMs) have shown surprising In-Context Learning (ICL) ability. An important application in deploying large language models is to augment LLMs with a private database for some specific task. The main problem with this promising commercial use is that LLMs have been shown to memorize their training data and their prompt data are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIA) and prompt leaking attacks. In order to deal with this problem, we treat LLMs as untrusted in privacy and propose a locally differentially private framework of in-context learning(LDP-ICL) in the settings where labels are sensitive. Considering the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers by gradient descent, we provide an analysis of the trade-off between privacy and utility in such LDP-ICL for classification. Moreover, we apply LDP-ICL to the discrete distribution estimation problem. In the end, we perform several experiments to demonstrate our analysis results.
Authors: Hassan Shakil, Zeydy Ortiz, Grant C. Forbes
Abstract: In this research, we uses the DistilBERT model to generate extractive summary and the T5 model to generate abstractive summaries. Also, we generate hybrid summaries by combining both DistilBERT and T5 models. Central to our research is the implementation of GPT-based refining process to minimize the common problem of hallucinations that happens in AI-generated summaries. We evaluate unrefined summaries and, after refining, we also assess refined summaries using a range of traditional and novel metrics, demonstrating marked improvements in the accuracy and reliability of the summaries. Results highlight significant improvements in reducing hallucinatory content, thereby increasing the factual integrity of the summaries.
Authors: Yadang Chen, Wentao Zhu, Zhi-Xin Yang, Enhua Wu
Abstract: Recently, video object segmentation (VOS) networks typically use memory-based methods: for each query frame, the mask is predicted by space-time matching to memory frames. Despite these methods having superior performance, they suffer from two issues: 1) Challenging data can destroy the space-time coherence between adjacent video frames. 2) Pixel-level matching will lead to undesired mismatching caused by the noises or distractors. To address the aforementioned issues, we first propose to generate an auxiliary frame between adjacent frames, serving as an implicit short-temporal reference for the query one. Next, we learn a prototype for each video object and prototype-level matching can be implemented between the query and memory. The experiment demonstrated that our network outperforms the state-of-the-art method on the DAVIS 2017, achieving a J&F score of 86.4%, and attains a competitive result 85.0% on YouTube VOS 2018. In addition, our network exhibits a high inference speed of 32+ FPS.
Authors: Yoni Choukroun, Lior Wolf
Abstract: Error correction codes are a crucial part of the physical communication layer, ensuring the reliable transfer of data over noisy channels. The design of optimal linear block codes capable of being efficiently decoded is of major concern, especially for short block lengths. While neural decoders have recently demonstrated their advantage over classical decoding techniques, the neural design of the codes remains a challenge. In this work, we propose for the first time a unified encoder-decoder training of binary linear block codes. To this end, we adapt the coding setting to support efficient and differentiable training of the code for end-to-end optimization over the order two Galois field. We also propose a novel Transformer model in which the self-attention masking is performed in a differentiable fashion for the efficient backpropagation of the code gradient. Our results show that (i) the proposed decoder outperforms existing neural decoding on conventional codes, (ii) the suggested framework generates codes that outperform the {analogous} conventional codes, and (iii) the codes we developed not only excel with our decoder but also show enhanced performance with traditional decoding techniques.
Authors: Hassan Shakil, Atqiya Munawara Mahi, Phuoc Nguyen, Zeydy Ortiz, Mamoun T. Mardini
Abstract: This research examines the effectiveness of OpenAI's GPT models as independent evaluators of text summaries generated by six transformer-based models from Hugging Face: DistilBART, BERT, ProphetNet, T5, BART, and PEGASUS. We evaluated these summaries based on essential properties of high-quality summary - conciseness, relevance, coherence, and readability - using traditional metrics such as ROUGE and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Uniquely, we also employed GPT not as a summarizer but as an evaluator, allowing it to independently assess summary quality without predefined metrics. Our analysis revealed significant correlations between GPT evaluations and traditional metrics, particularly in assessing relevance and coherence. The results demonstrate GPT's potential as a robust tool for evaluating text summaries, offering insights that complement established metrics and providing a basis for comparative analysis of transformer-based models in natural language processing tasks.
Authors: Mingfei Lu, Shujian Yu, Robert Jenssen, Badong Chen
Abstract: Divergence measures play a central role in machine learning and become increasingly essential in deep learning. However, valid and computationally efficient divergence measures for multiple (more than two) distributions are scarcely investigated. This becomes particularly crucial in areas where the simultaneous management of multiple distributions is both unavoidable and essential. Examples include clustering, multi-source domain adaptation or generalization, and multi-view learning, among others. Although calculating the mean of pairwise distances between any two distributions serves as a common way to quantify the total divergence among multiple distributions, it is crucial to acknowledge that this approach is not straightforward and requires significant computational resources. In this study, we introduce a new divergence measure for multiple distributions named the generalized Cauchy-Schwarz divergence (GCSD), which is inspired by the classic Cauchy-Schwarz divergence. Additionally, we provide a closed-form sample estimator based on kernel density estimation, making it convenient and straightforward to use in various machine-learning applications. Finally, we apply the proposed GCSD to two challenging machine learning tasks, namely deep learning-based clustering and the problem of multi-source domain adaptation. The experimental results showcase the impressive performance of GCSD in both tasks, highlighting its potential application in machine-learning areas that involve quantifying multiple distributions.
Authors: Kenichi Nakazato
Abstract: Deep neural networks give us a powerful method to model the training dataset's relationship between input and output. We can regard that as a complex adaptive system consisting of many artificial neurons that work as an adaptive memory as a whole. The network's behavior is training dynamics with a feedback loop from the evaluation of the loss function. We already know the training response can be constant or shows power law-like aging in some ideal situations. However, we still have gaps between those findings and other complex phenomena, like network fragility. To fill the gap, we introduce a very simple network and analyze it. We show the training response consists of some different factors based on training stages, activation functions, or training methods. In addition, we show feature space reduction as an effect of stochastic training dynamics, which can result in network fragility. Finally, we discuss some complex phenomena of deep networks.
Authors: Kumar Shubham, Aishwarya Jayagopal, Syed Mohammed Danish, Prathosh AP, Vaibhav Rajan
Abstract: Cancer, a leading cause of death globally, occurs due to genomic changes and manifests heterogeneously across patients. To advance research on personalized treatment strategies, the effectiveness of various drugs on cells derived from cancers (`cell lines') is experimentally determined in laboratory settings. Nevertheless, variations in the distribution of genomic data and drug responses between cell lines and humans arise due to biological and environmental differences. Moreover, while genomic profiles of many cancer patients are readily available, the scarcity of corresponding drug response data limits the ability to train machine learning models that can predict drug response in patients effectively. Recent cancer drug response prediction methods have largely followed the paradigm of unsupervised domain-invariant representation learning followed by a downstream drug response classification step. Introducing supervision in both stages is challenging due to heterogeneous patient response to drugs and limited drug response data. This paper addresses these challenges through a novel representation learning method in the first phase and weak supervision in the second. Experimental results on real patient data demonstrate the efficacy of our method (WISER) over state-of-the-art alternatives on predicting personalized drug response.
Authors: Da Fu, Mingfei Rong, Eun-Hu Kim, Hao Huang, Witold Pedrycz
Abstract: Accurate classification of fine-grained images remains a challenge in backbones based on convolutional operations or self-attention mechanisms. This study proposes novel dual-current neural networks (DCNN), which combine the advantages of convolutional operations and self-attention mechanisms to improve the accuracy of fine-grained image classification. The main novel design features for constructing a weakly supervised learning backbone model DCNN include (a) extracting heterogeneous data, (b) keeping the feature map resolution unchanged, (c) expanding the receptive field, and (d) fusing global representations and local features. Experimental results demonstrated that using DCNN as the backbone network for classifying certain fine-grained benchmark datasets achieved performance advantage improvements of 13.5--19.5% and 2.2--12.9%, respectively, compared to other advanced convolution or attention-based fine-grained backbones.
Authors: Yiling He, Junchi Lei, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren
Abstract: Deep learning-based malware classifiers face significant challenges due to concept drift. The rapid evolution of malware, especially with new families, can depress classification accuracy to near-random levels. Previous research has primarily focused on detecting drift samples, relying on expert-led analysis and labeling for model retraining. However, these methods often lack a comprehensive understanding of malware concepts and provide limited guidance for effective drift adaptation, leading to unstable detection performance and high human labeling costs. To address these limitations, we introduce DREAM, a novel system designed to surpass the capabilities of existing drift detectors and to establish an explanatory drift adaptation process. DREAM enhances drift detection through model sensitivity and data autonomy. The detector, trained in a semi-supervised approach, proactively captures malware behavior concepts through classifier feedback. During testing, it utilizes samples generated by the detector itself, eliminating reliance on extensive training data. For drift adaptation, DREAM enlarges human intervention, enabling revisions of malware labels and concept explanations embedded within the detector's latent space. To ensure a comprehensive response to concept drift, it facilitates a coordinated update process for both the classifier and the detector. Our evaluation shows that DREAM can effectively improve the drift detection accuracy and reduce the expert analysis effort in adaptation across different malware datasets and classifiers.
Authors: Ammarah Hashmi, Sahibzada Adil Shahzad, Chia-Wen Lin, Yu Tsao, Hsin-Min Wang
Abstract: The emergence of contemporary deepfakes has attracted significant attention in machine learning research, as artificial intelligence (AI) generated synthetic media increases the incidence of misinterpretation and is difficult to distinguish from genuine content. Currently, machine learning techniques have been extensively studied for automatically detecting deepfakes. However, human perception has been less explored. Malicious deepfakes could ultimately cause public and social problems. Can we humans correctly perceive the authenticity of the content of the videos we watch? The answer is obviously uncertain; therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the human ability to discern deepfake videos through a subjective study. We present our findings by comparing human observers to five state-ofthe-art audiovisual deepfake detection models. To this end, we used gamification concepts to provide 110 participants (55 native English speakers and 55 non-native English speakers) with a webbased platform where they could access a series of 40 videos (20 real and 20 fake) to determine their authenticity. Each participant performed the experiment twice with the same 40 videos in different random orders. The videos are manually selected from the FakeAVCeleb dataset. We found that all AI models performed better than humans when evaluated on the same 40 videos. The study also reveals that while deception is not impossible, humans tend to overestimate their detection capabilities. Our experimental results may help benchmark human versus machine performance, advance forensics analysis, and enable adaptive countermeasures.
Authors: Hamed Hemati, Lorenzo Pellegrini, Xiaotian Duan, Zixuan Zhao, Fangfang Xia, Marc Masana, Benedikt Tscheschner, Eduardo Veas, Yuxiang Zheng, Shiji Zhao, Shao-Yuan Li, Sheng-Jun Huang, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Gido M. van de Ven
Abstract: Continual learning (CL) provides a framework for training models in ever-evolving environments. Although re-occurrence of previously seen objects or tasks is common in real-world problems, the concept of repetition in the data stream is not often considered in standard benchmarks for CL. Unlike with the rehearsal mechanism in buffer-based strategies, where sample repetition is controlled by the strategy, repetition in the data stream naturally stems from the environment. This report provides a summary of the CLVision challenge at CVPR 2023, which focused on the topic of repetition in class-incremental learning. The report initially outlines the challenge objective and then describes three solutions proposed by finalist teams that aim to effectively exploit the repetition in the stream to learn continually. The experimental results from the challenge highlight the effectiveness of ensemble-based solutions that employ multiple versions of similar modules, each trained on different but overlapping subsets of classes. This report underscores the transformative potential of taking a different perspective in CL by employing repetition in the data stream to foster innovative strategy design.
Authors: Tianxiu Xie, Keke Gai, Jing Yu, Liehuang Zhu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
Abstract: Recent booming development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has facilitated an emerging model commercialization for the purpose of reinforcement on model performance, such as licensing or trading Deep Neural Network (DNN) models. However, DNN model trading may trigger concerns of the unauthorized replications or misuses over the model, so that the benefit of the model ownership will be violated. Model identity auditing is a challenging issue in protecting intellectual property of DNN models and verifying the integrity and ownership of models for guaranteeing trusts in transactions is one of the critical obstacles. In this paper, we focus on the above issue and propose a novel Accumulator-enabled Auditing for Distributed Identity of DNN Model (A2-DIDM) that utilizes blockchain and zero-knowledge techniques to protect data and function privacy while ensuring the lightweight on-chain ownership verification. The proposed model presents a scheme of identity records via configuring model weight checkpoints with corresponding zero-knowledge proofs, which incorporates predicates to capture incremental state changes in model weight checkpoints. Our scheme ensures both computational integrity of DNN training process and programmability, so that the uniqueness of the weight checkpoint sequence in a DNN model is preserved, ensuring the correctness of the model identity auditing. In addition, A2-DIDM also addresses privacy protections in distributed identity via a proposed method of accumulators. We systematically analyze the security and robustness of our proposed model and further evaluate the effectiveness and usability of auditing DNN model identities.
Authors: Lu Ma, Zeang Sheng, Xunkai Li, Xinyi Gao, Zhezheng Hao, Ling Yang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated effectiveness in various graph-based tasks. However, their inefficiency in training and inference presents challenges for scaling up to real-world and large-scale graph applications. To address the critical challenges, a range of algorithms have been proposed to accelerate training and inference of GNNs, attracting increasing attention from the research community. In this paper, we present a systematic review of acceleration algorithms in GNNs, which can be categorized into three main topics based on their purpose: training acceleration, inference acceleration, and execution acceleration. Specifically, we summarize and categorize the existing approaches for each main topic, and provide detailed characterizations of the approaches within each category. Additionally, we review several libraries related to acceleration algorithms in GNNs and discuss our Scalable Graph Learning (SGL) library. Finally, we propose promising directions for future research. A complete summary is presented in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/PKU-DAIR/SGL/blob/main/Awsome-GNN-Acceleration.md.
URLs: https://github.com/PKU-DAIR/SGL/blob/main/Awsome-GNN-Acceleration.md.
Authors: Megha Srivastava, Cedric Colas, Dorsa Sadigh, Jacob Andreas
Abstract: Modern AI systems such as self-driving cars and game-playing agents achieve superhuman performance, but often lack human-like features such as generalization, interpretability and human inter-operability. Inspired by the rich interactions between language and decision-making in humans, we introduce Policy Learning with a Language Bottleneck (PLLB), a framework enabling AI agents to generate linguistic rules that capture the strategies underlying their most rewarding behaviors. PLLB alternates between a rule generation step guided by language models, and an update step where agents learn new policies guided by rules. In a two-player communication game, a maze solving task, and two image reconstruction tasks, we show that PLLB agents are not only able to learn more interpretable and generalizable behaviors, but can also share the learned rules with human users, enabling more effective human-AI coordination.
Authors: Riccardo Simionato, Stefano Fasciani
Abstract: Analog electronic circuits are at the core of an important category of musical devices. The nonlinear features of their electronic components give analog musical devices a distinctive timbre and sound quality, making them highly desirable. Artificial neural networks have rapidly gained popularity for the emulation of analog audio effects circuits, particularly recurrent networks. While neural approaches have been successful in accurately modeling distortion circuits, they require architectural improvements that account for parameter conditioning and low latency response. In this article, we explore the application of recent machine learning advancements for virtual analog modeling. We compare State Space models and Linear Recurrent Units against the more common Long Short Term Memory networks. These have shown promising ability in sequence to sequence modeling tasks, showing a notable improvement in signal history encoding. Our comparative study uses these black box neural modeling techniques with a variety of audio effects. We evaluate the performance and limitations using multiple metrics aiming to assess the models' ability to accurately replicate energy envelopes, frequency contents, and transients in the audio signal. To incorporate control parameters we employ the Feature wise Linear Modulation method. Long Short Term Memory networks exhibit better accuracy in emulating distortions and equalizers, while the State Space model, followed by Long Short Term Memory networks when integrated in an encoder decoder structure, outperforms others in emulating saturation and compression. When considering long time variant characteristics, the State Space model demonstrates the greatest accuracy. The Long Short Term Memory and, in particular, Linear Recurrent Unit networks present more tendency to introduce audio artifacts.
Authors: Nabil Al-Dhamari, Nathan Clarke
Abstract: This study explores the limitations of traditional Cybersecurity Awareness and Training (CSAT) programs and proposes an innovative solution using Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) to address these shortcomings. Traditional approaches lack personalization and adaptability to individual learning styles. To overcome these challenges, the study integrates GPT models to deliver highly tailored and dynamic cybersecurity learning expe-riences. Leveraging natural language processing capabilities, the proposed approach personalizes training modules based on individual trainee pro-files, helping to ensure engagement and effectiveness. An experiment using a GPT model to provide a real-time and adaptive CSAT experience through generating customized training content. The findings have demonstrated a significant improvement over traditional programs, addressing issues of en-gagement, dynamicity, and relevance. GPT-powered CSAT programs offer a scalable and effective solution to enhance cybersecurity awareness, provid-ing personalized training content that better prepares individuals to miti-gate cybersecurity risks in their specific roles within the organization.
Authors: Ricardo Vinuesa, Jean Rabault, Hossein Azizpour, Stefan Bauer, Bingni W. Brunton, Arne Elofsson, Elias Jarlebring, Hedvig Kjellstrom, Stefano Markidis, David Marlevi, Paola Cinnella, Steven L. Brunton
Abstract: Technological advancements have substantially increased computational power and data availability, enabling the application of powerful machine-learning (ML) techniques across various fields. However, our ability to leverage ML methods for scientific discovery, {\it i.e.} to obtain fundamental and formalized knowledge about natural processes, is still in its infancy. In this review, we explore how the scientific community can increasingly leverage ML techniques to achieve scientific discoveries. We observe that the applicability and opportunity of ML depends strongly on the nature of the problem domain, and whether we have full ({\it e.g.}, turbulence), partial ({\it e.g.}, computational biochemistry), or no ({\it e.g.}, neuroscience) {\it a-priori} knowledge about the governing equations and physical properties of the system. Although challenges remain, principled use of ML is opening up new avenues for fundamental scientific discoveries. Throughout these diverse fields, there is a theme that ML is enabling researchers to embrace complexity in observational data that was previously intractable to classic analysis and numerical investigations.
Authors: Angelo Rodio, Giovanni Neglia
Abstract: Federated learning algorithms, such as FedAvg, are negatively affected by data heterogeneity and partial client participation. To mitigate the latter problem, global variance reduction methods, like FedVARP, leverage stale model updates for non-participating clients. These methods are effective under homogeneous client participation. Yet, this paper shows that, when some clients participate much less than others, aggregating updates with different levels of staleness can detrimentally affect the training process. Motivated by this observation, we introduce FedStale, a novel algorithm that updates the global model in each round through a convex combination of "fresh" updates from participating clients and "stale" updates from non-participating ones. By adjusting the weight in the convex combination, FedStale interpolates between FedAvg, which only uses fresh updates, and FedVARP, which treats fresh and stale updates equally. Our analysis of FedStale convergence yields the following novel findings: i) it integrates and extends previous FedAvg and FedVARP analyses to heterogeneous client participation; ii) it underscores how the least participating client influences convergence error; iii) it provides practical guidelines to best exploit stale updates, showing that their usefulness diminishes as data heterogeneity decreases and participation heterogeneity increases. Extensive experiments featuring diverse levels of client data and participation heterogeneity not only confirm these findings but also show that FedStale outperforms both FedAvg and FedVARP in many settings.
Authors: Mohit Upadhyay, Rohan Juneja, Weng-Fai Wong, Li-Shiuan Peh
Abstract: Attention mechanisms are becoming increasingly popular, being used in neural network models in multiple domains such as natural language processing (NLP) and vision applications, especially at the edge. However, attention layers are difficult to map onto existing neuro accelerators since they have a much higher density of non-linear operations, which lead to inefficient utilization of today's vector units. This work introduces NOVA, a NoC-based Vector Unit that can perform non-linear operations within the NoC of the accelerators, and can be overlaid onto existing neuro accelerators to map attention layers at the edge. Our results show that the NOVA architecture is up to 37.8x more power-efficient than state-of-the-art hardware approximators when running existing attention-based neural networks.
Authors: Chen Qian, Jiahao Li, Yufan Dang, Wei Liu, YiFei Wang, Zihao Xie, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Yingli Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Abstract: Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show significant potential for achieving high autonomy in various scenarios such as software development. Recent research has shown that LLM agents can leverage past experiences to reduce errors and enhance efficiency. However, the static experience paradigm, reliant on a fixed collection of past experiences acquired heuristically, lacks iterative refinement and thus hampers agents' adaptability. In this paper, we introduce the Iterative Experience Refinement framework, enabling LLM agents to refine experiences iteratively during task execution. We propose two fundamental patterns: the successive pattern, refining based on nearest experiences within a task batch, and the cumulative pattern, acquiring experiences across all previous task batches. Augmented with our heuristic experience elimination, the method prioritizes high-quality and frequently-used experiences, effectively managing the experience space and enhancing efficiency. Extensive experiments show that while the successive pattern may yield superior results, the cumulative pattern provides more stable performance. Moreover, experience elimination facilitates achieving better performance using just 11.54% of a high-quality subset.
Authors: Jorge F. Urb\'an, Petros Stefanou, Jos\'e A. Pons
Abstract: This study investigates the potential accuracy boundaries of physics-informed neural networks, contrasting their approach with previous similar works and traditional numerical methods. We find that selecting improved optimization algorithms significantly enhances the accuracy of the results. Simple modifications to the loss function may also improve precision, offering an additional avenue for enhancement. Despite optimization algorithms having a greater impact on convergence than adjustments to the loss function, practical considerations often favor tweaking the latter due to ease of implementation. On a global scale, the integration of an enhanced optimizer and a marginally adjusted loss function enables a reduction in the loss function by several orders of magnitude across diverse physical problems. Consequently, our results obtained using compact networks (typically comprising 2 or 3 layers of 20-30 neurons) achieve accuracies comparable to finite difference schemes employing thousands of grid points. This study encourages the continued advancement of PINNs and associated optimization techniques for broader applications across various fields.
Authors: Alejandro Garcia-Sosa, Jose J. Quintana-Hernandez, Miguel A. Ferrer Ballester, Cristina Carmona-Duarte
Abstract: Sensors and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have revolutionized the analysis of human movement, but the scarcity of specific samples presents a significant challenge in training intelligent systems, particularly in the context of diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases. This study investigates the feasibility of utilizing robot-collected data to train classification systems traditionally trained with human-collected data. As a proof of concept, we recorded a database of numeric characters using an ABB robotic arm and an Apple Watch. We compare the classification performance of the trained systems using both human-recorded and robot-recorded data. Our primary objective is to determine the potential for accurate identification of human numeric characters wearing a smartwatch using robotic movement as training data. The findings of this study offer valuable insights into the feasibility of using robot-collected data for training classification systems. This research holds broad implications across various domains that require reliable identification, particularly in scenarios where access to human-specific data is limited.
Authors: Taoran Fang, Wei Zhou, Yifei Sun, Kaiqiao Han, Lvbin Ma, Yang Yang
Abstract: Graph self-supervised learning has sparked a research surge in training informative representations without accessing any labeled data. However, our understanding of graph self-supervised learning remains limited, and the inherent relationships between various self-supervised tasks are still unexplored. Our paper aims to provide a fresh understanding of graph self-supervised learning based on task correlations. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of the representations trained by one specific task on other tasks and define correlation values to quantify task correlations. Through this process, we unveil the task correlations between various self-supervised tasks and can measure their expressive capabilities, which are closely related to downstream performance. By analyzing the correlation values between tasks across various datasets, we reveal the complexity of task correlations and the limitations of existing multi-task learning methods. To obtain more capable representations, we propose Graph Task Correlation Modeling (GraphTCM) to illustrate the task correlations and utilize it to enhance graph self-supervised training. The experimental results indicate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods across various downstream tasks.
Authors: Caelin Kaplan, Tareq Si Salem, Angelo Rodio, Chuan Xu, Giovanni Neglia
Abstract: As Internet of Things (IoT) technology advances, end devices like sensors and smartphones are progressively equipped with AI models tailored to their local memory and computational constraints. Local inference reduces communication costs and latency; however, these smaller models typically underperform compared to more sophisticated models deployed on edge servers or in the cloud. Cooperative Inference Systems (CISs) address this performance trade-off by enabling smaller devices to offload part of their inference tasks to more capable devices. These systems often deploy hierarchical models that share numerous parameters, exemplified by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that utilize strategies like early exits or ordered dropout. In such instances, Federated Learning (FL) may be employed to jointly train the models within a CIS. Yet, traditional training methods have overlooked the operational dynamics of CISs during inference, particularly the potential high heterogeneity in serving rates across clients. To address this gap, we propose a novel FL approach designed explicitly for use in CISs that accounts for these variations in serving rates. Our framework not only offers rigorous theoretical guarantees, but also surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) training algorithms for CISs, especially in scenarios where inference request rates or data availability are uneven among clients.
Authors: Alireza Koochali, Ensiye Tahaei, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed
Abstract: This paper presents VAEneu, an innovative autoregressive method for multistep ahead univariate probabilistic time series forecasting. We employ the conditional VAE framework and optimize the lower bound of the predictive distribution likelihood function by adopting the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), a strictly proper scoring rule, as the loss function. This novel pipeline results in forecasting sharp and well-calibrated predictive distribution. Through a comprehensive empirical study, VAEneu is rigorously benchmarked against 12 baseline models across 12 datasets. The results unequivocally demonstrate VAEneu's remarkable forecasting performance. VAEneu provides a valuable tool for quantifying future uncertainties, and our extensive empirical study lays the foundation for future comparative studies for univariate multistep ahead probabilistic forecasting.
Authors: Rudy Bunel (Dj), Krishnamurthy (Dj), Dvijotham, M. Pawan Kumar, Alessandro De Palma, Robert Stanforth
Abstract: We develop the first (to the best of our knowledge) provably correct neural networks for a precise computational task, with the proof of correctness generated by an automated verification algorithm without any human input. Prior work on neural network verification has focused on partial specifications that, even when satisfied, are not sufficient to ensure that a neural network never makes errors. We focus on applying neural network verification to computational tasks with a precise notion of correctness, where a verifiably correct neural network provably solves the task at hand with no caveats. In particular, we develop an approach to train and verify the first provably correct neural networks for compressed sensing, i.e., recovering sparse vectors from a number of measurements smaller than the dimension of the vector. We show that for modest problem dimensions (up to 50), we can train neural networks that provably recover a sparse vector from linear and binarized linear measurements. Furthermore, we show that the complexity of the network (number of neurons/layers) can be adapted to the problem difficulty and solve problems where traditional compressed sensing methods are not known to provably work.
Authors: Sayantan Pal, Souvik Das, Rohini K. Srihari
Abstract: This study introduces 'clickbait spoiling', a novel technique designed to detect, categorize, and generate spoilers as succinct text responses, countering the curiosity induced by clickbait content. By leveraging a multi-task learning framework, our model's generalization capabilities are significantly enhanced, effectively addressing the pervasive issue of clickbait. The crux of our research lies in generating appropriate spoilers, be it a phrase, an extended passage, or multiple, depending on the spoiler type required. Our methodology integrates two crucial techniques: a refined spoiler categorization method and a modified version of the Question Answering (QA) mechanism, incorporated within a multi-task learning paradigm for optimized spoiler extraction from context. Notably, we have included fine-tuning methods for models capable of handling longer sequences to accommodate the generation of extended spoilers. This research highlights the potential of sophisticated text processing techniques in tackling the omnipresent issue of clickbait, promising an enhanced user experience in the digital realm.
Authors: Raiyan Rahman, Christopher Indris, Goetz Bramesfeld, Tianxiao Zhang, Kaidong Li, Xiangyu Chen, Ivan Grijalva, Brian McCornack, Daniel Flippo, Ajay Sharda, Guanghui Wang
Abstract: Aphid infestations are one of the primary causes of extensive damage to wheat and sorghum fields and are one of the most common vectors for plant viruses, resulting in significant agricultural yield losses. To address this problem, farmers often employ the inefficient use of harmful chemical pesticides that have negative health and environmental impacts. As a result, a large amount of pesticide is wasted on areas without significant pest infestation. This brings to attention the urgent need for an intelligent autonomous system that can locate and spray sufficiently large infestations selectively within the complex crop canopies. We have developed a large multi-scale dataset for aphid cluster detection and segmentation, collected from actual sorghum fields and meticulously annotated to include clusters of aphids. Our dataset comprises a total of 54,742 image patches, showcasing a variety of viewpoints, diverse lighting conditions, and multiple scales, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world applications. In this study, we trained and evaluated four real-time semantic segmentation models and three object detection models specifically for aphid cluster segmentation and detection. Considering the balance between accuracy and efficiency, Fast-SCNN delivered the most effective segmentation results, achieving 80.46% mean precision, 81.21% mean recall, and 91.66 frames per second (FPS). For object detection, RT-DETR exhibited the best overall performance with a 61.63% mean average precision (mAP), 92.6% mean recall, and 72.55 on an NVIDIA V100 GPU. Our experiments further indicate that aphid cluster segmentation is more suitable for assessing aphid infestations than using detection models.
Authors: Yiwen Hou, Haoyuan Sun, Jinming Ma, Feng Wu
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising approach to avoid costly online interaction with the real environment. However, the performance of offline RL highly depends on the quality of the datasets, which may cause extrapolation error in the learning process. In many robotic applications, an inaccurate simulator is often available. However, the data directly collected from the inaccurate simulator cannot be directly used in offline RL due to the well-known exploration-exploitation dilemma and the dynamic gap between inaccurate simulation and the real environment. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach to combine the offline dataset and the inaccurate simulation data in a better manner. Specifically, we pre-train a generative adversarial network (GAN) model to fit the state distribution of the offline dataset. Given this, we collect data from the inaccurate simulator starting from the distribution provided by the generator and reweight the simulated data using the discriminator. Our experimental results in the D4RL benchmark and a real-world manipulation task confirm that our method can benefit more from both inaccurate simulator and limited offline datasets to achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Zhen Zhang
Abstract: Automatic perception of image quality is a challenging problem that impacts billions of Internet and social media users daily. To advance research in this field, we propose a no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) method termed Cross-IQA based on vision transformer(ViT) model. The proposed Cross-IQA method can learn image quality features from unlabeled image data. We construct the pretext task of synthesized image reconstruction to unsupervised extract the image quality information based ViT block. The pretrained encoder of Cross-IQA is used to fine-tune a linear regression model for score prediction. Experimental results show that Cross-IQA can achieve state-of-the-art performance in assessing the low-frequency degradation information (e.g., color change, blurring, etc.) of images compared with the classical full-reference IQA and NR-IQA under the same datasets.
Authors: Markus Hillemann, Robert Langend\"orfer, Max Heiken, Max Mehltretter, Andreas Schenk, Martin Weinmann, Stefan Hinz, Christian Heipke, Markus Ulrich
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have become a rapidly growing research field with the potential to revolutionize typical photogrammetric workflows, such as those used for 3D scene reconstruction. As input, NeRFs require multi-view images with corresponding camera poses as well as the interior orientation. In the typical NeRF workflow, the camera poses and the interior orientation are estimated in advance with Structure from Motion (SfM). But the quality of the resulting novel views, which depends on different parameters such as the number and distribution of available images, as well as the accuracy of the related camera poses and interior orientation, is difficult to predict. In addition, SfM is a time-consuming pre-processing step, and its quality strongly depends on the image content. Furthermore, the undefined scaling factor of SfM hinders subsequent steps in which metric information is required. In this paper, we evaluate the potential of NeRFs for industrial robot applications. We propose an alternative to SfM pre-processing: we capture the input images with a calibrated camera that is attached to the end effector of an industrial robot and determine accurate camera poses with metric scale based on the robot kinematics. We then investigate the quality of the novel views by comparing them to ground truth, and by computing an internal quality measure based on ensemble methods. For evaluation purposes, we acquire multiple datasets that pose challenges for reconstruction typical of industrial applications, like reflective objects, poor texture, and fine structures. We show that the robot-based pose determination reaches similar accuracy as SfM in non-demanding cases, while having clear advantages in more challenging scenarios. Finally, we present first results of applying the ensemble method to estimate the quality of the synthetic novel view in the absence of a ground truth.
Authors: Elias Abad Rocamora, Yongtao Wu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios G. Chrysos, Volkan Cevher
Abstract: Adversarial attacks in Natural Language Processing apply perturbations in the character or token levels. Token-level attacks, gaining prominence for their use of gradient-based methods, are susceptible to altering sentence semantics, leading to invalid adversarial examples. While character-level attacks easily maintain semantics, they have received less attention as they cannot easily adopt popular gradient-based methods, and are thought to be easy to defend. Challenging these beliefs, we introduce Charmer, an efficient query-based adversarial attack capable of achieving high attack success rate (ASR) while generating highly similar adversarial examples. Our method successfully targets both small (BERT) and large (Llama 2) models. Specifically, on BERT with SST-2, Charmer improves the ASR in 4.84% points and the USE similarity in 8% points with respect to the previous art. Our implementation is available in https://github.com/LIONS-EPFL/Charmer.
Authors: Omid Esrafilian, Mohsen Ahadi, Florian Kaltenberger, David Gesbert
Abstract: The sensing and positioning capabilities foreseen in 6G have great potential for technology advancements in various domains, such as future smart cities and industrial use cases. Channel charting has emerged as a promising technology in recent years for radio frequency-based sensing and localization. However, the accuracy of these techniques is yet far behind the numbers envisioned in 6G. To reduce this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel channel charting technique capitalizing on the time of arrival measurements from surrounding Transmission Reception Points (TRPs) along with their locations and leveraging sensor fusion in channel charting by incorporating laser scanner data during the training phase of our algorithm. The proposed algorithm remains self-supervised during training and test phases, requiring no geometrical models or user position ground truth. Simulation results validate the achievement of a sub-meter level localization accuracy using our algorithm 90% of the time, outperforming the state-of-the-art channel charting techniques and the traditional triangulation-based approaches.
Authors: Ziqing Zhu, Guan Yuan, Tao Zhou, Jiuxin Cao
Abstract: The community plays a crucial role in understanding user behavior and network characteristics in social networks. Some users can use multiple social networks at once for a variety of objectives. These users are called overlapping users who bridge different social networks. Detecting communities across multiple social networks is vital for interaction mining, information diffusion, and behavior migration analysis among networks. This paper presents a community detection method based on nonnegative matrix tri-factorization for multiple heterogeneous social networks, which formulates a common consensus matrix to represent the global fused community. Specifically, the proposed method involves creating adjacency matrices based on network structure and content similarity, followed by alignment matrices which distinguish overlapping users in different social networks. With the generated alignment matrices, the method could enhance the fusion degree of the global community by detecting overlapping user communities across networks. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated with new metrics on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr datasets. The results of the experiments demonstrate its superior performance in terms of community quality and community fusion.
Authors: Martin Marzidov\v{s}ek, Janja Franc\'e, Vid Podpe\v{c}an, Stanka Vadnjal, Jo\v{z}ica Dolenc, Patricija Mozeti\v{c}
Abstract: In this study, explainable machine learning techniques are applied to predict the toxicity of mussels in the Gulf of Trieste (Adriatic Sea) caused by harmful algal blooms. By analysing a newly created 28-year dataset containing records of toxic phytoplankton in mussel farming areas and toxin concentrations in mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis), we train and evaluate the performance of ML models to accurately predict diarrhetic shellfish poisoning (DSP) events. The random forest model provided the best prediction of positive toxicity results based on the F1 score. Explainability methods such as permutation importance and SHAP identified key species (Dinophysis fortii and D. caudata) and environmental factors (salinity, river discharge and precipitation) as the best predictors of DSP outbreaks. These findings are important for improving early warning systems and supporting sustainable aquaculture practices.
Authors: Ishita Gupta, Sneha Kumari, Priya Jha, Mohona Ghosh
Abstract: The malware booming is a cyberspace equal to the effect of climate change to ecosystems in terms of danger. In the case of significant investments in cybersecurity technologies and staff training, the global community has become locked up in the eternal war with cyber security threats. The multi-form and changing faces of malware are continuously pushing the boundaries of the cybersecurity practitioners employ various approaches like detection and mitigate in coping with this issue. Some old mannerisms like signature-based detection and behavioral analysis are slow to adapt to the speedy evolution of malware types. Consequently, this paper proposes the utilization of the Deep Learning Model, LSTM networks, and GANs to amplify malware detection accuracy and speed. A fast-growing, state-of-the-art technology that leverages raw bytestream-based data and deep learning architectures, the AI technology provides better accuracy and performance than the traditional methods. Integration of LSTM and GAN model is the technique that is used for the synthetic generation of data, leading to the expansion of the training datasets, and as a result, the detection accuracy is improved. The paper uses the VirusShare dataset which has more than one million unique samples of the malware as the training and evaluation set for the presented models. Through thorough data preparation including tokenization, augmentation, as well as model training, the LSTM and GAN models convey the better performance in the tasks compared to straight classifiers. The research outcomes come out with 98% accuracy that shows the efficiency of deep learning plays a decisive role in proactive cybersecurity defense. Aside from that, the paper studies the output of ensemble learning and model fusion methods as a way to reduce biases and lift model complexity.
Authors: Xiao Liu, Chenxu Zhang, Lei Zhang
Abstract: State Space Model (SSM) is a mathematical model used to describe and analyze the behavior of dynamic systems. This model has witnessed numerous applications in several fields, including control theory, signal processing, economics and machine learning. In the field of deep learning, state space models are used to process sequence data, such as time series analysis, natural language processing (NLP) and video understanding. By mapping sequence data to state space, long-term dependencies in the data can be better captured. In particular, modern SSMs have shown strong representational capabilities in NLP, especially in long sequence modeling, while maintaining linear time complexity. Notably, based on the latest state-space models, Mamba merges time-varying parameters into SSMs and formulates a hardware-aware algorithm for efficient training and inference. Given its impressive efficiency and strong long-range dependency modeling capability, Mamba is expected to become a new AI architecture that may outperform Transformer. Recently, a number of works have attempted to study the potential of Mamba in various fields, such as general vision, multi-modal, medical image analysis and remote sensing image analysis, by extending Mamba from natural language domain to visual domain. To fully understand Mamba in the visual domain, we conduct a comprehensive survey and present a taxonomy study. This survey focuses on Mamba's application to a variety of visual tasks and data types, and discusses its predecessors, recent advances and far-reaching impact on a wide range of domains. Since Mamba is now on an upward trend, please actively notice us if you have new findings, and new progress on Mamba will be included in this survey in a timely manner and updated on the Mamba project at https://github.com/lx6c78/Vision-Mamba-A-Comprehensive-Survey-and-Taxonomy.
URLs: https://github.com/lx6c78/Vision-Mamba-A-Comprehensive-Survey-and-Taxonomy.
Authors: Laurent Orseau, Remi Munos
Abstract: We improve the proofs of the lower bounds of Coquelin and Munos (2007) that demonstrate that UCT can have $\exp(\dots\exp(1)\dots)$ regret (with $\Omega(D)$ exp terms) on the $D$-chain environment, and that a `polynomial' UCT variant has $\exp_2(\exp_2(D - O(\log D)))$ regret on the same environment -- the original proofs contain an oversight for rewards bounded in $[0, 1]$, which we fix in the present draft. We also adapt the proofs to AlphaGo's MCTS and its descendants (e.g., AlphaZero, Leela Zero) to also show $\exp_2(\exp_2(D - O(\log D)))$ regret.
Authors: DeepSeek-AI
Abstract: We present DeepSeek-V2, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model characterized by economical training and efficient inference. It comprises 236B total parameters, of which 21B are activated for each token, and supports a context length of 128K tokens. DeepSeek-V2 adopts innovative architectures including Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE. MLA guarantees efficient inference through significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector, while DeepSeekMoE enables training strong models at an economical cost through sparse computation. Compared with DeepSeek 67B, DeepSeek-V2 achieves significantly stronger performance, and meanwhile saves 42.5% of training costs, reduces the KV cache by 93.3%, and boosts the maximum generation throughput to 5.76 times. We pretrain DeepSeek-V2 on a high-quality and multi-source corpus consisting of 8.1T tokens, and further perform Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to fully unlock its potential. Evaluation results show that, even with only 21B activated parameters, DeepSeek-V2 and its chat versions still achieve top-tier performance among open-source models. The model checkpoints are available at "https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V2".
Authors: Tanaz Ghahremani, Mohammad Hoseyni, Mohammad Javad Ahmadi, Pouria Mehrabi, Amirhossein Nikoofard
Abstract: Data augmentation is a key technique for addressing the challenge of limited datasets, which have become a major component in the training procedures of image processing. Techniques such as geometric transformations and color space adjustments have been thoroughly tested for their ability to artificially expand training datasets and generate semi-realistic data for training purposes. Data augmentation is the most important key to addressing the challenge of limited datasets, which have become a major component of image processing training procedures. Data augmentation techniques, such as geometric transformations and color space adjustments, are thoroughly tested for their ability to artificially expand training datasets and generate semi-realistic data for training purposes. Polygons play a crucial role in instance segmentation and have seen a surge in use across advanced models, such as YOLOv8. Despite their growing popularity, the lack of specialized libraries hampers the polygon-augmentation process. This paper introduces a novel solution to this challenge, embodied in the newly developed AugmenTory library. Notably, AugmenTory offers reduced computational demands in both time and space compared to existing methods. Additionally, the library includes a postprocessing thresholding feature. The AugmenTory package is publicly available on GitHub, where interested users can access the source code: https://github.com/Smartory/AugmenTory
Authors: Per Kristian Lehre, Shishen Lin
Abstract: Runtime analysis, as a branch of the theory of AI, studies how the number of iterations algorithms take before finding a solution (its runtime) depends on the design of the algorithm and the problem structure. Drift analysis is a state-of-the-art tool for estimating the runtime of randomised algorithms, such as evolutionary and bandit algorithms. Drift refers roughly to the expected progress towards the optimum per iteration. This paper considers the problem of deriving concentration tail-bounds on the runtime/regret of algorithms. It provides a novel drift theorem that gives precise exponential tail-bounds given positive, weak, zero and even negative drift. Previously, such exponential tail bounds were missing in the case of weak, zero, or negative drift. Our drift theorem can be used to prove a strong concentration of the runtime/regret of algorithms in AI. For example, we prove that the regret of the \rwab bandit algorithm is highly concentrated, while previous analyses only considered the expected regret. This means that the algorithm obtains the optimum within a given time frame with high probability, i.e. a form of algorithm reliability. Moreover, our theorem implies that the time needed by the co-evolutionary algorithm RLS-PD to obtain a Nash equilibrium in a \bilinear max-min-benchmark problem is highly concentrated. However, we also prove that the algorithm forgets the Nash equilibrium, and the time until this occurs is highly concentrated. This highlights a weakness in the RLS-PD which should be addressed by future work.
Authors: Alexis Ross, Jacob Andreas
Abstract: When a teacher provides examples for a student to study, these examples must be informative, enabling a student to progress from their current state toward a target concept or skill. Good teachers must therefore simultaneously infer what students already know and adapt their teaching to students' changing state of knowledge. There is increasing interest in using computational models, particularly large language models, as pedagogical tools. As students, language models in particular have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to new tasks given small numbers of examples. But how effectively can these models adapt as teachers to students of different types? To study this question, we introduce a suite of models and evaluation methods we call AdapT. AdapT has two components: (1) a collection of simulated Bayesian student models that can be used for evaluation of automated teaching methods; (2) a platform for evaluation with human students, to characterize the real-world effectiveness of these methods. We additionally introduce (3) AToM, a new probabilistic model for adaptive teaching that jointly infers students' past beliefs and optimizes for the correctness of future beliefs. In evaluations of simulated students across three learning domains (fraction arithmetic, English morphology, function learning), AToM systematically outperforms LLM-based and standard Bayesian teaching models. In human experiments, both AToM and LLMs outperform non-adaptive random example selection. Our results highlight both the difficulty of the adaptive teaching task and the potential of learned adaptive models for solving it.
Authors: Shujian Zhang, Korawat Tanwisuth, Chengyue Gong, Pengcheng He, Mingyuan Zhou
Abstract: Auto-regressive generation models achieve competitive performance across many different NLP tasks such as summarization, question answering, and classifications. However, they are also known for being slow in inference, which makes them challenging to deploy in real-time applications. We propose a switchable decision to accelerate inference by dynamically assigning computation resources for each data instance. Automatically making decisions on where to skip and how to balance quality and computation cost with constrained optimization, our dynamic neural generation networks enforce the efficient inference path and determine the optimized trade-off. Experiments across question answering, summarization, and classification benchmarks show that our method benefits from less computation cost during inference while keeping the same accuracy. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our method can be general, effective, and beneficial for many NLP tasks.
Authors: Maximilian Beck, Korbinian P\"oppel, Markus Spanring, Andreas Auer, Oleksandra Prudnikova, Michael Kopp, G\"unter Klambauer, Johannes Brandstetter, Sepp Hochreiter
Abstract: In the 1990s, the constant error carousel and gating were introduced as the central ideas of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Since then, LSTMs have stood the test of time and contributed to numerous deep learning success stories, in particular they constituted the first Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the advent of the Transformer technology with parallelizable self-attention at its core marked the dawn of a new era, outpacing LSTMs at scale. We now raise a simple question: How far do we get in language modeling when scaling LSTMs to billions of parameters, leveraging the latest techniques from modern LLMs, but mitigating known limitations of LSTMs? Firstly, we introduce exponential gating with appropriate normalization and stabilization techniques. Secondly, we modify the LSTM memory structure, obtaining: (i) sLSTM with a scalar memory, a scalar update, and new memory mixing, (ii) mLSTM that is fully parallelizable with a matrix memory and a covariance update rule. Integrating these LSTM extensions into residual block backbones yields xLSTM blocks that are then residually stacked into xLSTM architectures. Exponential gating and modified memory structures boost xLSTM capabilities to perform favorably when compared to state-of-the-art Transformers and State Space Models, both in performance and scaling.
Authors: Yujun Lin, Haotian Tang, Shang Yang, Zhekai Zhang, Guangxuan Xiao, Chuang Gan, Song Han
Abstract: Quantization can accelerate large language model (LLM) inference. Going beyond INT8 quantization, the research community is actively exploring even lower precision, such as INT4. Nonetheless, state-of-the-art INT4 quantization techniques only accelerate low-batch, edge LLM inference, failing to deliver performance gains in large-batch, cloud-based LLM serving. We uncover a critical issue: existing INT4 quantization methods suffer from significant runtime overhead (20-90%) when dequantizing either weights or partial sums on GPUs. To address this challenge, we introduce QoQ, a W4A8KV4 quantization algorithm with 4-bit weight, 8-bit activation, and 4-bit KV cache. QoQ stands for quattuor-octo-quattuor, which represents 4-8-4 in Latin. QoQ is implemented by the QServe inference library that achieves measured speedup. The key insight driving QServe is that the efficiency of LLM serving on GPUs is critically influenced by operations on low-throughput CUDA cores. Building upon this insight, in QoQ algorithm, we introduce progressive quantization that can allow low dequantization overhead in W4A8 GEMM. Additionally, we develop SmoothAttention to effectively mitigate the accuracy degradation incurred by 4-bit KV quantization. In the QServe system, we perform compute-aware weight reordering and take advantage of register-level parallelism to reduce dequantization latency. We also make fused attention memory-bound, harnessing the performance gain brought by KV4 quantization. As a result, QServe improves the maximum achievable serving throughput of Llama-3-8B by 1.2x on A100, 1.4x on L40S; and Qwen1.5-72B by 2.4x on A100, 3.5x on L40S, compared to TensorRT-LLM. Remarkably, QServe on L40S GPU can achieve even higher throughput than TensorRT-LLM on A100. Thus, QServe effectively reduces the dollar cost of LLM serving by 3x. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/qserve.
Authors: Thierry Denoeux
Abstract: We introduce a general theory of epistemic random fuzzy sets for reasoning with fuzzy or crisp evidence. This framework generalizes both the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions, and possibility theory. Independent epistemic random fuzzy sets are combined by the generalized product-intersection rule, which extends both Dempster's rule for combining belief functions, and the product conjunctive combination of possibility distributions. We introduce Gaussian random fuzzy numbers and their multi-dimensional extensions, Gaussian random fuzzy vectors, as practical models for quantifying uncertainty about scalar or vector quantities. Closed-form expressions for the combination, projection and vacuous extension of Gaussian random fuzzy numbers and vectors are derived.
Authors: Carlos N\'u\~nez-Molina, Masataro Asai, Pablo Mesejo, Juan Fern\'andez-Olivares
Abstract: In recent years, there has been growing interest in utilizing modern machine learning techniques to learn heuristic functions for forward search algorithms. Despite this, there has been little theoretical understanding of what they should learn, how to train them, and why we do so. This lack of understanding has resulted in the adoption of diverse training targets (suboptimal vs optimal costs vs admissible heuristics) and loss functions (e.g., square vs absolute errors) in the literature. In this work, we focus on how to effectively utilize the information provided by admissible heuristics in heuristic learning. We argue that learning from poly-time admissible heuristics by minimizing mean square errors (MSE) is not the correct approach, since its result is merely a noisy, inadmissible copy of an efficiently computable heuristic. Instead, we propose to model the learned heuristic as a truncated gaussian, where admissible heuristics are used not as training targets but as lower bounds of this distribution. This results in a different loss function from the MSE commonly employed in the literature, which implicitly models the learned heuristic as a gaussian distribution. We conduct experiments where both MSE and our novel loss function are applied to learning a heuristic from optimal plan costs. Results show that our proposed method converges faster during training and yields better heuristics.
Authors: Ian Watson
Abstract: Case-based reasoning (CBR) as a methodology for problem-solving can use any appropriate computational technique. This position paper argues that CBR researchers have somewhat overlooked recent developments in deep learning and large language models (LLMs). The underlying technical developments that have enabled the recent breakthroughs in AI have strong synergies with CBR and could be used to provide a persistent memory for LLMs to make progress towards Artificial General Intelligence.
Authors: Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Kevin Ellis
Abstract: We build a computational model of how humans actively infer hidden rules by doing experiments. The basic principles behind the model is that, even if the rule is deterministic, the learner considers a broader space of fuzzy probabilistic rules, which it represents in natural language, and updates its hypotheses online after each experiment according to approximately Bayesian principles. In the same framework we also model experiment design according to information-theoretic criteria. We find that the combination of these three principles -- explicit hypotheses, probabilistic rules, and online updates -- can explain human performance on a Zendo-style task, and that removing any of these components leaves the model unable to account for the data.
Authors: Yihua Shao, Hongyi Cai, Xinwei Long, Weiyi Lang, Zhe Wang, Haoran Wu, Yan Wang, Jiayi Yin, Yang Yang, Yisheng Lv, Zhen Lei
Abstract: Intelligent vehicles have demonstrated excellent capabilities in many transportation scenarios. The inference capabilities of neural networks using cameras limit the accuracy of accident detection in complex transportation systems. This paper presents AccidentBlip2, a pure vision-based multi-modal large model Blip2 for accident detection. Our method first processes the multi-view images through ViT-14g and sends the multi-view features into the cross-attention layer of Q-Former. Different from Blip2's Q-Former, our Motion Q-Former extends the self-attention layer with the temporal-attention layer. In the inference process, the queries generated from previous frames are input into Motion Q-Former to aggregate temporal information. Queries are updated with an auto-regressive strategy and are sent to a MLP to detect whether there is an accident in the surrounding environment. Our AccidentBlip2 can be extended to a multi-vehicle cooperative system by deploying Motion Q-Former on each vehicle and simultaneously fusing the generated queries into the MLP for auto-regressive inference. Our approach outperforms existing video large language models in detection accuracy in both single-vehicle and multi-vehicle systems.
Authors: Yifan Guo, Zhongqiang Ren, Chen Wang
Abstract: This paper considers a Min-Max Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (MTSP), where the goal is to find a set of tours, one for each agent, to collectively visit all the cities while minimizing the length of the longest tour. Though MTSP has been widely studied, obtaining near-optimal solutions for large-scale problems is still challenging due to its NP-hardness. Recent efforts in data-driven methods face challenges of the need for hard-to-obtain supervision and issues with high variance in gradient estimations, leading to slow convergence and highly suboptimal solutions. We address these issues by reformulating MTSP as a bilevel optimization problem, using the concept of imperative learning (IL). This involves introducing an allocation network that decomposes the MTSP into multiple single-agent traveling salesman problems (TSPs). The longest tour from these TSP solutions is then used to self-supervise the allocation network, resulting in a new self-supervised, bilevel, end-to-end learning framework, which we refer to as imperative MTSP (iMTSP). Additionally, to tackle the high-variance gradient issues during the optimization, we introduce a control variate-based gradient estimation algorithm. Our experiments showed that these innovative designs enable our gradient estimator to converge 20% faster than the advanced reinforcement learning baseline and find up to 80% shorter tour length compared with Google OR-Tools MTSP solver, especially in large-scale problems (e.g. 1000 cities and 15 agents).
Authors: Giorgio Franceschelli, Mirco Musolesi
Abstract: There is a growing interest in the area of machine learning and creativity. This survey presents an overview of the history and the state of the art of computational creativity theories, key machine learning techniques (including generative deep learning), and corresponding automatic evaluation methods. After presenting a critical discussion of the key contributions in this area, we outline the current research challenges and emerging opportunities in this field.
Authors: Yinan Zhang, Pei Wang, Congcong Liu, Xiwei Zhao, Hao Qi, Jie He, Junsheng Jin, Changping Peng, Zhangang Lin, Jingping Shao
Abstract: Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has become a novel state-of-art for Collaborative Filtering (CF) based Recommender Systems (RS). It is a common practice to learn informative user and item representations by performing embedding propagation on a user-item bipartite graph, and then provide the users with personalized item suggestions based on the representations. Despite effectiveness, existing algorithms neglect precious interactive features between user-item pairs in the embedding process. When predicting a user's preference for different items, they still aggregate the user tree in the same way, without emphasizing target-related information in the user neighborhood. Such a uniform aggregation scheme easily leads to suboptimal user and item representations, limiting the model expressiveness to some extent. In this work, we address this problem by building bilateral interactive guidance between each user-item pair and proposing a new model named IA-GCN (short for InterActive GCN). Specifically, when learning the user representation from its neighborhood, we assign higher attention weights to those neighbors similar to the target item. Correspondingly, when learning the item representation, we pay more attention to those neighbors resembling the target user. This leads to interactive and interpretable features, effectively distilling target-specific information through each graph convolutional operation. Our model is built on top of LightGCN, a state-of-the-art GCN model for CF, and can be combined with various GCN-based CF architectures in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of IA-GCN.
Authors: Guoliang Lin, Yongheng Xu, Hanjiang Lai, Jian Yin
Abstract: Few-shot learning with $N$-way $K$-shot scheme is an open challenge in machine learning. Many metric-based approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, e.g., the Matching Networks and CLIP-Adapter. Despite that these approaches have shown significant progress, the mechanism of why these methods succeed has not been well explored. In this paper, we try to interpret these metric-based few-shot learning methods via causal mechanism. We show that the existing approaches can be viewed as specific forms of front-door adjustment, which can alleviate the effect of spurious correlations and thus learn the causality. This causal interpretation could provide us a new perspective to better understand these existing metric-based methods. Further, based on this causal interpretation, we simply introduce two causal methods for metric-based few-shot learning, which considers not only the relationship between examples but also the diversity of representations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods in few-shot classification on various benchmark datasets. Code is available in https://github.com/lingl1024/causalFewShot.
Authors: Yiwei Wang, Bryan Hooi, Fei Wang, Yujun Cai, Yuxuan Liang, Wenxuan Zhou, Jing Tang, Manjuan Duan, Muhao Chen
Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) aims to extract the relations between entity names from the textual context. In principle, textual context determines the ground-truth relation and the RE models should be able to correctly identify the relations reflected by the textual context. However, existing work has found that the RE models memorize the entity name patterns to make RE predictions while ignoring the textual context. This motivates us to raise the question: ``are RE models robust to the entity replacements?'' In this work, we operate the random and type-constrained entity replacements over the RE instances in TACRED and evaluate the state-of-the-art RE models under the entity replacements. We observe the 30\% - 50\% F1 score drops on the state-of-the-art RE models under entity replacements. These results suggest that we need more efforts to develop effective RE models robust to entity replacements. We release the source code at https://github.com/wangywUST/RobustRE.
Authors: Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Various industries such as finance, meteorology, and energy produce vast amounts of heterogeneous data every day. There is a natural demand for humans to manage, process, and display data efficiently. However, it necessitates labor-intensive efforts and a high level of expertise for these data-related tasks. Considering large language models (LLMs) showcase promising capabilities in semantic understanding and reasoning, we advocate that the deployment of LLMs could autonomously manage and process massive amounts of data while interacting and displaying in a human-friendly manner. Based on this, we propose Data-Copilot, an LLM-based system that connects numerous data sources on one end and caters to diverse human demands on the other end. Acting as an experienced expert, Data-Copilot autonomously transforms raw data into multi-form output that best matches the user's intent. Specifically, it first designs multiple universal interfaces to satisfy diverse data-related requests, like querying, analysis, prediction, and visualization. In real-time response, it automatically deploys a concise workflow by invoking corresponding interfaces. The whole process is fully controlled by Data-Copilot, without human assistance. We release Data-Copilot-1.0 using massive Chinese financial data, e.g., stocks, funds, and news. Experiments indicate it achieves reliable performance with lower token consumption, showing promising application prospects.
Authors: Hieu Le, Jian Tao
Abstract: Lossy compression has become an important technique to reduce data size in many domains. This type of compression is especially valuable for large-scale scientific data, whose size ranges up to several petabytes. Although Autoencoder-based models have been successfully leveraged to compress images and videos, such neural networks have not widely gained attention in the scientific data domain. Our work presents a neural network that not only significantly compresses large-scale scientific data, but also maintains high reconstruction quality. The proposed model is tested with scientific benchmark data available publicly and applied to a large-scale high-resolution climate modeling data set. Our model achieves a compression ratio of 140 on several benchmark data sets without compromising the reconstruction quality. 2D simulation data from the High-Resolution Community Earth System Model (CESM) Version 1.3 over 500 years are also being compressed with a compression ratio of 200 while the reconstruction error is negligible for scientific analysis.
Authors: Marco Carvalho, Damian Marriott, Mark Bilinski, Ahmad Ridley
Abstract: The 2nd International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Defense was held at the Florida Institute of Technology, Florida. This workshop was organized to share research that explores unique applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) as foundational capabilities for the pursuit of adaptive cyber defense. The cyber domain cannot currently be reliably and effectively defended without extensive reliance on human experts. Skilled cyber defenders are in short supply and often cannot respond fast enough to cyber threats. Building on recent advances in AI and ML the Cyber defense research community has been motivated to develop new dynamic and sustainable defenses through the adoption of AI and ML techniques to cyber settings. Bridging critical gaps between AI and Cyber researchers and practitioners can accelerate efforts to create semi-autonomous cyber defenses that can learn to recognize and respond to cyber attacks or discover and mitigate weaknesses in cooperation with other cyber operation systems and human experts. Furthermore, these defenses are expected to be adaptive and able to evolve over time to thwart changes in attacker behavior, changes in the system health and readiness, and natural shifts in user behavior over time. The workshop was comprised of invited keynote talks, technical presentations and a panel discussion about how AI/ML can enable autonomous mitigation of current and future cyber attacks. Workshop submissions were peer reviewed by a panel of domain experts with a proceedings consisting of six technical articles exploring challenging problems of critical importance to national and global security. Participation in this workshop offered new opportunities to stimulate research and innovation in the emerging domain of adaptive and autonomous cyber defense.
Authors: Junhui Liang, Ying Liu, Vladimir Vlassov
Abstract: Fashion understanding is a hot topic in computer vision, with many applications having great business value in the market. Fashion understanding remains a difficult challenge for computer vision due to the immense diversity of garments and various scenes and backgrounds. In this work, we try removing the background from fashion images to boost data quality and increase model performance. Having fashion images of evident persons in fully visible garments, we can utilize Salient Object Detection to achieve the background removal of fashion data to our expectations. A fashion image with the background removed is claimed as the "rembg" image, contrasting with the original one in the fashion dataset. We conducted extensive comparative experiments with these two types of images on multiple aspects of model training, including model architectures, model initialization, compatibility with other training tricks and data augmentations, and target task types. Our experiments show that background removal can effectively work for fashion data in simple and shallow networks that are not susceptible to overfitting. It can improve model accuracy by up to 5% in the classification on the FashionStyle14 dataset when training models from scratch. However, background removal does not perform well in deep neural networks due to incompatibility with other regularization techniques like batch normalization, pre-trained initialization, and data augmentations introducing randomness. The loss of background pixels invalidates many existing training tricks in the model training, adding the risk of overfitting for deep models.
Authors: Ferdinando Auricchio, Maria Roberta Belardo, Gianluca Fabiani, Francesco Calabr\`o, Ariel F. Pascaner
Abstract: In the present paper, we consider one-hidden layer ANNs with a feedforward architecture, also referred to as shallow or two-layer networks, so that the structure is determined by the number and types of neurons. The determination of the parameters that define the function, called training, is done via the resolution of the approximation problem, so by imposing the interpolation through a set of specific nodes. We present the case where the parameters are trained using a procedure that is referred to as Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) that leads to a linear interpolation problem. In such hypotheses, the existence of an ANN interpolating function is guaranteed. The focus is then on the accuracy of the interpolation outside of the given sampling interpolation nodes when they are the equispaced, the Chebychev, and the randomly selected ones. The study is motivated by the well-known bell-shaped Runge example, which makes it clear that the construction of a global interpolating polynomial is accurate only if trained on suitably chosen nodes, ad example the Chebychev ones. In order to evaluate the behavior when growing the number of interpolation nodes, we raise the number of neurons in our network and compare it with the interpolating polynomial. We test using Runge's function and other well-known examples with different regularities. As expected, the accuracy of the approximation with a global polynomial increases only if the Chebychev nodes are considered. Instead, the error for the ANN interpolating function always decays and in most cases we observe that the convergence follows what is observed in the polynomial case on Chebychev nodes, despite the set of nodes used for training.
Authors: Minghang Deng, Zhong Zhang, Junming Shao
Abstract: Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have achieved great success in diverse fields. The typical paradigm is to pre-train a big deep learning model on large-scale data sets, and then fine-tune the model on small task-specific data sets for downstream tasks. Although PTMs have rapidly progressed with wide real-world applications, they also pose significant risks of potential attacks. Existing backdoor attacks or data poisoning methods often build up the assumption that the attacker invades the computers of victims or accesses the target data, which is challenging in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for an invisible attack on PTMs with enhanced MD5 collision. The key idea is to generate two equal-size models with the same MD5 checksum by leveraging the MD5 chosen-prefix collision. Afterwards, the two ``same" models will be deployed on public websites to induce victims to download the poisoned model. Unlike conventional attacks on deep learning models, this new attack is flexible, covert, and model-independent. Additionally, we propose a simple defensive strategy for recognizing the MD5 chosen-prefix collision and provide a theoretical justification for its feasibility. We extensively validate the effectiveness and stealthiness of our proposed attack and defensive method on different models and data sets.
Authors: Dong Lao, Yangchao Wu, Tian Yu Liu, Alex Wong, Stefano Soatto
Abstract: Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures represent images as collections of high-dimensional vectorized tokens, each corresponding to a rectangular non-overlapping patch. This representation trades spatial granularity for embedding dimensionality, and results in semantically rich but spatially coarsely quantized feature maps. In order to retrieve spatial details beneficial to fine-grained inference tasks we propose a training-free method inspired by "stochastic resonance". Specifically, we perform sub-token spatial transformations to the input data, and aggregate the resulting ViT features after applying the inverse transformation. The resulting "Stochastic Resonance Transformer" (SRT) retains the rich semantic information of the original representation, but grounds it on a finer-scale spatial domain, partly mitigating the coarse effect of spatial tokenization. SRT is applicable across any layer of any ViT architecture, consistently boosting performance on several tasks including segmentation, classification, depth estimation, and others by up to 14.9% without the need for any fine-tuning.
Authors: Jiabin Tang, Yuhao Yang, Wei Wei, Lei Shi, Lixin Su, Suqi Cheng, Dawei Yin, Chao Huang
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have evolved to understand graph structures through recursive exchanges and aggregations among nodes. To enhance robustness, self-supervised learning (SSL) has become a vital tool for data augmentation. Traditional methods often depend on fine-tuning with task-specific labels, limiting their effectiveness when labeled data is scarce. Our research tackles this by advancing graph model generalization in zero-shot learning environments. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), we aim to create a graph-oriented LLM capable of exceptional generalization across various datasets and tasks without relying on downstream graph data. We introduce the GraphGPT framework, which integrates LLMs with graph structural knowledge through graph instruction tuning. This framework includes a text-graph grounding component to link textual and graph structures and a dual-stage instruction tuning approach with a lightweight graph-text alignment projector. These innovations allow LLMs to comprehend complex graph structures and enhance adaptability across diverse datasets and tasks. Our framework demonstrates superior generalization in both supervised and zero-shot graph learning tasks, surpassing existing benchmarks. The open-sourced model implementation of our GraphGPT is available at https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphGPT.
Authors: Hangyu Wang, Jianghao Lin, Xiangyang Li, Bo Chen, Chenxu Zhu, Ruiming Tang, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
Abstract: Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays as a core function module in various personalized online services. The traditional ID-based models for CTR prediction take as inputs the one-hot encoded ID features of tabular modality, which capture the collaborative signals via feature interaction modeling. But the one-hot encoding discards the semantic information conceived in the original feature texts. Recently, the emergence of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has given rise to another paradigm, which takes as inputs the sentences of textual modality obtained by hard prompt templates and adopts PLMs to extract the semantic knowledge. However, PLMs generally tokenize the input text data into subword tokens and ignore field-wise collaborative signals. Therefore, these two lines of research focus on different characteristics of the same input data (i.e., textual and tabular modalities), forming a distinct complementary relationship with each other. In this paper, we propose to conduct Fine-grained feature-level ALignment between ID-based Models and Pretrained Language Models (FLIP) for CTR prediction. We design a novel joint reconstruction pretraining task for both masked language and tabular modeling. Specifically, the masked data of one modality (i.e., tokens or features) has to be recovered with the help of the other modality, which establishes the feature-level interaction and alignment via sufficient mutual information extraction between dual modalities. Moreover, we propose to jointly finetune the ID-based model and PLM for downstream CTR prediction tasks, thus achieving superior performance by combining the advantages of both models. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FLIP outperforms SOTA baselines, and is highly compatible for various ID-based models and PLMs. The code is at \url{https://github.com/justarter/FLIP}.
Authors: Richard Bornemann, Gautier Hamon, Eleni Nisioti, Cl\'ement Moulin-Frier
Abstract: Recent works have proven that intricate cooperative behaviors can emerge in agents trained using meta reinforcement learning on open ended task distributions using self-play. While the results are impressive, we argue that self-play and other centralized training techniques do not accurately reflect how general collective exploration strategies emerge in the natural world: through decentralized training and over an open-ended distribution of tasks. In this work we therefore investigate the emergence of collective exploration strategies, where several agents meta-learn independent recurrent policies on an open ended distribution of tasks. To this end we introduce a novel environment with an open ended procedurally generated task space which dynamically combines multiple subtasks sampled from five diverse task types to form a vast distribution of task trees. We show that decentralized agents trained in our environment exhibit strong generalization abilities when confronted with novel objects at test time. Additionally, despite never being forced to cooperate during training the agents learn collective exploration strategies which allow them to solve novel tasks never encountered during training. We further find that the agents learned collective exploration strategies extend to an open ended task setting, allowing them to solve task trees of twice the depth compared to the ones seen during training. Our open source code as well as videos of the agents can be found on our companion website.
Authors: Jin-Jian Xu, Hao Zhang, Chao-Sheng Tang, Lin Li, Bin Shi
Abstract: As Earth science enters the era of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) not only offers great potential for solving geoscience problems, but also plays a critical role in accelerating the understanding of the complex, interactive, and multiscale processes of Earth's behavior. As geoscience AI models are progressively utilized for significant predictions in crucial situations, geoscience researchers are increasingly demanding their interpretability and versatility. This study proposes an interpretable geoscience artificial intelligence (XGeoS-AI) framework to unravel the mystery of image recognition in the Earth sciences, and its effectiveness and versatility is demonstrated by taking computed tomography (CT) image recognition as an example. Inspired by the mechanism of human vision, the proposed XGeoS-AI framework generates a threshold value from a local region within the whole image to complete the recognition. Different kinds of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, such as Support Vector Regression (SVR), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), can be adopted as the AI engines of the proposed XGeoS-AI framework to efficiently complete geoscience image recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the effectiveness, versatility, and heuristics of the proposed framework have great potential in solving geoscience image recognition problems. Interpretable AI should receive more and more attention in the field of the Earth sciences, which is the key to promoting more rational and wider applications of AI in the field of Earth sciences. In addition, the proposed interpretable framework may be the forerunner of technological innovation in the Earth sciences.
Authors: Maximilian Luz, Rohit Mohan, Ahmed Rida Sekkat, Oliver Sawade, Elmar Matthes, Thomas Brox, Abhinav Valada
Abstract: Optical flow estimation is very challenging in situations with transparent or occluded objects. In this work, we address these challenges at the task level by introducing Amodal Optical Flow, which integrates optical flow with amodal perception. Instead of only representing the visible regions, we define amodal optical flow as a multi-layered pixel-level motion field that encompasses both visible and occluded regions of the scene. To facilitate research on this new task, we extend the AmodalSynthDrive dataset to include pixel-level labels for amodal optical flow estimation. We present several strong baselines, along with the Amodal Flow Quality metric to quantify the performance in an interpretable manner. Furthermore, we propose the novel AmodalFlowNet as an initial step toward addressing this task. AmodalFlowNet consists of a transformer-based cost-volume encoder paired with a recurrent transformer decoder which facilitates recurrent hierarchical feature propagation and amodal semantic grounding. We demonstrate the tractability of amodal optical flow in extensive experiments and show its utility for downstream tasks such as panoptic tracking. We make the dataset, code, and trained models publicly available at http://amodal-flow.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
Authors: Qi Fan (Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, China), Haolin Zuo (Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, China), Rui Liu (Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, China), Zheng Lian (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China), Guanglai Gao (Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, China)
Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) in practical scenarios is significantly challenged by the presence of missing or incomplete data across different modalities. To overcome these challenges, researchers have aimed to simulate incomplete conditions during the training phase to enhance the system's overall robustness. Traditional methods have often involved discarding data or substituting data segments with zero vectors to approximate these incompletenesses. However, such approaches neither accurately represent real-world conditions nor adequately address the issue of noisy data availability. For instance, a blurry image cannot be simply replaced with zero vectors, and still retain information. To tackle this issue and develop a more precise MER system, we introduce a novel noise-robust MER model that effectively learns robust multimodal joint representations from noisy data. This approach includes two pivotal components: firstly, a noise scheduler that adjusts the type and level of noise in the data to emulate various realistic incomplete situations. Secondly, a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE)-based module is employed to reconstruct these robust multimodal joint representations from the noisy inputs. Notably, the introduction of the noise scheduler enables the exploration of an entirely new type of incomplete data condition, which is impossible with existing methods. Extensive experimental evaluations on the benchmark datasets IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI demonstrate the effectiveness of the noise scheduler and the excellent performance of our proposed model.
Authors: Sangamesh Kodge, Gobinda Saha, Kaushik Roy
Abstract: Machine unlearning is a prominent and challenging field, driven by regulatory demands for user data deletion and heightened privacy awareness. Existing approaches involve retraining model or multiple finetuning steps for each deletion request, often constrained by computational limits and restricted data access. In this work, we introduce a novel class unlearning algorithm designed to strategically eliminate specific classes from the learned model. Our algorithm first estimates the Retain and the Forget Spaces using Singular Value Decomposition on the layerwise activations for a small subset of samples from the retain and unlearn classes, respectively. We then compute the shared information between these spaces and remove it from the forget space to isolate class-discriminatory feature space. Finally, we obtain the unlearned model by updating the weights to suppress the class discriminatory features from the activation spaces. We demonstrate our algorithm's efficacy on ImageNet using a Vision Transformer with only $\sim 1.5\%$ drop in retain accuracy compared to the original model while maintaining under $1\%$ accuracy on the unlearned class samples. Further, our algorithm consistently performs well when subject to Membership Inference Attacks showing $7.8\%$ improvement on average across a variety of image classification datasets and network architectures, as compared to other baselines while being $\sim 6 \times$ more computationally efficient. Our code is available at https://github.com/sangamesh-kodge/class_forgetting.
Authors: Kim Youwang, Tae-Hyun Oh, Gerard Pons-Moll
Abstract: We present Paint-it, a text-driven high-fidelity texture map synthesis method for 3D meshes via neural re-parameterized texture optimization. Paint-it synthesizes texture maps from a text description by synthesis-through-optimization, exploiting the Score-Distillation Sampling (SDS). We observe that directly applying SDS yields undesirable texture quality due to its noisy gradients. We reveal the importance of texture parameterization when using SDS. Specifically, we propose Deep Convolutional Physically-Based Rendering (DC-PBR) parameterization, which re-parameterizes the physically-based rendering (PBR) texture maps with randomly initialized convolution-based neural kernels, instead of a standard pixel-based parameterization. We show that DC-PBR inherently schedules the optimization curriculum according to texture frequency and naturally filters out the noisy signals from SDS. In experiments, Paint-it obtains remarkable quality PBR texture maps within 15 min., given only a text description. We demonstrate the generalizability and practicality of Paint-it by synthesizing high-quality texture maps for large-scale mesh datasets and showing test-time applications such as relighting and material control using a popular graphics engine. Project page: https://kim-youwang.github.io/paint-it
Authors: Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin, Michelle S. Lam, Ranjay Krishna, Daniel S. Weld, Jeffrey Heer
Abstract: LLM chains enable complex tasks by decomposing work into a sequence of subtasks. Similarly, the more established techniques of crowdsourcing workflows decompose complex tasks into smaller tasks for human crowdworkers. Chains address LLM errors analogously to the way crowdsourcing workflows address human error. To characterize opportunities for LLM chaining, we survey 107 papers across the crowdsourcing and chaining literature to construct a design space for chain development. The design space covers a designer's objectives and the tactics used to build workflows. We then surface strategies that mediate how workflows use tactics to achieve objectives. To explore how techniques from crowdsourcing may apply to chaining, we adapt crowdsourcing workflows to implement LLM chains across three case studies: creating a taxonomy, shortening text, and writing a short story. From the design space and our case studies, we identify takeaways for effective chain design and raise implications for future research and development.
Authors: Gantavya Bhatt, Yifang Chen, Arnav M. Das, Jifan Zhang, Sang T. Truong, Stephen Mussmann, Yinglun Zhu, Jeffrey Bilmes, Simon S. Du, Kevin Jamieson, Jordan T. Ash, Robert D. Nowak
Abstract: Supervised finetuning (SFT) on instruction datasets has played a crucial role in achieving the remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities observed in modern large language models (LLMs). However, the annotation efforts required to produce high quality responses for instructions are becoming prohibitively expensive, especially as the number of tasks spanned by instruction datasets continues to increase. Active learning is effective in identifying useful subsets of samples to annotate from an unlabeled pool, but its high computational cost remains a barrier to its widespread applicability in the context of LLMs. To mitigate the annotation cost of SFT and circumvent the computational bottlenecks of active learning, we propose using experimental design. Experimental design techniques select the most informative samples to label, and typically maximize some notion of uncertainty and/or diversity. In our work, we implement a framework that evaluates several existing and novel experimental design techniques and find that these methods consistently yield significant gains in label efficiency with little computational overhead. On generative tasks, our methods achieve the same generalization performance with only $50\%$ of annotation cost required by random sampling.
Authors: Zongbo Han, Zechen Bai, Haiyang Mei, Qianli Xu, Changqing Zhang, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract: Recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in visual information understanding with human language. Despite these advances, LVLMs still face challenges with multimodal hallucination, such as generating text descriptions of objects that are not present in the visual information. However, the underlying fundamental reasons of multimodal hallucinations remain poorly explored. In this paper, we propose a new perspective, suggesting that the inherent biases in LVLMs might be a key factor in hallucinations. Specifically, we systematically identify a semantic shift bias related to paragraph breaks (\n\n), where the content before and after '\n\n' in the training data frequently exhibit significant semantic changes. This pattern leads the model to infer that the contents following '\n\n' should be obviously different from the preceding contents with less hallucinatory descriptions, thereby increasing the probability of hallucinatory descriptions subsequent to the '\n\n'. We have validated this hypothesis on multiple publicly available LVLMs. Besides, we find that deliberately inserting '\n\n' at the generated description can induce more hallucinations. A simple method is proposed to effectively mitigate the hallucination of LVLMs by skipping the output of '\n'.
Authors: Jennifer Chien, David Danks
Abstract: Algorithmic harms are commonly categorized as either allocative or representational. This study specifically addresses the latter, focusing on an examination of current definitions of representational harms to discern what is included and what is not. This analysis motivates our expansion beyond behavioral definitions to encompass harms to cognitive and affective states. The paper outlines high-level requirements for measurement: identifying the necessary expertise to implement this approach and illustrating it through a case study. Our work highlights the unique vulnerabilities of large language models to perpetrating representational harms, particularly when these harms go unmeasured and unmitigated. The work concludes by presenting proposed mitigations and delineating when to employ them. The overarching aim of this research is to establish a framework for broadening the definition of representational harms and to translate insights from fairness research into practical measurement and mitigation praxis.
Authors: Xiyuan Zhang, Ranak Roy Chowdhury, Rajesh K. Gupta, Jingbo Shang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen significant use in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. Going beyond text, image and graphics, LLMs present a significant potential for analysis of time series data, benefiting domains such as climate, IoT, healthcare, traffic, audio and finance. This survey paper provides an in-depth exploration and a detailed taxonomy of the various methodologies employed to harness the power of LLMs for time series analysis. We address the inherent challenge of bridging the gap between LLMs' original text data training and the numerical nature of time series data, and explore strategies for transferring and distilling knowledge from LLMs to numerical time series analysis. We detail various methodologies, including (1) direct prompting of LLMs, (2) time series quantization, (3) aligning techniques, (4) utilization of the vision modality as a bridging mechanism, and (5) the combination of LLMs with tools. Additionally, this survey offers a comprehensive overview of the existing multimodal time series and text datasets and delves into the challenges and future opportunities of this emerging field. We maintain an up-to-date Github repository which includes all the papers and datasets discussed in the survey.
Authors: Benjamin Decardi-Nelson, Abdulelah S. Alshehri, Akshay Ajagekar, Fengqi You
Abstract: This article explores how emerging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models, such as large language models (LLMs), can enhance solution methodologies within process systems engineering (PSE). These cutting-edge GenAI models, particularly foundation models (FMs), which are pre-trained on extensive, general-purpose datasets, offer versatile adaptability for a broad range of tasks, including responding to queries, image generation, and complex decision-making. Given the close relationship between advancements in PSE and developments in computing and systems technologies, exploring the synergy between GenAI and PSE is essential. We begin our discussion with a compact overview of both classic and emerging GenAI models, including FMs, and then dive into their applications within key PSE domains: synthesis and design, optimization and integration, and process monitoring and control. In each domain, we explore how GenAI models could potentially advance PSE methodologies, providing insights and prospects for each area. Furthermore, the article identifies and discusses potential challenges in fully leveraging GenAI within PSE, including multiscale modeling, data requirements, evaluation metrics and benchmarks, and trust and safety, thereby deepening the discourse on effective GenAI integration into systems analysis, design, optimization, operations, monitoring, and control. This paper provides a guide for future research focused on the applications of emerging GenAI in PSE.
Authors: Henry W. Sprueill, Carl Edwards, Khushbu Agarwal, Mariefel V. Olarte, Udishnu Sanyal, Conrad Johnston, Hongbin Liu, Heng Ji, Sutanay Choudhury
Abstract: The discovery of new catalysts is essential for the design of new and more efficient chemical processes in order to transition to a sustainable future. We introduce an AI-guided computational screening framework unifying linguistic reasoning with quantum-chemistry based feedback from 3D atomistic representations. Our approach formulates catalyst discovery as an uncertain environment where an agent actively searches for highly effective catalysts via the iterative combination of large language model (LLM)-derived hypotheses and atomistic graph neural network (GNN)-derived feedback. Identified catalysts in intermediate search steps undergo structural evaluation based on spatial orientation, reaction pathways, and stability. Scoring functions based on adsorption energies and barriers steer the exploration in the LLM's knowledge space toward energetically favorable, high-efficiency catalysts. We introduce planning methods that automatically guide the exploration without human input, providing competitive performance against expert-enumerated chemical descriptor-based implementations. By integrating language-guided reasoning with computational chemistry feedback, our work pioneers AI-accelerated, trustworthy catalyst discovery.
Authors: Shasha Guo, Lizi Liao, Cuiping Li, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: In this survey, we present a detailed examination of the advancements in Neural Question Generation (NQG), a field leveraging neural network techniques to generate relevant questions from diverse inputs like knowledge bases, texts, and images. The survey begins with an overview of NQG's background, encompassing the task's problem formulation, prevalent benchmark datasets, established evaluation metrics, and notable applications. It then methodically classifies NQG approaches into three predominant categories: structured NQG, which utilizes organized data sources, unstructured NQG, focusing on more loosely structured inputs like texts or visual content, and hybrid NQG, drawing on diverse input modalities. This classification is followed by an in-depth analysis of the distinct neural network models tailored for each category, discussing their inherent strengths and potential limitations. The survey culminates with a forward-looking perspective on the trajectory of NQG, identifying emergent research trends and prospective developmental paths. Accompanying this survey is a curated collection of related research papers, datasets and codes, systematically organized on Github, providing an extensive reference for those delving into NQG.
Authors: Yuxiang Huang, John Zelek
Abstract: Motion segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision and is crucial in various applications such as robotics, autonomous driving and action recognition. Recently, spectral clustering based methods have shown impressive results on motion segmentation in dynamic environments. These methods perform spectral clustering on motion affinity matrices to cluster objects or point trajectories in the scene into different motion groups. However, existing methods often need the number of motions present in the scene to be known, which significantly reduces their practicality. In this paper, we propose a unified model selection technique to automatically infer the number of motion groups for spectral clustering based motion segmentation methods by combining different existing model selection techniques together. We evaluate our method on the KT3DMoSeg dataset and achieve competitve results comparing to the baseline where the number of clusters is given as ground truth information.
Authors: Yanchen Guan, Haicheng Liao, Zhenning Li, Jia Hu, Runze Yuan, Yunjian Li, Guohui Zhang, Chengzhong Xu
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving landscape of autonomous driving, the capability to accurately predict future events and assess their implications is paramount for both safety and efficiency, critically aiding the decision-making process. World models have emerged as a transformative approach, enabling autonomous driving systems to synthesize and interpret vast amounts of sensor data, thereby predicting potential future scenarios and compensating for information gaps. This paper provides an initial review of the current state and prospective advancements of world models in autonomous driving, spanning their theoretical underpinnings, practical applications, and the ongoing research efforts aimed at overcoming existing limitations. Highlighting the significant role of world models in advancing autonomous driving technologies, this survey aspires to serve as a foundational reference for the research community, facilitating swift access to and comprehension of this burgeoning field, and inspiring continued innovation and exploration.
Authors: Zijie Zeng, Shiqi Liu, Lele Sha, Zhuang Li, Kaixun Yang, Sannyuya Liu, Dragan Ga\v{s}evi\'c, Guanliang Chen
Abstract: This study explores the challenge of sentence-level AI-generated text detection within human-AI collaborative hybrid texts. Existing studies of AI-generated text detection for hybrid texts often rely on synthetic datasets. These typically involve hybrid texts with a limited number of boundaries. We contend that studies of detecting AI-generated content within hybrid texts should cover different types of hybrid texts generated in realistic settings to better inform real-world applications. Therefore, our study utilizes the CoAuthor dataset, which includes diverse, realistic hybrid texts generated through the collaboration between human writers and an intelligent writing system in multi-turn interactions. We adopt a two-step, segmentation-based pipeline: (i) detect segments within a given hybrid text where each segment contains sentences of consistent authorship, and (ii) classify the authorship of each identified segment. Our empirical findings highlight (1) detecting AI-generated sentences in hybrid texts is overall a challenging task because (1.1) human writers' selecting and even editing AI-generated sentences based on personal preferences adds difficulty in identifying the authorship of segments; (1.2) the frequent change of authorship between neighboring sentences within the hybrid text creates difficulties for segment detectors in identifying authorship-consistent segments; (1.3) the short length of text segments within hybrid texts provides limited stylistic cues for reliable authorship determination; (2) before embarking on the detection process, it is beneficial to assess the average length of segments within the hybrid text. This assessment aids in deciding whether (2.1) to employ a text segmentation-based strategy for hybrid texts with longer segments, or (2.2) to adopt a direct sentence-by-sentence classification strategy for those with shorter segments.
Authors: Qiuyu Liang, Weihua Wang, Feilong Bao, Guanglai Gao
Abstract: Linear Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are used to classify the node in the graph data. However, we note that most existing linear GCN models perform neural network operations in Euclidean space, which do not explicitly capture the tree-like hierarchical structure exhibited in real-world datasets that modeled as graphs. In this paper, we attempt to introduce hyperbolic space into linear GCN and propose a novel framework for Lorentzian linear GCN. Specifically, we map the learned features of graph nodes into hyperbolic space, and then perform a Lorentzian linear feature transformation to capture the underlying tree-like structure of data. Experimental results on standard citation networks datasets with semi-supervised learning show that our approach yields new state-of-the-art results of accuracy 74.7$\%$ on Citeseer and 81.3$\%$ on PubMed datasets. Furthermore, we observe that our approach can be trained up to two orders of magnitude faster than other nonlinear GCN models on PubMed dataset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/llqy123/LLGC-master.
Authors: Yang Hu
Abstract: Interests in the value of digital technologies for its potential uses to increase supply chain resilience (SCRes) are increasing in light to the industry 4.0 and the global pandemic. Utilization of Recommender systems (RS) as a supply chain (SC) resilience measure is neglected although RS is a capable tool to enhance SC resilience from a reactive aspect. To address this problem, this research proposed a novel data-driven supply chain disruption response framework based on the intelligent recommender system techniques and validated the conceptual model through a practical use case. Results show that our framework can be implemented as an effective SC disruption mitigation measure in the very first response phrase and help SC participants get better reaction performance after the SC disruption.
Authors: Mingyuan Zhou, Huangjie Zheng, Zhendong Wang, Mingzhang Yin, Hai Huang
Abstract: We introduce Score identity Distillation (SiD), an innovative data-free method that distills the generative capabilities of pretrained diffusion models into a single-step generator. SiD not only facilitates an exponentially fast reduction in Fr\'echet inception distance (FID) during distillation but also approaches or even exceeds the FID performance of the original teacher diffusion models. By reformulating forward diffusion processes as semi-implicit distributions, we leverage three score-related identities to create an innovative loss mechanism. This mechanism achieves rapid FID reduction by training the generator using its own synthesized images, eliminating the need for real data or reverse-diffusion-based generation, all accomplished within significantly shortened generation time. Upon evaluation across four benchmark datasets, the SiD algorithm demonstrates high iteration efficiency during distillation and surpasses competing distillation approaches, whether they are one-step or few-step, data-free, or dependent on training data, in terms of generation quality. This achievement not only redefines the benchmarks for efficiency and effectiveness in diffusion distillation but also in the broader field of diffusion-based generation. The PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/mingyuanzhou/SiD
Authors: Hongyu Cai, Arjun Arunasalam, Leo Y. Lin, Antonio Bianchi, Z. Berkay Celik
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly integrated with various applications. To ensure that LLMs do not generate unsafe responses, they are aligned with safeguards that specify what content is restricted. However, such alignment can be bypassed to produce prohibited content using a technique commonly referred to as jailbreak. Different systems have been proposed to perform the jailbreak automatically. These systems rely on evaluation methods to determine whether a jailbreak attempt is successful. However, our analysis reveals that current jailbreak evaluation methods have two limitations. (1) Their objectives lack clarity and do not align with the goal of identifying unsafe responses. (2) They oversimplify the jailbreak result as a binary outcome, successful or not. In this paper, we propose three metrics, safeguard violation, informativeness, and relative truthfulness, to evaluate language model jailbreak. Additionally, we demonstrate how these metrics correlate with the goal of different malicious actors. To compute these metrics, we introduce a multifaceted approach that extends the natural language generation evaluation method after preprocessing the response. We evaluate our metrics on a benchmark dataset produced from three malicious intent datasets and three jailbreak systems. The benchmark dataset is labeled by three annotators. We compare our multifaceted approach with three existing jailbreak evaluation methods. Experiments demonstrate that our multifaceted evaluation outperforms existing methods, with F1 scores improving on average by 17% compared to existing baselines. Our findings motivate the need to move away from the binary view of the jailbreak problem and incorporate a more comprehensive evaluation to ensure the safety of the language model.
Authors: Dongseong Hwang, Weiran Wang, Zhuoyuan Huo, Khe Chai Sim, Pedro Moreno Mengibar
Abstract: While Transformers have revolutionized deep learning, their quadratic attention complexity hinders their ability to process infinitely long inputs. We propose Feedback Attention Memory (FAM), a novel Transformer architecture that leverages a feedback loop to enable the network to attend to its own latent representations. This design fosters the emergence of working memory within the Transformer, allowing it to process indefinitely long sequences. TransformerFAM requires no additional weights, enabling seamless integration with pre-trained models. Our experiments show that TransformerFAM significantly improves Transformer performance on long-context tasks across various model sizes (1B, 8B, and 24B). These results showcase the potential to empower Large Language Models (LLMs) to process sequences of unlimited length.
Authors: Antonio Pio Ricciardi, Valentino Maiorca, Luca Moschella, Riccardo Marin, Emanuele Rodol\`a
Abstract: Visual Reinforcement Learning is a popular and powerful framework that takes full advantage of the Deep Learning breakthrough. However, it is also known that variations in the input (e.g., different colors of the panorama due to the season of the year) or the task (e.g., changing the speed limit for a car to respect) could require complete retraining of the agents. In this work, we leverage recent developments in unifying latent representations to demonstrate that it is possible to combine the components of an agent, rather than retrain it from scratch. We build upon the recent relative representations framework and adapt it for Visual RL. This allows us to create completely new agents capable of handling environment-task combinations never seen during training. Our work paves the road toward a more accessible and flexible use of reinforcement learning.
Authors: Ben Williams, Bart van Merri\"enboer, Vincent Dumoulin, Jenny Hamer, Eleni Triantafillou, Abram B. Fleishman, Matthew McKown, Jill E. Munger, Aaron N. Rice, Ashlee Lillis, Clemency E. White, Catherine A. D. Hobbs, Tries B. Razak, Kate E. Jones, Tom Denton
Abstract: Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for ecological assessments. However, high annotation and compute costs limit the field's efficacy. Generalizable pretrained networks can overcome these costs, but high-quality pretraining requires vast annotated libraries, limiting its current applicability primarily to bird taxa. Here, we identify the optimum pretraining strategy for a data-deficient domain using coral reef bioacoustics. We assemble ReefSet, a large annotated library of reef sounds, though modest compared to bird libraries at 2% of the sample count. Through testing few-shot transfer learning performance, we observe that pretraining on bird audio provides notably superior generalizability compared to pretraining on ReefSet or unrelated audio alone. However, our key findings show that cross-domain mixing which leverages bird, reef and unrelated audio during pretraining maximizes reef generalizability. SurfPerch, our pretrained network, provides a strong foundation for automated analysis of marine PAM data with minimal annotation and compute costs.
Authors: Zilong Bai, Ruiji Zhang, Linqing Chen, Qijun Cai, Yuan Zhong, Cong Wang, Yan Fang, Jie Fang, Jing Sun, Weikuan Wang, Lizhi Zhou, Haoran Hua, Tian Qiu, Chaochao Wang, Cheng Sun, Jianping Lu, Yixin Wang, Yubin Xia, Meng Hu, Haowen Liu, Peng Xu, Licong Xu, Fu Bian, Xiaolong Gu, Lisha Zhang, Weilei Wang, Changyang Tu
Abstract: In recent years, large language models(LLMs) have attracted significant attention due to their exceptional performance across a multitude of natural language process tasks, and have been widely applied in various fields. However, the application of large language models in the Intellectual Property (IP) domain is challenging due to the strong need for specialized knowledge, privacy protection, processing of extremely long text in this field. In this technical report, we present for the first time a low-cost, standardized procedure for training IP-oriented LLMs, meeting the unique requirements of the IP domain. Using this standard process, we have trained the PatentGPT series models based on open-source pretrained models. By evaluating them on the open-source IP-oriented benchmark MOZIP, our domain-specific LLMs outperforms GPT-4, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed training procedure and the expertise of the PatentGPT models in the IP domain. Remarkably, our model surpassed GPT-4 on the 2019 China Patent Agent Qualification Examination, scoring 65 and matching human expert levels. Additionally, the PatentGPT model, which utilizes the SMoE architecture, achieves performance comparable to that of GPT-4 in the IP domain and demonstrates a better cost-performance ratio on long-text tasks, potentially serving as an alternative to GPT-4 within the IP domain.
Authors: Zijian Zhang, Shuchang Liu, Jiaao Yu, Qingpeng Cai, Xiangyu Zhao, Chunxu Zhang, Ziru Liu, Qidong Liu, Hongwei Zhao, Lantao Hu, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai
Abstract: Multi-domain recommendation and multi-task recommendation have demonstrated their effectiveness in leveraging common information from different domains and objectives for comprehensive user modeling. Nonetheless, the practical recommendation usually faces multiple domains and tasks simultaneously, which cannot be well-addressed by current methods. To this end, we introduce M3oE, an adaptive multi-domain multi-task mixture-of-experts recommendation framework. M3oE integrates multi-domain information, maps knowledge across domains and tasks, and optimizes multiple objectives. We leverage three mixture-of-experts modules to learn common, domain-aspect, and task-aspect user preferences respectively to address the complex dependencies among multiple domains and tasks in a disentangled manner. Additionally, we design a two-level fusion mechanism for precise control over feature extraction and fusion across diverse domains and tasks. The framework's adaptability is further enhanced by applying AutoML technique, which allows dynamic structure optimization. To the best of the authors' knowledge, our M3oE is the first effort to solve multi-domain multi-task recommendation self-adaptively. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets against diverse baselines demonstrate M3oE's superior performance. The implementation code is available to ensure reproducibility.
Authors: Chuni Liu, Boyuan Ma, Xiaojuan Ban, Yujie Xie, Hao Wang, Weihua Xue, Jingchao Ma, Ke Xu
Abstract: Topological consistency plays a crucial role in the task of boundary segmentation for reticular images, such as cell membrane segmentation in neuron electron microscopic images, grain boundary segmentation in material microscopic images and road segmentation in aerial images. In these fields, topological changes in segmentation results have a serious impact on the downstream tasks, which can even exceed the misalignment of the boundary itself. To enhance the topology accuracy in segmentation results, we propose the Skea-Topo Aware loss, which is a novel loss function that takes into account the shape of each object and topological significance of the pixels. It consists of two components. First, a skeleton-aware weighted loss improves the segmentation accuracy by better modeling the object geometry with skeletons. Second, a boundary rectified term effectively identifies and emphasizes topological critical pixels in the prediction errors using both foreground and background skeletons in the ground truth and predictions. Experiments prove that our method improves topological consistency by up to 7 points in VI compared to 13 state-of-art methods, based on objective and subjective assessments across three different boundary segmentation datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/clovermini/Skea_topo.
Authors: Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Weizhe Yuan, Kyunghyun Cho, He He, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jason Weston
Abstract: Iterative preference optimization methods have recently been shown to perform well for general instruction tuning tasks, but typically make little improvement on reasoning tasks (Yuan et al., 2024, Chen et al., 2024). In this work we develop an iterative approach that optimizes the preference between competing generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) candidates by optimizing for winning vs. losing reasoning steps that lead to the correct answer. We train using a modified DPO loss (Rafailov et al., 2023) with an additional negative log-likelihood term, which we find to be crucial. We show reasoning improves across repeated iterations of this scheme. While only relying on examples in the training set, our approach results in increasing accuracy on GSM8K, MATH, and ARC-Challenge for Llama-2-70B-Chat, outperforming other Llama-2-based models not relying on additionally sourced datasets. For example, we see a large improvement from 55.6% to 81.6% on GSM8K and an accuracy of 88.7% with majority voting out of 32 samples.
Authors: Praveen Kumar Chandaliya, Kiran Raja, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Zahid Akhtar, Christoph Busch
Abstract: Numerous studies have shown that existing Face Recognition Systems (FRS), including commercial ones, often exhibit biases toward certain ethnicities due to under-represented data. In this work, we explore ethnicity alteration and skin tone modification using synthetic face image generation methods to increase the diversity of datasets. We conduct a detailed analysis by first constructing a balanced face image dataset representing three ethnicities: Asian, Black, and Indian. We then make use of existing Generative Adversarial Network-based (GAN) image-to-image translation and manifold learning models to alter the ethnicity from one to another. A systematic analysis is further conducted to assess the suitability of such datasets for FRS by studying the realistic skin-tone representation using Individual Typology Angle (ITA). Further, we also analyze the quality characteristics using existing Face image quality assessment (FIQA) approaches. We then provide a holistic FRS performance analysis using four different systems. Our findings pave the way for future research works in (i) developing both specific ethnicity and general (any to any) ethnicity alteration models, (ii) expanding such approaches to create databases with diverse skin tones, (iii) creating datasets representing various ethnicities which further can help in mitigating bias while addressing privacy concerns.
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: Jiexia Ye, Weiqi Zhang, Ke Yi, Yongzi Yu, Ziyue Li, Jia Li, Fugee Tsung
Abstract: Time series data are ubiquitous across various domains, making time series analysis critically important. Traditional time series models are task-specific, featuring singular functionality and limited generalization capacity. Recently, large language foundation models have unveiled their remarkable capabilities for cross-task transferability, zero-shot/few-shot learning, and decision-making explainability. This success has sparked interest in the exploration of foundation models to solve multiple time series challenges simultaneously. There are two main research lines, namely pre-training foundation models from scratch for time series and adapting large language foundation models for time series. They both contribute to the development of a unified model that is highly generalizable, versatile, and comprehensible for time series analysis. This survey offers a 3E analytical framework for comprehensive examination of related research. Specifically, we examine existing works from three dimensions, namely Effectiveness, Efficiency and Explainability. In each dimension, we focus on discussing how related works devise tailored solution by considering unique challenges in the realm of time series. Furthermore, we provide a domain taxonomy to help followers keep up with the domain-specific advancements. In addition, we introduce extensive resources to facilitate the field's development, including datasets, open-source, time series libraries. A GitHub repository is also maintained for resource updates (https://github.com/start2020/Awesome-TimeSeries-LLM-FM).
URLs: https://github.com/start2020/Awesome-TimeSeries-LLM-FM).
Authors: Tianze Xu, Jiajun Li, Xuesong Chen, Xinrui Yao, Shuchang Liu
Abstract: In recent years, AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has witnessed rapid advancements, facilitating the generation of music, images, and other forms of artistic expression across various industries. However, researches on general multi-modal music generation model remain scarce. To fill this gap, we propose a multi-modal music generation framework Mozart's Touch. It could generate aligned music with the cross-modality inputs, such as images, videos and text. Mozart's Touch is composed of three main components: Multi-modal Captioning Module, Large Language Model (LLM) Understanding & Bridging Module, and Music Generation Module. Unlike traditional approaches, Mozart's Touch requires no training or fine-tuning pre-trained models, offering efficiency and transparency through clear, interpretable prompts. We also introduce "LLM-Bridge" method to resolve the heterogeneous representation problems between descriptive texts of different modalities. We conduct a series of objective and subjective evaluations on the proposed model, and results indicate that our model surpasses the performance of current state-of-the-art models. Our codes and examples is availble at: https://github.com/WangTooNaive/MozartsTouch
Authors: Fares Abawi, Di Fu, Stefan Wermter
Abstract: Previous research on scanpath prediction has mainly focused on group models, disregarding the fact that the scanpaths and attentional behaviors of individuals are diverse. The disregard of these differences is especially detrimental to social human-robot interaction, whereby robots commonly emulate human gaze based on heuristics or predefined patterns. However, human gaze patterns are heterogeneous and varying behaviors can significantly affect the outcomes of such human-robot interactions. To fill this gap, we developed a deep learning-based social cue integration model for saliency prediction to instead predict scanpaths in videos. Our model learned scanpaths by recursively integrating fixation history and social cues through a gating mechanism and sequential attention. We evaluated our approach on gaze datasets of dynamic social scenes, observed under the free-viewing condition. The introduction of fixation history into our models makes it possible to train a single unified model rather than the resource-intensive approach of training individual models for each set of scanpaths. We observed that the late neural integration approach surpasses early fusion when training models on a large dataset, in comparison to a smaller dataset with a similar distribution. Results also indicate that a single unified model, trained on all the observers' scanpaths, performs on par or better than individually trained models. We hypothesize that this outcome is a result of the group saliency representations instilling universal attention in the model, while the supervisory signal and fixation history guide it to learn personalized attentional behaviors, providing the unified model a benefit over individual models due to its implicit representation of universal attention.
Authors: Hirokazu Ishida, Naoki Hiraoka, Kei Okada, Masayuki Inaba
Abstract: Library-based methods are known to be very effective for fast motion planning by adapting an experience retrieved from a precomputed library. This article presents CoverLib, a principled approach for constructing and utilizing such a library. CoverLib iteratively adds an experience-classifier-pair to the library, where each classifier corresponds to an adaptable region of the experience within the problem space. This iterative process is an active procedure, as it selects the next experience based on its ability to effectively cover the uncovered region. During the query phase, these classifiers are utilized to select an experience that is expected to be adaptable for a given problem. Experimental results demonstrate that CoverLib effectively mitigates the trade-off between plannability and speed observed in global (e.g. sampling-based) and local (e.g. optimization-based) methods. As a result, it achieves both fast planning and high success rates over the problem domain. Moreover, due to its adaptation-algorithm-agnostic nature, CoverLib seamlessly integrates with various adaptation methods, including nonlinear programming-based and sampling-based algorithms.
Authors: Yihao Zhou, Timothy Tin-Yan Lee, Kelly Ka-Lee Lai, Chonglin Wu, Hin Ting Lau, De Yang, Chui-Yi Chan, Winnie Chiu-Wing Chu, Jack Chun-Yiu Cheng, Tsz-Ping Lam, Yong-Ping Zheng
Abstract: The current clinical gold standard for evaluating adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is X-ray radiography, using Cobb angle measurement. However, the frequent monitoring of the AIS progression using X-rays poses a challenge due to the cumulative radiation exposure. Although 3D ultrasound has been validated as a reliable and radiation-free alternative for scoliosis assessment, the process of measuring spinal curvature is still carried out manually. Consequently, there is a considerable demand for a fully automatic system that can locate bony landmarks and perform angle measurements. To this end, we introduce an estimation model for automatic ultrasound curve angle (UCA) measurement. The model employs a dual-branch network to detect candidate landmarks and perform vertebra segmentation on ultrasound coronal images. An affinity clustering strategy is utilized within the vertebral segmentation area to illustrate the affinity relationship between candidate landmarks. Subsequently, we can efficiently perform line delineation from a clustered affinity map for UCA measurement. As our method is specifically designed for UCA calculation, this method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for landmark and line detection tasks. The high correlation between the automatic UCA and Cobb angle (R$^2$=0.858) suggests that our proposed method can potentially replace manual UCA measurement in ultrasound scoliosis assessment.
Authors: Jairo Gudi\~no-Rosero, Umberto Grandi, C\'esar A. Hidalgo
Abstract: We explore the capabilities of an augmented democracy system built on off-the-shelf LLMs fine-tuned on data summarizing individual preferences across 67 policy proposals collected during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. We use a train-test cross-validation setup to estimate the accuracy with which the LLMs predict both: a subject's individual political choices and the aggregate preferences of the full sample of participants. At the individual level, the accuracy of the out of sample predictions lie in the range 69%-76% and are significantly better at predicting the preferences of liberal and college educated participants. At the population level, we aggregate preferences using an adaptation of the Borda score and compare the ranking of policy proposals obtained from a probabilistic sample of participants and from data augmented using LLMs. We find that the augmented data predicts the preferences of the full population of participants better than probabilistic samples alone when these represent less than 30% to 40% of the total population. These results indicate that LLMs are potentially useful for the construction of systems of augmented democracy.
Authors: Shang Shang, Xinqiang Zhao, Zhongjiang Yao, Yepeng Yao, Liya Su, Zijing Fan, Xiaodan Zhang, Zhengwei Jiang
Abstract: To demonstrate and address the underlying maliciousness, we propose a theoretical hypothesis and analytical approach, and introduce a new black-box jailbreak attack methodology named IntentObfuscator, exploiting this identified flaw by obfuscating the true intentions behind user prompts.This approach compels LLMs to inadvertently generate restricted content, bypassing their built-in content security measures. We detail two implementations under this framework: "Obscure Intention" and "Create Ambiguity", which manipulate query complexity and ambiguity to evade malicious intent detection effectively. We empirically validate the effectiveness of the IntentObfuscator method across several models, including ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, Qwen and Baichuan, achieving an average jailbreak success rate of 69.21\%. Notably, our tests on ChatGPT-3.5, which claims 100 million weekly active users, achieved a remarkable success rate of 83.65\%. We also extend our validation to diverse types of sensitive content like graphic violence, racism, sexism, political sensitivity, cybersecurity threats, and criminal skills, further proving the substantial impact of our findings on enhancing 'Red Team' strategies against LLM content security frameworks.