Authors: Zhenwen Liang, Dian Yu, Wenhao Yu, Wenlin Yao, Zhihan Zhang, Xiangliang Zhang, Dong Yu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in mathematical problem solving, particularly in single turn question answering formats. However, real world scenarios often involve mathematical question answering that requires multi turn or interactive information exchanges, and the performance of LLMs on these tasks is still underexplored. This paper introduces MathChat, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs across a broader spectrum of mathematical tasks. These tasks are structured to assess the models' abilities in multiturn interactions and open ended generation. We evaluate the performance of various SOTA LLMs on the MathChat benchmark, and we observe that while these models excel in single turn question answering, they significantly underperform in more complex scenarios that require sustained reasoning and dialogue understanding. To address the above limitations of existing LLMs when faced with multiturn and open ended tasks, we develop MathChat sync, a synthetic dialogue based math dataset for LLM finetuning, focusing on improving models' interaction and instruction following capabilities in conversations. Experimental results emphasize the need for training LLMs with diverse, conversational instruction tuning datasets like MathChatsync. We believe this work outlines one promising direction for improving the multiturn mathematical reasoning abilities of LLMs, thus pushing forward the development of LLMs that are more adept at interactive mathematical problem solving and real world applications.
Authors: Chamani Shiranthika, Parvaneh Saeedi, Ivan V. Baji\'c
Abstract: Recent advancements in decentralized learning, such as Federated Learning (FL), Split Learning (SL), and Split Federated Learning (SplitFed), have expanded the potentials of machine learning. SplitFed aims to minimize the computational burden on individual clients in FL and parallelize SL while maintaining privacy. This study investigates the resilience of SplitFed to packet loss at model split points. It explores various parameter aggregation strategies of SplitFed by examining the impact of splitting the model at different points-either shallow split or deep split-on the final global model performance. The experiments, conducted on a human embryo image segmentation task, reveal a statistically significant advantage of a deeper split point.
Authors: Xisen Wang, Yigit Ihlamur
Abstract: Evaluating startups in their early stages is a complex task that requires detailed analysis by experts. While automating this process on a large scale can significantly impact businesses, the inherent complexity poses challenges. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing the Startup Success Forecasting Framework (SSFF), a new automated system that combines traditional machine learning with advanced language models. This intelligent agent-based architecture is designed to reason, act, synthesize, and decide like a venture capitalist to perform the analysis end-to-end. The SSFF is made up of three main parts: - Prediction Block: Uses random forests and neural networks to make predictions. - Analyst Block: Simulates VC analysis scenario and uses SOTA prompting techniques - External Knowledge Block: Gathers real-time information from external sources. This framework requires minimal input data about the founder and startup description, enhances it with additional data from external resources, and performs a detailed analysis with high accuracy, all in an automated manner
Authors: Haowen Xu, Femi Omitaomu, Soheil Sabri, Xiao Li, Yongze Song
Abstract: The digital transformation of modern cities by integrating advanced information, communication, and computing technologies has marked the epoch of data-driven smart city applications for efficient and sustainable urban management. Despite their effectiveness, these applications often rely on massive amounts of high-dimensional and multi-domain data for monitoring and characterizing different urban sub-systems, presenting challenges in application areas that are limited by data quality and availability, as well as costly efforts for generating urban scenarios and design alternatives. As an emerging research area in deep learning, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have demonstrated their unique values in data and code generation. This survey paper aims to explore the innovative integration of generative AI techniques and urban digital twins to address challenges in the realm of smart cities in various urban sectors, such as transportation and mobility management, energy system operations, building and infrastructure management, and urban design. The survey starts with the introduction of popular generative AI models with their application areas, followed by a structured review of the existing urban science applications that leverage the autonomous capability of the generative AI techniques to facilitate (a) data augmentation for promoting urban monitoring and predictive analytics, (b) synthetic data and scenario generation, (c) automated 3D city modeling, and (d) generative urban design and optimization. Based on the review, this survey discusses potential opportunities and technical strategies that integrate generative AI models into the next-generation urban digital twins for more reliable, scalable, and automated management of smart cities.
Authors: Robert Johansson
Abstract: This paper introduces an interdisciplinary framework called Machine Psychology, which merges principles from operant learning psychology with a specific Artificial Intelligence model, the Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS), to enhance Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research. The core premise of this framework is that adaptation is crucial to both biological and artificial intelligence and can be understood through operant conditioning principles. The study assesses this approach via three operant learning tasks using OpenNARS for Applications (ONA): simple discrimination, changing contingencies, and conditional discrimination tasks. In the simple discrimination task, NARS demonstrated rapid learning, achieving perfect accuracy during both training and testing phases. The changing contingencies task showcased NARS's adaptability, as it successfully adjusted its behavior when task conditions were reversed. In the conditional discrimination task, NARS handled complex learning scenarios effectively, achieving high accuracy by forming and utilizing intricate hypotheses based on conditional cues. These findings support the application of operant conditioning as a framework for creating adaptive AGI systems. NARS's ability to operate under conditions of insufficient knowledge and resources, coupled with its sensorimotor reasoning capabilities, establishes it as a robust model for AGI. The Machine Psychology framework, by incorporating elements of natural intelligence such as continuous learning and goal-driven behavior, offers a scalable and flexible approach for real-world applications. Future research should investigate using enhanced NARS systems, more advanced tasks, and applying this framework to diverse, complex challenges to further progress the development of human-level AI.
Authors: Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Vanessa Parli, Anka Reuel, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald, Jack Clark
Abstract: The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI's influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI's impact on science and medicine. The AI Index report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The AI Index is recognized globally as one of the most credible and authoritative sources for data and insights on artificial intelligence. Previous editions have been cited in major newspapers, including the The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian, have amassed hundreds of academic citations, and been referenced by high-level policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, among other places. This year's edition surpasses all previous ones in size, scale, and scope, reflecting the growing significance that AI is coming to hold in all of our lives.
Authors: Xinmeng Huang, Shuo Li, Edgar Dobriban, Osbert Bastani, Hamed Hassani, Dongsheng Ding
Abstract: The growing safety concerns surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs) raise an urgent need to align them with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their helpfulness and safety. A promising approach is to enforce safety constraints through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). For such constrained RLHF, common Lagrangian-based primal-dual policy optimization methods are computationally expensive and often unstable. This paper presents a dualization perspective that reduces constrained alignment to an equivalent unconstrained alignment problem. We do so by pre-optimizing a smooth and convex dual function that has a closed form. This shortcut eliminates the need for cumbersome primal-dual policy iterations, thus greatly reducing the computational burden and improving training stability. Our strategy leads to two practical algorithms in model-based and preference-based scenarios (MoCAN and PeCAN, respectively). A broad range of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.
Authors: Venkat Venkatasubramanian, Arijit Chakraborty
Abstract: The startling success of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) using transformer-based generative neural network architecture in applications such as natural language processing and image synthesis has many researchers excited about potential opportunities in process systems engineering (PSE). The almost human-like performance of LLMs in these areas is indeed very impressive, surprising, and a major breakthrough. Their capabilities are very useful in certain tasks, such as writing first drafts of documents, code writing assistance, text summarization, etc. However, their success is limited in highly scientific domains as they cannot yet reason, plan, or explain due to their lack of in-depth domain knowledge. This is a problem in domains such as chemical engineering as they are governed by fundamental laws of physics and chemistry (and biology), constitutive relations, and highly technical knowledge about materials, processes, and systems. Although purely data-driven machine learning has its immediate uses, the long-term success of AI in scientific and engineering domains would depend on developing hybrid AI systems that use first principles and technical knowledge effectively. We call these hybrid AI systems Large Knowledge Models (LKMs), as they will not be limited to only NLP-based techniques or NLP-like applications. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in developing such systems in chemical engineering.
Authors: Shenghuan Sun, Gregory M. Goldgof, Alexander Schubert, Zhiqing Sun, Thomas Hartvigsen, Atul J. Butte, Ahmed Alaa
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLM) can support clinicians by analyzing medical images and engaging in natural language interactions to assist in diagnostic and treatment tasks. However, VLMs often exhibit "hallucinogenic" behavior, generating textual outputs not grounded in contextual multimodal information. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the medical domain, where we do not only require VLM outputs to be accurate in single interactions but also to be consistent with clinical reasoning and diagnostic pathways throughout multi-turn conversations. For this purpose, we propose a new alignment algorithm that uses symbolic representations of clinical reasoning to ground VLMs in medical knowledge. These representations are utilized to (i) generate GPT-4-guided visual instruction tuning data at scale, simulating clinician-VLM conversations with demonstrations of clinical reasoning, and (ii) create an automatic reward function that evaluates the clinical validity of VLM generations throughout clinician-VLM interactions. Our algorithm eliminates the need for human involvement in training data generation or reward model construction, reducing costs compared to standard reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). We apply our alignment algorithm to develop Dr-LLaVA, a conversational VLM finetuned for analyzing bone marrow pathology slides, demonstrating strong performance in multi-turn medical conversations.
Authors: Xiaming Che, Junlin Zhang, Zhuang Qi, Xin Qi
Abstract: Learning with noisy labels has become an effective strategy for enhancing the robustness of models, which enables models to better tolerate inaccurate data. Existing methods either focus on optimizing the loss function to mitigate the interference from noise, or design procedures to detect potential noise and correct errors. However, their effectiveness is often compromised in representation learning due to the dilemma where models overfit to noisy labels. To address this issue, this paper proposes a relation modeling and distillation framework that models inter-sample relationships via self-supervised learning and employs knowledge distillation to enhance understanding of latent associations, which mitigate the impact of noisy labels. Specifically, the proposed method, termed RMDNet, includes two main modules, where the relation modeling (RM) module implements the contrastive learning technique to learn representations of all data, an unsupervised approach that effectively eliminates the interference of noisy tags on feature extraction. The relation-guided representation learning (RGRL) module utilizes inter-sample relation learned from the RM module to calibrate the representation distribution for noisy samples, which is capable of improving the generalization of the model in the inference phase. Notably, the proposed RMDNet is a plug-and-play framework that can integrate multiple methods to its advantage. Extensive experiments were conducted on two datasets, including performance comparison, ablation study, in-depth analysis and case study. The results show that RMDNet can learn discriminative representations for noisy data, which results in superior performance than the existing methods.
Authors: Sean Williams, James Huckle
Abstract: We introduce a comprehensive Linguistic Benchmark designed to evaluate the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in domains such as logical reasoning, spatial intelligence, and linguistic understanding, among others. Through a series of straightforward questions, it uncovers the significant limitations of well-regarded models to perform tasks that humans manage with ease. It also highlights the potential of prompt engineering to mitigate some errors and underscores the necessity for better training methodologies. Our findings stress the importance of grounding LLMs with human reasoning and common sense, emphasising the need for human-in-the-loop for enterprise applications. We hope this work paves the way for future research to enhance the usefulness and reliability of new models.
Authors: Akul Goel, Surya Narayanan Hari, Belinda Waltman, Matt Thomson
Abstract: Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) play a significant role in patient health outcomes. The Center of Disease Control (CDC) introduced a subset of ICD-10 codes called Z-codes in an attempt to officially recognize and measure SDOH in the health care system. However, these codes are rarely annotated in a patient's Electronic Health Record (EHR), and instead, in many cases, need to be inferred from clinical notes. Previous research has shown that large language models (LLMs) show promise on extracting unstructured data from EHRs. However, with thousands of models to choose from with unique architectures and training sets, it's difficult to choose one model that performs the best on coding tasks. Further, clinical notes contain trusted health information making the use of closed-source language models from commercial vendors difficult, so the identification of open source LLMs that can be run within health organizations and exhibits high performance on SDOH tasks is an urgent problem. Here, we introduce an intelligent routing system for SDOH coding that uses a language model router to direct medical record data to open source LLMs that demonstrate optimal performance on specific SDOH codes. The intelligent routing system exhibits state of the art performance of 97.4% accuracy averaged across 5 codes, including homelessness and food insecurity, on par with closed models such as GPT-4o. In order to train the routing system and validate models, we also introduce a synthetic data generation and validation paradigm to increase the scale of training data without needing privacy protected medical records. Together, we demonstrate an architecture for intelligent routing of inputs to task-optimal language models to achieve high performance across a set of medical coding sub-tasks.
Authors: Mengjie Gan, Penglong Lian, Zhiheng Su, Jiyang Zhang, Jialong Huang, Benhao Wang, Jianxiao Zou, Shicai Fan
Abstract: Industrial equipment fault diagnosis often encounter challenges such as the scarcity of fault data, complex operating conditions, and varied types of failures. Signal analysis, data statistical learning, and conventional deep learning techniques face constraints under these conditions due to their substantial data requirements and the necessity for transfer learning to accommodate new failure modes. To effectively leverage information and extract the intrinsic characteristics of faults across different domains under limited sample conditions, this paper introduces a fault diagnosis approach employing Multi-Scale Graph Convolution Filtering (MSGCF). MSGCF enhances the traditional Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework by integrating both local and global information fusion modules within the graph convolution filter block. This advancement effectively mitigates the over-smoothing issue associated with excessive layering of graph convolutional layers while preserving a broad receptive field. It also reduces the risk of overfitting in few-shot diagnosis, thereby augmenting the model's representational capacity. Experiments on the University of Paderborn bearing dataset (PU) demonstrate that the MSGCF method proposed herein surpasses alternative approaches in accuracy, thereby offering valuable insights for industrial fault diagnosis in few-shot learning scenarios.
Authors: Jinxia Yang, Bing Su, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract: Medical vision-language pre-training methods mainly leverage the correspondence between paired medical images and radiological reports. Although multi-view spatial images and temporal sequences of image-report pairs are available in off-the-shelf multi-modal medical datasets, most existing methods have not thoroughly tapped into such extensive supervision signals. In this paper, we introduce the Med-ST framework for fine-grained spatial and temporal modeling to exploit information from multiple spatial views of chest radiographs and temporal historical records. For spatial modeling, Med-ST employs the Mixture of View Expert (MoVE) architecture to integrate different visual features from both frontal and lateral views. To achieve a more comprehensive alignment, Med-ST not only establishes the global alignment between whole images and texts but also introduces modality-weighted local alignment between text tokens and spatial regions of images. For temporal modeling, we propose a novel cross-modal bidirectional cycle consistency objective by forward mapping classification (FMC) and reverse mapping regression (RMR). By perceiving temporal information from simple to complex, Med-ST can learn temporal semantics. Experimental results across four distinct tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Med-ST, especially in temporal classification tasks. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/SVT-Yang/MedST.
Authors: Han Liu, Peng Cui, Bingning Wang, Jun Zhu, Xiaolin Hu
Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in a variety of tasks, especially when it comes to prediction accuracy. However, in complex real-world scenarios, particularly in safety-critical applications, high accuracy alone is not enough. Reliable uncertainty estimates are crucial. Modern DNNs, often trained with cross-entropy loss, tend to be overconfident, especially with ambiguous samples. To improve uncertainty calibration, many techniques have been developed, but they often compromise prediction accuracy. To tackle this challenge, we propose the ``mutual-transport ensemble'' (MTE). This approach introduces a co-trained auxiliary model and adaptively regularizes the cross-entropy loss using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the prediction distributions of the primary and auxiliary models. We conducted extensive studies on various benchmarks to validate the effectiveness of our method. The results show that MTE can simultaneously enhance both accuracy and uncertainty calibration. For example, on the CIFAR-100 dataset, our MTE method on ResNet34/50 achieved significant improvements compared to previous state-of-the-art method, with absolute accuracy increases of 2.4%/3.7%, relative reductions in ECE of $42.3%/29.4%, and relative reductions in classwise-ECE of 11.6%/15.3%.
Authors: Jingwei Sun, Zhixu Du, Yiran Chen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in a range of natural language processing tasks. Once deployed, LLMs encounter users with personalized factual knowledge, and such personalized knowledge is consistently reflected through users' interactions with the LLMs. To enhance user experience, real-time model personalization is essential, allowing LLMs to adapt user-specific knowledge based on user feedback during human-LLM interactions. Existing methods mostly require back-propagation to finetune the model parameters, which incurs high computational and memory costs. In addition, these methods suffer from low interpretability, which will cause unforeseen impacts on model performance during long-term use, where the user's personalized knowledge is accumulated extensively.To address these challenges, we propose Knowledge Graph Tuning (KGT), a novel approach that leverages knowledge graphs (KGs) to personalize LLMs. KGT extracts personalized factual knowledge triples from users' queries and feedback and optimizes KGs without modifying the LLM parameters. Our method improves computational and memory efficiency by avoiding back-propagation and ensures interpretability by making the KG adjustments comprehensible to humans.Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-2, Llama2, and Llama3, show that KGT significantly improves personalization performance while reducing latency and GPU memory costs. Ultimately, KGT offers a promising solution of effective, efficient, and interpretable real-time LLM personalization during user interactions with the LLMs.
Authors: Wenjing Xie, Juxin Niu, Chun Jason Xue, Nan Guan
Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have been used for automated grading, they have not yet achieved the same level of performance as humans, especially when it comes to grading complex questions. Existing research on this topic focuses on a particular step in the grading procedure: grading using predefined rubrics. However, grading is a multifaceted procedure that encompasses other crucial steps, such as grading rubrics design and post-grading review. There has been a lack of systematic research exploring the potential of LLMs to enhance the entire grading~process. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based grading system that addresses the entire grading procedure, including the following key components: 1) Developing grading rubrics that not only consider the questions but also the student answers, which can more accurately reflect students' performance. 2) Under the guidance of grading rubrics, providing accurate and consistent scores for each student, along with customized feedback. 3) Conducting post-grading review to better ensure accuracy and fairness. Additionally, we collected a new dataset named OS from a university operating system course and conducted extensive experiments on both our new dataset and the widely used Mohler dataset. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, providing some new insights for developing automated grading systems based on LLMs.
Authors: Shaohua Wang (Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xing Xie (Microsoft Research Asia), Yong Li (Tsinghua University), Danhuai Guo (Beijing University of Chemical Technology), Zhi Cai (Beijing University of Technology), Yu Liu (Peking University), Yang Yue (Shenzhen University), Xiao Pan (Shijiazhuang Tiedao University), Feng Lu (Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Huayi Wu (Wuhan University), Zhipeng Gui (Wuhan University), Zhiming Ding (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Bolong Zheng (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Fuzheng Zhang (Kuaishou Natural Language Processing Center and Audio Center), Tao Qin (Microsoft Research Asia), Jingyuan Wang (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), Chuang Tao (Shanghai Figure Interesting Information Technology Co., Ltd), Zhengchao Chen (Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Hao Lu (SuperMap Software Co., Ltd), Jiayi Li (Wuhan University), Hongyang Chen (Zhejiang Lab), Peng Yue (Wuhan University), Wenhao Yu (China University of Geosciences), Yao Yao (China University of Geosciences), Leilei Sun (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), Yong Zhang (Beijing University of Technology), Longbiao Chen (Xiamen University), Xiaoping Du (Key Laboratory of Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xiang Li (East China Normal University), Xueying Zhang (Nanjing Normal University), Kun Qin (Wuhan University), Zhaoya Gong (Peking University), Weihua Dong (Beijing Normal University), Xiaofeng Meng (Renmin University of China)
Abstract: This report focuses on spatial data intelligent large models, delving into the principles, methods, and cutting-edge applications of these models. It provides an in-depth discussion on the definition, development history, current status, and trends of spatial data intelligent large models, as well as the challenges they face. The report systematically elucidates the key technologies of spatial data intelligent large models and their applications in urban environments, aerospace remote sensing, geography, transportation, and other scenarios. Additionally, it summarizes the latest application cases of spatial data intelligent large models in themes such as urban development, multimodal systems, remote sensing, smart transportation, and resource environments. Finally, the report concludes with an overview and outlook on the development prospects of spatial data intelligent large models.
Authors: Dayang Liang, Jinyang Lai, Yunlong Liu
Abstract: Learning task-relevant state representations is crucial to solving the problem of scene generalization in visual deep reinforcement learning. Prior work typically establishes a self-supervised auxiliary learner, introducing elements (e.g., rewards and actions) to extract task-relevant state information from observations through behavioral similarity metrics. However, the methods often ignore the inherent relationships between the elements (e.g., dynamics relationships) that are essential for learning accurate representations, and they are also limited to single-step metrics, which impedes the discrimination of short-term similar task/behavior information in long-term dynamics transitions. To solve the issues, we propose an intrinsic dynamic characteristics-driven sequence representation learning method (DSR) over a common DRL frame. Concretely, inspired by the fact of state transition in the underlying system, it constrains the optimization of the encoder via modeling the dynamics equations related to the state transition, which prompts the latent encoding information to satisfy the state transition process and thereby distinguishes state space and noise space. Further, to refine the ability of encoding similar tasks based on dynamics constraints, DSR also sequentially models inherent dynamics equation relationships from the perspective of sequence elements' frequency domain and multi-step prediction. Finally, experimental results show that DSR has achieved a significant performance boost in the Distracting DMControl Benchmark, with an average of 78.9% over the backbone baseline. Further results indicate that it also achieves the best performance in real-world autonomous driving tasks in the CARLA simulator. Moreover, the qualitative analysis results of t-SNE visualization validate that our method possesses superior representation ability on visual tasks.
Authors: Zhihao Chang, Linzhu Yu, Huan Li, Sai Wu, Gang Chen, Dongxiang Zhang
Abstract: Similarity search is a fundamental but expensive operator in querying trajectory data, due to its quadratic complexity of distance computation. To mitigate the computational burden for long trajectories, neural networks have been widely employed for similarity learning and each trajectory is encoded as a high-dimensional vector for similarity search with linear complexity. Given the sequential nature of trajectory data, previous efforts have been primarily devoted to the utilization of RNNs or Transformers. In this paper, we argue that the common practice of treating trajectory as sequential data results in excessive attention to capturing long-term global dependency between two sequences. Instead, our investigation reveals the pivotal role of local similarity, prompting a revisit of simple CNNs for trajectory similarity learning. We introduce ConvTraj, incorporating both 1D and 2D convolutions to capture sequential and geo-distribution features of trajectories, respectively. In addition, we conduct a series of theoretical analyses to justify the effectiveness of ConvTraj. Experimental results on three real-world large-scale datasets demonstrate that ConvTraj achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in trajectory similarity search. Owing to the simple network structure of ConvTraj, the training and inference speed on the Porto dataset with 1.6 million trajectories are increased by at least $240$x and $2.16$x, respectively. The source code and dataset can be found at \textit{\url{https://github.com/Proudc/ConvTraj}}.
Authors: Herman Cappelen, Josh Dever
Abstract: AlphaGo plays chess and Go in a creative and novel way. It is natural for us to attribute contents to it, such as that it doesn't view being several pawns behind, if it has more board space, as bad. The framework introduced in Cappelen and Dever (2021) provides a way of thinking about the semantics and the metasemantics of AI content: does AlphaGo entertain contents like this, and if so, in virtue of what does a given state of the program mean that particular content? One salient question Cappelen and Dever didn't consider was the possibility of alien content. Alien content is content that is not or cannot be expressed by human beings. It's highly plausible that AlphaGo, or any other sophisticated AI system, expresses alien contents. That this is so, moreover, is plausibly a metasemantic fact: a fact that has to do with how AI comes to entertain content in the first place, one that will heed the vastly different etiology of AI and human content. This chapter explores the question of alien content in AI from a semantic and metasemantic perspective. It lays out the logical space of possible responses to the semantic and metasemantic questions alien content poses, considers whether and how we humans could communicate with entities who express alien content, and points out that getting clear about such questions might be important for more 'applied' issues in the philosophy of AI, such as existential risk and XAI.
Authors: Deepak Narayan Gadde, Thomas Nalapat, Aman Kumar, Djones Lettnin, Wolfgang Kunz, Sebastian Simon
Abstract: The increasing design complexity of System-on-Chips (SoCs) has led to significant verification challenges, particularly in meeting coverage targets within a timely manner. At present, coverage closure is heavily dependent on constrained random and coverage driven verification methodologies where the randomized stimuli are bounded to verify certain scenarios and to reach coverage goals. This process is said to be exhaustive and to consume a lot of project time. In this paper, a novel methodology is proposed to generate efficient stimuli with the help of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to reach the maximum code coverage of the Design Under Verification (DUV). Additionally, an automated framework is created using metamodeling to generate a SystemVerilog testbench and an RL environment for any given design. The proposed approach is applied to various designs and the produced results proves that the RL agent provides effective stimuli to achieve code coverage faster in comparison with baseline random simulations. Furthermore, various RL agents and reward schemes are analyzed in our work.
Authors: Manon Verbockhaven (TAU, LISN), Sylvain Chevallier (TAU, LISN), Guillaume Charpiat (TAU, LISN)
Abstract: Machine learning tasks are generally formulated as optimization problems, where one searches for an optimal function within a certain functional space. In practice, parameterized functional spaces are considered, in order to be able to perform gradient descent. Typically, a neural network architecture is chosen and fixed, and its parameters (connection weights) are optimized, yielding an architecture-dependent result. This way of proceeding however forces the evolution of the function during training to lie within the realm of what is expressible with the chosen architecture, and prevents any optimization across architectures. Costly architectural hyper-parameter optimization is often performed to compensate for this. Instead, we propose to adapt the architecture on the fly during training. We show that the information about desirable architectural changes, due to expressivity bottlenecks when attempting to follow the functional gradient, can be extracted from %the backpropagation. To do this, we propose a mathematical definition of expressivity bottlenecks, which enables us to detect, quantify and solve them while training, by adding suitable neurons when and where needed. Thus, while the standard approach requires large networks, in terms of number of neurons per layer, for expressivity and optimization reasons, we are able to start with very small neural networks and let them grow appropriately. As a proof of concept, we show results~on the CIFAR dataset, matching large neural network accuracy, with competitive training time, while removing the need for standard architectural hyper-parameter search.
Authors: Herman Cappelen, Josh Dever, John Hawthorne
Abstract: This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before failing - safety efforts have negative expected utility. The paper examines three response strategies: Optimism, Mitigation, and Holism. Each faces challenges stemming from intrinsic features of the AI safety landscape that we term Bottlenecking, the Perfection Barrier, and Equilibrium Fluctuation. The surprising robustness of the argument forces a re-examination of core assumptions around AI safety and points to several avenues for further research.
Authors: Margarida Romero (LINE, COMUE UCA, ULaval, Mnemosyne)
Abstract: The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought significant challenges to the education and workforce skills required to take advantage of AI for human-AI collaboration in the workplace. As AI continues to reshape industries and job markets, the need to define how AI literacy can be considered in lifelong learning has become increasingly critical (Cetindamar et al., 2022; Laupichler et al., 2022; Romero et al., 2023). Like any new technology, AI is the subject of both hopes and fears, and what it entails today presents major challenges (Cugurullo \& Acheampong, 2023; Villani et al., 2018). It also raises profound questions about our own humanity. Will the machine surpass the intelligence of the humans who designed it? What will be the relationship between so-called AI and our human intelligences? How could human-AI collaboration be regulated in a way that serves the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? This paper provides a review of the challenges of lifelong learning in the era of AI from a computational thinking, critical thinking, and creative competencies perspective, highlighting the implications for management and leadership in organizations.
Authors: Yuxiao Luo, Zhongcai Cao, Xin Jin, Kang Liu, Ling Yin
Abstract: Understanding human mobility patterns is essential for various applications, from urban planning to public safety. The individual trajectory such as mobile phone location data, while rich in spatio-temporal information, often lacks semantic detail, limiting its utility for in-depth mobility analysis. Existing methods can infer basic routine activity sequences from this data, lacking depth in understanding complex human behaviors and users' characteristics. Additionally, they struggle with the dependency on hard-to-obtain auxiliary datasets like travel surveys. To address these limitations, this paper defines trajectory semantic inference through three key dimensions: user occupation category, activity sequence, and trajectory description, and proposes the Trajectory Semantic Inference with Large Language Models (TSI-LLM) framework to leverage LLMs infer trajectory semantics comprehensively and deeply. We adopt spatio-temporal attributes enhanced data formatting (STFormat) and design a context-inclusive prompt, enabling LLMs to more effectively interpret and infer the semantics of trajectory data. Experimental validation on real-world trajectory datasets demonstrates the efficacy of TSI-LLM in deciphering complex human mobility patterns. This study explores the potential of LLMs in enhancing the semantic analysis of trajectory data, paving the way for more sophisticated and accessible human mobility research.
Authors: Arto Bendiken
Abstract: We present KNOW--the Knowledge Navigator Ontology for the World--the first ontology designed to capture everyday knowledge to augment large language models (LLMs) in real-world generative AI use cases such as personal AI assistants. Our domain is human life, both its everyday concerns and its major milestones. We have limited the initial scope of the modeled concepts to only established human universals: spacetime (places, events) plus social (people, groups, organizations). The inclusion criteria for modeled concepts are pragmatic, beginning with universality and utility. We compare and contrast previous work such as Schema.org and Cyc--as well as attempts at a synthesis of knowledge graphs and language models--noting how LLMs already encode internally much of the commonsense tacit knowledge that took decades to capture in the Cyc project. We also make available code-generated software libraries for the 12 most popular programming languages, enabling the direct use of ontology concepts in software engineering. We emphasize simplicity and developer experience in promoting AI interoperability.
Authors: Huihong Shi, Xin Cheng, Wendong Mao, Zhongfeng Wang
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) have excelled in computer vision tasks but are memory-consuming and computation-intensive, challenging their deployment on resource-constrained devices. To tackle this limitation, prior works have explored ViT-tailored quantization algorithms but retained floating-point scaling factors, which yield non-negligible re-quantization overhead, limiting ViTs' hardware efficiency and motivating more hardware-friendly solutions. To this end, we propose \emph{P$^2$-ViT}, the first \underline{P}ower-of-Two (PoT) \underline{p}ost-training quantization and acceleration framework to accelerate fully quantized ViTs. Specifically, {as for quantization,} we explore a dedicated quantization scheme to effectively quantize ViTs with PoT scaling factors, thus minimizing the re-quantization overhead. Furthermore, we propose coarse-to-fine automatic mixed-precision quantization to enable better accuracy-efficiency trade-offs. {In terms of hardware,} we develop {a dedicated chunk-based accelerator} featuring multiple tailored sub-processors to individually handle ViTs' different types of operations, alleviating reconfigurable overhead. Additionally, we design {a tailored row-stationary dataflow} to seize the pipeline processing opportunity introduced by our PoT scaling factors, thereby enhancing throughput. Extensive experiments consistently validate P$^2$-ViT's effectiveness. {Particularly, we offer comparable or even superior quantization performance with PoT scaling factors when compared to the counterpart with floating-point scaling factors. Besides, we achieve up to $\mathbf{10.1\times}$ speedup and $\mathbf{36.8\times}$ energy saving over GPU's Turing Tensor Cores, and up to $\mathbf{1.84\times}$ higher computation utilization efficiency against SOTA quantization-based ViT accelerators. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/shihuihong214/P2-ViT}.
Authors: Xuanfa Jin, Ziyan Wang, Yali Du, Meng Fang, Haifeng Zhang, Jun Wang
Abstract: Communication is a fundamental aspect of human society, facilitating the exchange of information and beliefs among people. Despite the advancements in large language models (LLMs), recent agents built with these often neglect the control over discussion tactics, which are essential in communication scenarios and games. As a variant of the famous communication game Werewolf, One Night Ultimate Werewolf (ONUW) requires players to develop strategic discussion policies due to the potential role changes that increase the uncertainty and complexity of the game. In this work, we first present the existence of the Perfect Bayesian Equilibria (PBEs) in two scenarios of the ONUW game: one with discussion and one without. The results showcase that the discussion greatly changes players' utilities by affecting their beliefs, emphasizing the significance of discussion tactics. Based on the insights obtained from the analyses, we propose an RL-instructed language agent framework, where a discussion policy trained by reinforcement learning (RL) is employed to determine appropriate discussion tactics to adopt. Our experimental results on several ONUW game settings demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed framework.
Authors: Jing Wen
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) can easily be cheated by some imperceptible but purposeful noise added to images, and erroneously classify them. Previous defensive work mostly focused on retraining the models or detecting the noise, but has either shown limited success rates or been attacked by new adversarial examples. Instead of focusing on adversarial images or the interior of DNN models, we observed that adversarial examples generated by different algorithms can be identified based on the output of DNNs (logits). Logit can serve as an exterior feature to train detectors. Then, we propose HOLMES (Hierarchically Organized Light-weight Multiple dEtector System) to reinforce DNNs by detecting potential adversarial examples to minimize the threats they may bring in practical. HOLMES is able to distinguish \textit{unseen} adversarial examples from multiple attacks with high accuracy and low false positive rates than single detector systems even in an adaptive model. To ensure the diversity and randomness of detectors in HOLMES, we use two methods: training dedicated detectors for each label and training detectors with top-k logits. Our effective and inexpensive strategies neither modify original DNN models nor require its internal parameters. HOLMES is not only compatible with all kinds of learning models (even only with external APIs), but also complementary to other defenses to achieve higher detection rates (may also fully protect the system against various adversarial examples).
Authors: Petra Saskia Bayerl, Babak Akhgar, Ernesto La Mattina, Barbara Pirillo, Ioana Cotoi, Davide Ariu, Matteo Mauri, Jorge Garcia, Dimitris Kavallieros, Antonia Kardara, Konstantina Karagiorgou
Abstract: This paper investigates citizens' counter-strategies to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by law enforcement agencies (LEAs). Based on information from three countries (Greece, Italy and Spain) we demonstrate disparities in the likelihood of ten specific counter-strategies. We further identified factors that increase the propensity for counter-strategies. Our study provides an important new perspective to societal impacts of security-focused AI applications by illustrating the conscious, strategic choices by citizens when confronted with AI capabilities for LEAs.
Authors: Zhenxing Niu, Yuyao Sun, Haodong Ren, Haoxuan Ji, Quan Wang, Xiaoke Ma, Gang Hua, Rong Jin
Abstract: This paper focuses on jailbreaking attacks against large language models (LLMs), eliciting them to generate objectionable content in response to harmful user queries. Unlike previous LLM-jailbreaks that directly orient to LLMs, our approach begins by constructing a multimodal large language model (MLLM) through the incorporation of a visual module into the target LLM. Subsequently, we conduct an efficient MLLM-jailbreak to generate jailbreaking embeddings embJS. Finally, we convert the embJS into text space to facilitate the jailbreaking of the target LLM. Compared to direct LLM-jailbreaking, our approach is more efficient, as MLLMs are more vulnerable to jailbreaking than pure LLM. Additionally, to improve the attack success rate (ASR) of jailbreaking, we propose an image-text semantic matching scheme to identify a suitable initial input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, our approach exhibits superior cross-class jailbreaking capabilities.
Authors: Zhuang Qi, Lei Meng, Weihao He, Ruohan Zhang, Yu Wang, Xin Qi, Xiangxu Meng
Abstract: Federated learning benefits from cross-training strategies, which enables models to train on data from distinct sources to improve the generalization capability. However, the data heterogeneity between sources may lead models to gradually forget previously acquired knowledge when undergoing cross-training to adapt to new tasks or data sources. We argue that integrating personalized and global knowledge to gather information from multiple perspectives could potentially improve performance. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a novel approach that enhances federated learning through a cross-training scheme incorporating multi-view information. Specifically, the proposed method, termed FedCT, includes three main modules, where the consistency-aware knowledge broadcasting module aims to optimize model assignment strategies, which enhances collaborative advantages between clients and achieves an efficient federated learning process. The multi-view knowledge-guided representation learning module leverages fused prototypical knowledge from both global and local views to enhance the preservation of local knowledge before and after model exchange, as well as to ensure consistency between local and global knowledge. The mixup-based feature augmentation module aggregates rich information to further increase the diversity of feature spaces, which enables the model to better discriminate complex samples. Extensive experiments were conducted on four datasets in terms of performance comparison, ablation study, in-depth analysis and case study. The results demonstrated that FedCT alleviates knowledge forgetting from both local and global views, which enables it outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Sun Zhanbo, Dong Caiyin, Ji Ang, Zhao Ruibin, Zhao Yu
Abstract: Accurate prediction of future trajectories for surrounding vehicles is vital for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. This study proposes a Lane Graph Transformer (LGT) model with structure-aware capabilities. Its key contribution lies in encoding the map topology structure into the attention mechanism. To address variations in lane information from different directions, four Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) matrices are introduced to capture the local details of the map topology structure. Additionally, two Shortest Path Distance (SPD) matrices are employed to capture distance information between two accessible lanes. Numerical results indicate that the proposed LGT model achieves a significantly higher prediction performance on the Argoverse 2 dataset. Specifically, the minFDE$_6$ metric was decreased by 60.73% compared to the Argoverse 2 baseline model (Nearest Neighbor) and the b-minFDE$_6$ metric was reduced by 2.65% compared to the baseline LaneGCN model. Furthermore, ablation experiments demonstrated that the consideration of map topology structure led to a 4.24% drop in the b-minFDE$_6$ metric, validating the effectiveness of this model.
Authors: Fuki Ito, Toshio Suzuki
Abstract: Herein, we investigate the randomized complexity, which is the least cost against the worst input, of AND-OR tree computation by imposing various restrictions on the algorithm to find the Boolean value of the root of that tree and no restrictions on the tree shape. When a tree satisfies a certain condition regarding its symmetry, directional algorithms proposed by Saks and Wigderson (1986), special randomized algorithms, are known to achieve the randomized complexity. Furthermore, there is a known example of a tree that is so unbalanced that no directional algorithm achieves the randomized complexity (Vereshchagin 1998). In this study, we aim to identify where deviations arise between the general randomized Boolean decision tree and its special case, directional algorithms. In this paper, we show that for any AND-OR tree, randomized depth-first algorithms, which form a broader class compared with directional algorithms, have the same equilibrium as that of the directional algorithms. Thus, we get the collapse result on equilibria inequalities that holds for an arbitrary AND-OR tree. This implies that there exists a case where even depth-first algorithms cannot be the fastest, leading to the separation result on equilibria inequality. Additionally, a new algorithm is introduced as a key concept for proof of the separation result.
Authors: Chao Zhanga, Weirong Cuia, Jingjing Guo
Abstract: Background and Objectives: Monitoring sleep states is crucial for assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. Traditional manual staging methods are not only time-consuming but also subject to subjective judgment, leading to inconsistent results. This study developed an automated sleep staging and sleep disorder classification model through deep learning technology, aimed at improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. Methods: Considering the characteristics of polysomnography (PSG) multi-lead sleep monitoring, we designed a sleep state classification model, MSSC-BiMamba, that combines an Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) mechanism with a Bidirectional State Space Model (BSSM). The ECA module allows for weighting data from different sensor channels, thereby amplifying the influence of diverse sensor inputs. Additionally, the implementation of mamba enables the model to effectively capture the multidimensional features and long-range dependencies of PSG data. Results: The developed model demonstrated impressive performance on sleep stage classification tasks. Furthermore, the model exhibited an accuracy of 0.952 for sleep health prediction when evaluated on a combined dataset consisting of ISRUC and Sleep-EDF. Conclusion: Our model is the first to apply the bidirectional Mamba to sleep staging with complex PSG data, showing substantial gains in computational and memory efficiency over traditional Transformer-style models. This method not only makes health monitoring more accessible but also broadens the reach of advanced healthcare, thereby enhancing sleep health management with innovative technology.
Authors: Eduard Frankford, Ingo H\"ohn, Clemens Sauerwein, Ruth Breu
Abstract: This paper analyzes Large Language Models (LLMs) with regard to their programming exercise generation capabilities. Through a survey study, we defined the state of the art, extracted their strengths and weaknesses and finally proposed an evaluation matrix, helping researchers and educators to decide which LLM is the best fitting for the programming exercise generation use case. We also found that multiple LLMs are capable of producing useful programming exercises. Nevertheless, there exist challenges like the ease with which LLMs might solve exercises generated by LLMs. This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the integration of LLMs in education.
Authors: Ke Yi, Yuhui Xu, Heng Chang, Chen Tang, Yuan Meng, Tong Zhang, Jia Li
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly but face significant memory demands. While quantization has shown promise for LLMs, current methods typically require lengthy training to alleviate the performance degradation from quantization loss. However, deploying LLMs across diverse scenarios with different resource constraints, e.g., servers and personal computers, requires repeated training per application, which amplifies the lengthy training problem. Given that, it is advantageous to train a once-for-all (OFA) supernet capable of yielding diverse optimal subnets for downstream applications through one-shot training. Nonetheless, the scale of current language models impedes efficiency and amplifies interference from weight sharing between subnets. We make an initial attempt to extend the once-for-all framework to large language models. Specifically, we decouple shared weights to eliminate the interference and incorporate Low-Rank adapters for training efficiency. Furthermore, we observe the imbalance allocation of training resources from the traditional uniform sampling. A non-parametric scheduler is introduced to adjust the sampling rate for each quantization configuration, achieving a more balanced allocation among subnets with varying demands. We validate the approach on LLaMA2 families, and downstream evaluation confirms our ability to maintain high performance while significantly reducing deployment time faced with multiple scenarios.
Authors: Vijay Jaisankar, Sambaran Bandyopadhyay, Kalp Vyas, Varre Chaitanya, Shwetha Somasundaram
Abstract: A poster from a long input document can be considered as a one-page easy-to-read multimodal (text and images) summary presented on a nice template with good design elements. Automatic transformation of a long document into a poster is a very less studied but challenging task. It involves content summarization of the input document followed by template generation and harmonization. In this work, we propose a novel deep submodular function which can be trained on ground truth summaries to extract multimodal content from the document and explicitly ensures good coverage, diversity and alignment of text and images. Then, we use an LLM based paraphraser and propose to generate a template with various design aspects conditioned on the input content. We show the merits of our approach through extensive automated and human evaluations.
Authors: Mariya Pavlova, Bernard Casey, Miaosen Wang
Abstract: We present ESG-FTSE, the first corpus comprised of news articles with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) relevance annotations. In recent years, investors and regulators have pushed ESG investing to the mainstream due to the urgency of climate change. This has led to the rise of ESG scores to evaluate an investment's credentials as socially responsible. While demand for ESG scores is high, their quality varies wildly. Quantitative techniques can be applied to improve ESG scores, thus, responsible investing. To contribute to resource building for ESG and financial text mining, we pioneer the ESG-FTSE corpus. We further present the first of its kind ESG annotation schema. It has three levels: a binary classification (relevant versus irrelevant news articles), ESG classification (ESG-related news articles), and target company. Both supervised and unsupervised learning experiments for ESG relevance detection were conducted to demonstrate that the corpus can be used in different settings to derive accurate ESG predictions. Keywords: corpus annotation, ESG labels, annotation schema, news article, natural language processing
Authors: Cheng'an Wei, Kai Chen, Yue Zhao, Yujia Gong, Lu Xiang, Shenchen Zhu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Llama-2 have become prevalent in real-world applications, exhibiting impressive text generation performance. LLMs are fundamentally developed from a scenario where the input data remains static and lacks a clear structure. To behave interactively over time, LLM-based chat systems must integrate additional contextual information (i.e., chat history) into their inputs, following a pre-defined structure. This paper identifies how such integration can expose LLMs to misleading context from untrusted sources and fail to differentiate between system and user inputs, allowing users to inject context. We present a systematic methodology for conducting context injection attacks aimed at eliciting disallowed responses by introducing fabricated context. This could lead to illegal actions, inappropriate content, or technology misuse. Our context fabrication strategies, acceptance elicitation and word anonymization, effectively create misleading contexts that can be structured with attacker-customized prompt templates, achieving injection through malicious user messages. Comprehensive evaluations on real-world LLMs such as ChatGPT and Llama-2 confirm the efficacy of the proposed attack with success rates reaching 97%. We also discuss potential countermeasures that can be adopted for attack detection and developing more secure models. Our findings provide insights into the challenges associated with the real-world deployment of LLMs for interactive and structured data scenarios.
Authors: Matthew Watson, Divyashree Shivakumar Sreepathihalli, Francois Chollet, Martin Gorner, Kiranbir Sodhia, Ramesh Sampath, Tirth Patel, Haifeng Jin, Neel Kovelamudi, Gabriel Rasskin, Samaneh Saadat, Luke Wood, Chen Qian, Jonathan Bischof, Ian Stenbit
Abstract: We present the Keras domain packages KerasCV and KerasNLP, extensions of the Keras API for Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing workflows, capable of running on either JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch. These domain packages are designed to enable fast experimentation, with a focus on ease-of-use and performance. We adopt a modular, layered design: at the library's lowest level of abstraction, we provide building blocks for creating models and data preprocessing pipelines, and at the library's highest level of abstraction, we provide pretrained ``task" models for popular architectures such as Stable Diffusion, YOLOv8, GPT2, BERT, Mistral, CLIP, Gemma, T5, etc. Task models have built-in preprocessing, pretrained weights, and can be fine-tuned on raw inputs. To enable efficient training, we support XLA compilation for all models, and run all preprocessing via a compiled graph of TensorFlow operations using the tf.data API. The libraries are fully open-source (Apache 2.0 license) and available on GitHub.
Authors: Soochan Lee, Jaehyeon Son, Gunhee Kim
Abstract: In this work, we aim to establish a strong connection between two significant bodies of machine learning research: continual learning and sequence modeling. That is, we propose to formulate continual learning as a sequence modeling problem, allowing advanced sequence models to be utilized for continual learning. Under this formulation, the continual learning process becomes the forward pass of a sequence model. By adopting the meta-continual learning (MCL) framework, we can train the sequence model at the meta-level, on multiple continual learning episodes. As a specific example of our new formulation, we demonstrate the application of Transformers and their efficient variants as MCL methods. Our experiments on seven benchmarks, covering both classification and regression, show that sequence models can be an attractive solution for general MCL.
Authors: Yuzhen Ding, Jason M. Holmes, Hongying Feng, Baoxin Li, Lisa A. McGee, Jean-Claude M. Rwigema, Sujay A. Vora, Daniel J. Ma, Robert L. Foote, Samir H. Patel, Wei Liu
Abstract: In radiotherapy, 2D orthogonally projected kV images are used for patient alignment when 3D-on-board imaging(OBI) unavailable. But tumor visibility is constrained due to the projection of patient's anatomy onto a 2D plane, potentially leading to substantial setup errors. In treatment room with 3D-OBI such as cone beam CT(CBCT), the field of view(FOV) of CBCT is limited with unnecessarily high imaging dose, thus unfavorable for pediatric patients. A solution to this dilemma is to reconstruct 3D CT from kV images obtained at the treatment position. Here, we propose a dual-models framework built with hierarchical ViT blocks. Unlike a proof-of-concept approach, our framework considers kV images as the solo input and can synthesize accurate, full-size 3D CT in real time(within milliseconds). We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach on 10 patients with head and neck (H&N) cancer using image quality(MAE: <45HU), dosimetrical accuracy(Gamma passing rate (2%/2mm/10%)>97%) and patient position uncertainty(shift error: <0.4mm). The proposed framework can generate accurate 3D CT faithfully mirroring real-time patient position, thus significantly improving patient setup accuracy, keeping imaging dose minimum, and maintaining treatment veracity.
Authors: Andrew Katumba, Sudi Murindanyi, John Trevor Kasule, Elvis Mugume
Abstract: The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has generated massive interest in voice-controlled smart homes. While many voice-controlled smart home systems are designed to understand and support widely spoken languages like English, speakers of low-resource languages like Luganda may need more support. This research project aimed to develop a Luganda speech intent classification system for IoT applications to integrate local languages into smart home environments. The project uses hardware components such as Raspberry Pi, Wio Terminal, and ESP32 nodes as microcontrollers. The Raspberry Pi processes Luganda voice commands, the Wio Terminal is a display device, and the ESP32 nodes control the IoT devices. The ultimate objective of this work was to enable voice control using Luganda, which was accomplished through a natural language processing (NLP) model deployed on the Raspberry Pi. The NLP model utilized Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) as acoustic features and a Convolutional Neural Network (Conv2D) architecture for speech intent classification. A dataset of Luganda voice commands was curated for this purpose and this has been made open-source. This work addresses the localization challenges and linguistic diversity in IoT applications by incorporating Luganda voice commands, enabling users to interact with smart home devices without English proficiency, especially in regions where local languages are predominant.
Authors: Sion An, Myeongkyun Kang, Soopil Kim, Philip Chikontwe, Li Shen, Sang Hyun Park
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) motor imagery (MI) classification is a fundamental, yet challenging task due to the variation of signals between individuals i.e., inter-subject variability. Previous approaches try to mitigate this using task-specific (TS) EEG signals from the target subject in training. However, recording TS EEG signals requires time and limits its applicability in various fields. In contrast, resting state (RS) EEG signals are a viable alternative due to ease of acquisition with rich subject information. In this paper, we propose a novel subject-adaptive transfer learning strategy that utilizes RS EEG signals to adapt models on unseen subject data. Specifically, we disentangle extracted features into task- and subject-dependent features and use them to calibrate RS EEG signals for obtaining task information while preserving subject characteristics. The calibrated signals are then used to adapt the model to the target subject, enabling the model to simulate processing TS EEG signals of the target subject. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on three public benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in cross-subject EEG MI classification. Our findings highlight the potential of leveraging RS EEG signals to advance practical brain-computer interface systems.
Authors: Mohammad Amir Fallah, Mehdi Monemi, Mehdi Rasti, Matti Latva-Aho
Abstract: 3D spot beamfocusing (SBF), in contrast to conventional angular-domain beamforming, concentrates radiating power within very small volume in both radial and angular domains in the near-field zone. Recently the implementation of channel-state-information (CSI)-independent machine learning (ML)-based approaches have been developed for effective SBF using extremely-largescale-programable-metasurface (ELPMs). These methods involve dividing the ELPMs into subarrays and independently training them with Deep Reinforcement Learning to jointly focus the beam at the Desired Focal Point (DFP). This paper explores near-field SBF using ELPMs, addressing challenges associated with lengthy training times resulting from independent training of subarrays. To achieve a faster CSIindependent solution, inspired by the correlation between the beamfocusing matrices of the subarrays, we leverage transfer learning techniques. First, we introduce a novel similarity criterion based on the Phase Distribution Image of subarray apertures. Then we devise a subarray policy propagation scheme that transfers the knowledge from trained to untrained subarrays. We further enhance learning by introducing Quasi-Liquid-Layers as a revised version of the adaptive policy reuse technique. We show through simulations that the proposed scheme improves the training speed about 5 times. Furthermore, for dynamic DFP management, we devised a DFP policy blending process, which augments the convergence rate up to 8-fold.
Authors: Tommaso Flaminio, Lluis Godo, Paula Mench\'on, Ricardo O. Rodriguez
Abstract: The present paper is devoted to study the effect of connected and disconnected rotations of G\"odel algebras with operators grounded on directly indecomposable structures. The structures resulting from this construction we will present are nilpotent minimum (with or without negation fixpoint, depending on whether the rotation is connected or disconnected) with special modal operators defined on a directly indecomposable algebra. In this paper we will present a (quasi-)equational definition of these latter structures. Our main results show that directly indecomposable nilpotent minimum algebras (with or without negation fixpoint) with modal operators are fully characterized as connected and disconnected rotations of directly indecomposable G\"odel algebras endowed with modal operators.
Authors: Ismail Lotfi, Marwa Qaraqe, Ali Ghrayeb, Niyato Dusit
Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the issue of moral hazard within the realm of the vehicular Metaverse. A pivotal facilitator of the vehicular Metaverse is the effective orchestration of its market elements, primarily comprised of sensing internet of things (SIoT) devices. These SIoT devices play a critical role by furnishing the virtual service provider (VSP) with real-time sensing data, allowing for the faithful replication of the physical environment within the virtual realm. However, SIoT devices with intentional misbehavior can identify a loophole in the system post-payment and proceeds to deliver falsified content, which cause the whole vehicular Metaverse to collapse. To combat this significant problem, we propose an incentive mechanism centered around a reputation-based strategy. Specifically, the concept involves maintaining reputation scores for participants based on their interactions with the VSP. These scores are derived from feedback received by the VSP from Metaverse users regarding the content delivered by the VSP and are managed using a subjective logic model. Nevertheless, to prevent ``good" SIoT devices with false positive ratings to leave the Metaverse market, we build a vanishing-like system of previous ratings so that the VSP can make informed decisions based on the most recent and accurate data available. Finally, we validate our proposed model through extensive simulations. Our primary results show that our mechanism can efficiently prevent malicious devices from starting their poisoning attacks. At the same time, trustworthy SIoT devices that had a previous miss-classification are not banned from the market.
Authors: Chuheng Wu, S. Farokh Atashzar, Mohammad M. Ghassemi, Tuka Alhanai
Abstract: Surface Electromyography (sEMG) is a non-invasive signal that is used in the recognition of hand movement patterns, the diagnosis of diseases, and the robust control of prostheses. Despite the remarkable success of recent end-to-end Deep Learning approaches, they are still limited by the need for large amounts of labeled data. To alleviate the requirement for big data, researchers utilize Feature Engineering, which involves decomposing the sEMG signal into several spatial, temporal, and frequency features. In this paper, we propose utilizing a feature-imitating network (FIN) for closed-form temporal feature learning over a 300ms signal window on Ninapro DB2, and applying it to the task of 17 hand movement recognition. We implement a lightweight LSTM-FIN network to imitate four standard temporal features (entropy, root mean square, variance, simple square integral). We then explore transfer learning capabilities by applying the pre-trained LSTM-FIN for tuning to a downstream hand movement recognition task. We observed that the LSTM network can achieve up to 99\% R2 accuracy in feature reconstruction and 80\% accuracy in hand movement recognition. Our results also showed that the model can be robustly applied for both within- and cross-subject movement recognition, as well as simulated low-latency environments. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential of the FIN modeling paradigm in data-scarce scenarios for sEMG signal processing.
Authors: Xiaoqun Liu, Jiacheng Liang, Muchao Ye, Zhaohan Xi
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable when trained on datasets containing harmful content, which leads to potential jailbreaking attacks in two scenarios: the integration of harmful texts within crowdsourced data used for pre-training and direct tampering with LLMs through fine-tuning. In both scenarios, adversaries can compromise the safety alignment of LLMs, exacerbating malfunctions. Motivated by the need to mitigate these adversarial influences, our research aims to enhance safety alignment by either neutralizing the impact of malicious texts in pre-training datasets or increasing the difficulty of jailbreaking during downstream fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a data curation framework designed to counter adversarial impacts in both scenarios. Our method operates under the assumption that we have no prior knowledge of attack details, focusing solely on curating clean texts. We introduce an iterative process aimed at revising texts to reduce their perplexity as perceived by LLMs, while simultaneously preserving their text quality. By pre-training or fine-tuning LLMs with curated clean texts, we observe a notable improvement in LLM robustness regarding safety alignment against harmful queries. For instance, when pre-training LLMs using a crowdsourced dataset containing 5\% harmful instances, adding an equivalent amount of curated texts significantly mitigates the likelihood of providing harmful responses in LLMs and reduces the attack success rate by 71\%. Our study represents a significant step towards mitigating the risks associated with training-based jailbreaking and fortifying the secure utilization of LLMs.
Authors: Guanlin Li, Kangjie Chen, Shudong Zhang, Jie Zhang, Tianwei Zhang
Abstract: Large-scale pre-trained generative models are taking the world by storm, due to their abilities in generating creative content. Meanwhile, safeguards for these generative models are developed, to protect users' rights and safety, most of which are designed for large language models. Existing methods primarily focus on jailbreak and adversarial attacks, which mainly evaluate the model's safety under malicious prompts. Recent work found that manually crafted safe prompts can unintentionally trigger unsafe generations. To further systematically evaluate the safety risks of text-to-image models, we propose a novel Automatic Red-Teaming framework, ART. Our method leverages both vision language model and large language model to establish a connection between unsafe generations and their prompts, thereby more efficiently identifying the model's vulnerabilities. With our comprehensive experiments, we reveal the toxicity of the popular open-source text-to-image models. The experiments also validate the effectiveness, adaptability, and great diversity of ART. Additionally, we introduce three large-scale red-teaming datasets for studying the safety risks associated with text-to-image models. Datasets and models can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/ART.
Authors: Yihe Wang, Nan Huang, Taida Li, Yujun Yan, Xiang Zhang
Abstract: Medical time series data, such as Electroencephalography (EEG) and Electrocardiography (ECG), play a crucial role in healthcare, such as diagnosing brain and heart diseases. Existing methods for medical time series classification primarily rely on handcrafted biomarkers extraction and CNN-based models, with limited exploration of transformers tailored for medical time series. In this paper, we introduce Medformer, a multi-granularity patching transformer tailored specifically for medical time series classification. Our method incorporates three novel mechanisms to leverage the unique characteristics of medical time series: cross-channel patching to leverage inter-channel correlations, multi-granularity embedding for capturing features at different scales, and two-stage (intra- and inter-granularity) multi-granularity self-attention for learning features and correlations within and among granularities. We conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets under both subject-dependent and challenging subject-independent setups. Results demonstrate Medformer's superiority over 10 baselines, achieving top averaged ranking across five datasets on all six evaluation metrics. These findings underscore the significant impact of our method on healthcare applications, such as diagnosing Myocardial Infarction, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's disease. We release the source code at \url{https://github.com/DL4mHealth/Medformer}.
Authors: Han Yu, Peikun Guo, Akane Sano
Abstract: The utilization of deep learning on electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis has brought the advanced accuracy and efficiency of cardiac healthcare diagnostics. By leveraging the capabilities of deep learning in semantic understanding, especially in feature extraction and representation learning, this study introduces a new multimodal contrastive pretaining framework that aims to improve the quality and robustness of learned representations of 12-lead ECG signals. Our framework comprises two key components, including Cardio Query Assistant (CQA) and ECG Semantics Integrator(ESI). CQA integrates a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to leverage large language models (LLMs) and external medical knowledge to generate detailed textual descriptions of ECGs. The generated text is enriched with information about demographics and waveform patterns. ESI integrates both contrastive and captioning loss to pretrain ECG encoders for enhanced representations. We validate our approach through various downstream tasks, including arrhythmia detection and ECG-based subject identification. Our experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements over strong baselines in these tasks. These baselines encompass supervised and self-supervised learning methods, as well as prior multimodal pretraining approaches.
Authors: Omead Pooladzandi, Jeffrey Jiang, Sunay Bhat, Gregory Pottie
Abstract: Data poisoning attacks pose a significant threat to the integrity of machine learning models by leading to misclassification of target distribution test data by injecting adversarial examples during training. Existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) defense methods suffer from a variety of limitations, such as significantly reduced generalization performance, specificity to particular attack types and classifiers, and significant overhead during training, making them impractical or limited for real-world applications. In response to this challenge, we introduce a universal data purification method that defends naturally trained classifiers from malicious white-, gray-, and black-box image poisons by applying a universal stochastic preprocessing step $\Psi_{T}(x)$, realized by iterative Langevin sampling of a convergent Energy Based Model (EBM) initialized with an image $x.$ Mid-run dynamics of $\Psi_{T}(x)$ purify poison information with minimal impact on features important to the generalization of a classifier network. We show that the contrastive learning process of EBMs allows them to remain universal purifiers, even in the presence of poisoned EBM training data, and to achieve SoTA defense on leading triggered poison Narcissus and triggerless poisons Gradient Matching and Bullseye Polytope. This work is a subset of a larger framework introduced in PureGen with a more detailed focus on EBM purification and poison defense.
Authors: Heesup Yun, Sassoum Lo, Christine H. Diepenbrock, Brian N. Bailey, J. Mason Earles
Abstract: Thermal cameras are an important tool for agricultural research because they allow for non-invasive measurement of plant temperature, which relates to important photochemical, hydraulic, and agronomic traits. Utilizing low-cost thermal cameras can lower the barrier to introducing thermal imaging in agricultural research and production. This paper presents an approach to improve the temperature accuracy and image quality of low-cost thermal imaging cameras for agricultural applications. Leveraging advancements in computer vision techniques, particularly deep learning networks, we propose a method, called $\textbf{VisTA-SR}$ ($\textbf{Vis}$ual \& $\textbf{T}$hermal $\textbf{A}$lignment and $\textbf{S}$uper-$\textbf{R}$esolution Enhancement) that combines RGB and thermal images to enhance the capabilities of low-resolution thermal cameras. The research includes calibration and validation of temperature measurements, acquisition of paired image datasets, and the development of a deep learning network tailored for agricultural thermal imaging. Our study addresses the challenges of image enhancement in the agricultural domain and explores the potential of low-cost thermal cameras to replace high-resolution industrial cameras. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing temperature accuracy and image sharpness, paving the way for more accessible and efficient thermal imaging solutions in agriculture.
Authors: Raja Marjieh, Sreejan Kumar, Declan Campbell, Liyi Zhang, Gianluca Bencomo, Jake Snell, Thomas L. Griffiths
Abstract: Humans rely on strong inductive biases to learn from few examples and abstract useful information from sensory data. Instilling such biases in machine learning models has been shown to improve their performance on various benchmarks including few-shot learning, robustness, and alignment. However, finding effective training procedures to achieve that goal can be challenging as psychologically-rich training data such as human similarity judgments are expensive to scale, and Bayesian models of human inductive biases are often intractable for complex, realistic domains. Here, we address this challenge by introducing a Bayesian notion of generative similarity whereby two datapoints are considered similar if they are likely to have been sampled from the same distribution. This measure can be applied to complex generative processes, including probabilistic programs. We show that generative similarity can be used to define a contrastive learning objective even when its exact form is intractable, enabling learning of spatial embeddings that express specific inductive biases. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing how it can be used to capture human inductive biases for geometric shapes, and to better distinguish different abstract drawing styles that are parameterized by probabilistic programs.
Authors: Artemis Panagopoulou, Coby Melkin, Chris Callison-Burch
Abstract: Bistable images, also known as ambiguous or reversible images, present visual stimuli that can be seen in two distinct interpretations, though not simultaneously by the observer. In this study, we conduct the most extensive examination of vision-language models using bistable images to date. We manually gathered a dataset of 29 bistable images, along with their associated labels, and subjected them to 116 different manipulations in brightness, tint, and rotation. We evaluated twelve different models in both classification and generative tasks across six model architectures. Our findings reveal that, with the exception of models from the Idefics family and LLaVA1.5-13b, there is a pronounced preference for one interpretation over another among the models, and minimal variance under image manipulations, with few exceptions on image rotations. Additionally, we compared the model preferences with humans, noting that the models do not exhibit the same continuity biases as humans and often diverge from human initial interpretations. We also investigated the influence of variations in prompts and the use of synonymous labels, discovering that these factors significantly affect model interpretations more than image manipulations showing a higher influence of the language priors on bistable image interpretations compared to image-text training data. All code and data is open sourced.
Authors: Raman Dutt, Pedro Sanchez, Ondrej Bohdal, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Timothy Hospedales
Abstract: Diffusion models show a remarkable ability in generating images that closely mirror the training distribution. However, these models are prone to training data memorization, leading to significant privacy, ethical, and legal concerns, particularly in sensitive fields such as medical imaging. We hypothesize that memorization is driven by the overparameterization of deep models, suggesting that regularizing model capacity during fine-tuning could be an effective mitigation strategy. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods offer a promising approach to capacity control by selectively updating specific parameters. However, finding the optimal subset of learnable parameters that balances generation quality and memorization remains elusive. To address this challenge, we propose a bi-level optimization framework that guides automated parameter selection by utilizing memorization and generation quality metrics as rewards. Our framework successfully identifies the optimal parameter set to be updated to satisfy the generation-memorization tradeoff. We perform our experiments for the specific task of medical image generation and outperform existing state-of-the-art training-time mitigation strategies by fine-tuning as few as 0.019% of model parameters. Furthermore, we show that the strategies learned through our framework are transferable across different datasets and domains. Our proposed framework is scalable to large datasets and agnostic to the choice of reward functions. Finally, we show that our framework can be combined with existing approaches for further memorization mitigation.
Authors: Prakhar Ganesh, Cuong Tran, Reza Shokri, Ferdinando Fioretto
Abstract: The principle of data minimization aims to reduce the amount of data collected, processed or retained to minimize the potential for misuse, unauthorized access, or data breaches. Rooted in privacy-by-design principles, data minimization has been endorsed by various global data protection regulations. However, its practical implementation remains a challenge due to the lack of a rigorous formulation. This paper addresses this gap and introduces an optimization framework for data minimization based on its legal definitions. It then adapts several optimization algorithms to perform data minimization and conducts a comprehensive evaluation in terms of their compliance with minimization objectives as well as their impact on user privacy. Our analysis underscores the mismatch between the privacy expectations of data minimization and the actual privacy benefits, emphasizing the need for approaches that account for multiple facets of real-world privacy risks.
Authors: Harini Suresh, Emily Tseng, Meg Young, Mary L. Gray, Emma Pierson, Karen Levy
Abstract: Growing interest and investment in the capabilities of foundation models has positioned such systems to impact a wide array of public services. Alongside these opportunities is the risk that these systems reify existing power imbalances and cause disproportionate harm to marginalized communities. Participatory approaches hold promise to instead lend agency and decision-making power to marginalized stakeholders. But existing approaches in participatory AI/ML are typically deeply grounded in context - how do we apply these approaches to foundation models, which are, by design, disconnected from context? Our paper interrogates this question. First, we examine existing attempts at incorporating participation into foundation models. We highlight the tension between participation and scale, demonstrating that it is intractable for impacted communities to meaningfully shape a foundation model that is intended to be universally applicable. In response, we develop a blueprint for participatory foundation models that identifies more local, application-oriented opportunities for meaningful participation. In addition to the "foundation" layer, our framework proposes the "subfloor'' layer, in which stakeholders develop shared technical infrastructure, norms and governance for a grounded domain, and the "surface'' layer, in which affected communities shape the use of a foundation model for a specific downstream task. The intermediate "subfloor'' layer scopes the range of potential harms to consider, and affords communities more concrete avenues for deliberation and intervention. At the same time, it avoids duplicative effort by scaling input across relevant use cases. Through three case studies in clinical care, financial services, and journalism, we illustrate how this multi-layer model can create more meaningful opportunities for participation than solely intervening at the foundation layer.
Authors: Nicolas Dupuis, Luca Buratti, Sanjay Vishwakarma, Aitana Viudes Forrat, David Kremer, Ismael Faro, Ruchir Puri, Juan Cruz-Benito
Abstract: Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, revolutionizing the software development landscape by automating the coding process and reducing time and effort required to build applications. This paper focuses on training Code LLMs to specialize in the field of quantum computing. We begin by discussing the unique needs of quantum computing programming, which differ significantly from classical programming approaches or languages. A Code LLM specializing in quantum computing requires a foundational understanding of quantum computing and quantum information theory. However, the scarcity of available quantum code examples and the rapidly evolving field, which necessitates continuous dataset updates, present significant challenges. Moreover, we discuss our work on training Code LLMs to produce high-quality quantum code using the Qiskit library. This work includes an examination of the various aspects of the LLMs used for training and the specific training conditions, as well as the results obtained with our current models. To evaluate our models, we have developed a custom benchmark, similar to HumanEval, which includes a set of tests specifically designed for the field of quantum computing programming using Qiskit. Our findings indicate that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in quantum computing tasks. We also provide examples of code suggestions, comparing our model to other relevant code LLMs. Finally, we introduce a discussion on the potential benefits of Code LLMs for quantum computing computational scientists, researchers, and practitioners. We also explore various features and future work that could be relevant in this context.
Authors: Polezhaev Ignat, Goncharenko Igor, Iurina Natalya
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel methodology we call MDS-ViTNet (Multi Decoder Saliency by Vision Transformer Network) for enhancing visual saliency prediction or eye-tracking. This approach holds significant potential for diverse fields, including marketing, medicine, robotics, and retail. We propose a network architecture that leverages the Vision Transformer, moving beyond the conventional ImageNet backbone. The framework adopts an encoder-decoder structure, with the encoder utilizing a Swin transformer to efficiently embed most important features. This process involves a Transfer Learning method, wherein layers from the Vision Transformer are converted by the Encoder Transformer and seamlessly integrated into a CNN Decoder. This methodology ensures minimal information loss from the original input image. The decoder employs a multi-decoding technique, utilizing dual decoders to generate two distinct attention maps. These maps are subsequently combined into a singular output via an additional CNN model. Our trained model MDS-ViTNet achieves state-of-the-art results across several benchmarks. Committed to fostering further collaboration, we intend to make our code, models, and datasets accessible to the public.
Authors: Sudeshna Das, Yao Ge, Yuting Guo, Swati Rajwal, JaMor Hairston, Jeanne Powell, Drew Walker, Snigdha Peddireddy, Sahithi Lakamana, Selen Bozkurt, Matthew Reyna, Reza Sameni, Yunyu Xiao, Sangmi Kim, Rasheeta Chandler, Natalie Hernandez, Danielle Mowery, Rachel Wightman, Jennifer Love, Anthony Spadaro, Jeanmarie Perrone, Abeed Sarker
Abstract: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) provides the capability to constrain generative model outputs, and mitigate the possibility of hallucination, by providing relevant in-context text. The number of tokens a generative large language model (LLM) can incorporate as context is finite, thus limiting the volume of knowledge from which to generate an answer. We propose a two-layer RAG framework for query-focused answer generation and evaluate a proof-of-concept for this framework in the context of query-focused summary generation from social media forums, focusing on emerging drug-related information. The evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the two-layer framework in resource constrained settings to enable researchers in obtaining near real-time data from users.
Authors: Xiangyu Qi, Yangsibo Huang, Yi Zeng, Edoardo Debenedetti, Jonas Geiping, Luxi He, Kaixuan Huang, Udari Madhushani, Vikash Sehwag, Weijia Shi, Boyi Wei, Tinghao Xie, Danqi Chen, Pin-Yu Chen, Jeffrey Ding, Ruoxi Jia, Jiaqi Ma, Arvind Narayanan, Weijie J Su, Mengdi Wang, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Dawn Song, Peter Henderson, Prateek Mittal
Abstract: The exposure of security vulnerabilities in safety-aligned language models, e.g., susceptibility to adversarial attacks, has shed light on the intricate interplay between AI safety and AI security. Although the two disciplines now come together under the overarching goal of AI risk management, they have historically evolved separately, giving rise to differing perspectives. Therefore, in this paper, we advocate that stakeholders in AI risk management should be aware of the nuances, synergies, and interplay between safety and security, and unambiguously take into account the perspectives of both disciplines in order to devise mostly effective and holistic risk mitigation approaches. Unfortunately, this vision is often obfuscated, as the definitions of the basic concepts of "safety" and "security" themselves are often inconsistent and lack consensus across communities. With AI risk management being increasingly cross-disciplinary, this issue is particularly salient. In light of this conceptual challenge, we introduce a unified reference framework to clarify the differences and interplay between AI safety and AI security, aiming to facilitate a shared understanding and effective collaboration across communities.
Authors: Angelica Chen, Sadhika Malladi, Lily H. Zhang, Xinyi Chen, Qiuyi Zhang, Rajesh Ranganath, Kyunghyun Cho
Abstract: Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the conventional wisdom that preference learning trains models to assign higher likelihoods to more preferred outputs than less preferred outputs, measured via $\textit{ranking accuracy}$. Surprisingly, we find that most state-of-the-art preference-tuned models achieve a ranking accuracy of less than 60% on common preference datasets. We furthermore derive the $\textit{idealized ranking accuracy}$ that a preference-tuned LLM would achieve if it optimized the DPO or RLHF objective perfectly. We demonstrate that existing models exhibit a significant $\textit{alignment gap}$ -- $\textit{i.e.}$, a gap between the observed and idealized ranking accuracies. We attribute this discrepancy to the DPO objective, which is empirically and theoretically ill-suited to fix even mild ranking errors in the reference model, and derive a simple and efficient formula for quantifying the difficulty of learning a given preference datapoint. Finally, we demonstrate that ranking accuracy strongly correlates with the empirically popular win rate metric when the model is close to the reference model used in the objective, shedding further light on the differences between on-policy (e.g., RLHF) and off-policy (e.g., DPO) preference learning algorithms.
Authors: Pierre Chambon, Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Thomas Sounack, Shih-Cheng Huang, Zhihong Chen, Maya Varma, Steven QH Truong, Chu The Chuong, Curtis P. Langlotz
Abstract: Since the release of the original CheXpert paper five years ago, CheXpert has become one of the most widely used and cited clinical AI datasets. The emergence of vision language models has sparked an increase in demands for sharing reports linked to CheXpert images, along with a growing interest among AI fairness researchers in obtaining demographic data. To address this, CheXpert Plus serves as a new collection of radiology data sources, made publicly available to enhance the scaling, performance, robustness, and fairness of models for all subsequent machine learning tasks in the field of radiology. CheXpert Plus is the largest text dataset publicly released in radiology, with a total of 36 million text tokens, including 13 million impression tokens. To the best of our knowledge, it represents the largest text de-identification effort in radiology, with almost 1 million PHI spans anonymized. It is only the second time that a large-scale English paired dataset has been released in radiology, thereby enabling, for the first time, cross-institution training at scale. All reports are paired with high-quality images in DICOM format, along with numerous image and patient metadata covering various clinical and socio-economic groups, as well as many pathology labels and RadGraph annotations. We hope this dataset will boost research for AI models that can further assist radiologists and help improve medical care. Data is available at the following URL: https://stanfordaimi.azurewebsites.net/datasets/5158c524-d3ab-4e02-96e9-6ee9efc110a1 Models are available at the following URL: https://github.com/Stanford-AIMI/chexpert-plus
URLs: https://stanfordaimi.azurewebsites.net/datasets/5158c524-d3ab-4e02-96e9-6ee9efc110a1, https://github.com/Stanford-AIMI/chexpert-plus
Authors: Umar Ibrahim, Abubakar Yakubu Zandam, Fatima Muhammad Adam, Aminu Musa
Abstract: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is crucial for understanding sentiment nuances in text, especially across diverse languages and cultures. This paper introduces a novel Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model tailored for aspect and polarity classification in Hausa movie reviews, an underrepresented language in sentiment analysis research. A comprehensive Hausa ABSA dataset is created, filling a significant gap in resource availability. The dataset, preprocessed using sci-kit-learn for TF-IDF transformation, includes manually annotated aspect-level feature ontology words and sentiment polarity assignments. The proposed model combines CNNs with attention mechanisms for aspect-word prediction, leveraging contextual information and sentiment polarities. With 91% accuracy on aspect term extraction and 92% on sentiment polarity classification, the model outperforms traditional machine models, offering insights into specific aspects and sentiments. This study advances ABSA research, particularly in underrepresented languages, with implications for cross-cultural linguistic research.
Authors: Zian Su, Xiangzhe Xu, Ziyang Huang, Kaiyuan Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract: Human-Oriented Binary Reverse Engineering (HOBRE) lies at the intersection of binary and source code, aiming to lift binary code to human-readable content relevant to source code, thereby bridging the binary-source semantic gap. Recent advancements in uni-modal code model pre-training, particularly in generative Source Code Foundation Models (SCFMs) and binary understanding models, have laid the groundwork for transfer learning applicable to HOBRE. However, existing approaches for HOBRE rely heavily on uni-modal models like SCFMs for supervised fine-tuning or general LLMs for prompting, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Inspired by recent progress in large multi-modal models, we propose that it is possible to harness the strengths of uni-modal code models from both sides to bridge the semantic gap effectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel probe-and-recover framework that incorporates a binary-source encoder-decoder model and black-box LLMs for binary analysis. Our approach leverages the pre-trained knowledge within SCFMs to synthesize relevant, symbol-rich code fragments as context. This additional context enables black-box LLMs to enhance recovery accuracy. We demonstrate significant improvements in zero-shot binary summarization and binary function name recovery, with a 10.3% relative gain in CHRF and a 16.7% relative gain in a GPT4-based metric for summarization, as well as a 6.7% and 7.4% absolute increase in token-level precision and recall for name recovery, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in automating and improving binary code analysis.
Authors: Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Zhuoyan Xu, Yingyu Liang
Abstract: Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any adjustments to the model parameters. One recent interesting mysterious observation is that models of different scales may have different ICL behaviors: larger models tend to be more sensitive to noise in the test context. This work studies this observation theoretically aiming to improve the understanding of LLM and ICL. We analyze two stylized settings: (1) linear regression with one-layer single-head linear transformers and (2) parity classification with two-layer multiple attention heads transformers (non-linear data and non-linear model). In both settings, we give closed-form optimal solutions and find that smaller models emphasize important hidden features while larger ones cover more hidden features; thus, smaller models are more robust to noise while larger ones are more easily distracted, leading to different ICL behaviors. This sheds light on where transformers pay attention to and how that affects ICL. Preliminary experimental results on large base and chat models provide positive support for our analysis.
Authors: Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Aditya Vavre, Aneesh Shetty, Gautham Krishna Gudur, Joydeep Ghosh, Alex Dimakis, Eunsol Choi, Aleksandar Bojchevski, Sujay Sanghavi
Abstract: Popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA and its variants, freeze pre-trained model weights \(W\) and inject learnable matrices \(\Delta W\). These \(\Delta W\) matrices are structured for efficient parameterization, often using techniques like low-rank approximations or scaling vectors. However, these methods typically show a performance gap compared to full fine-tuning. Although recent PEFT methods have narrowed this gap, they do so at the cost of additional learnable parameters. We propose SVFT, a simple approach that fundamentally differs from existing methods: the structure imposed on \(\Delta W\) depends on the specific weight matrix \(W\). Specifically, SVFT updates \(W\) as a sparse combination of outer products of its singular vectors, training only the coefficients (scales) of these sparse combinations. This approach allows fine-grained control over expressivity through the number of coefficients. Extensive experiments on language and vision benchmarks show that SVFT recovers up to 96% of full fine-tuning performance while training only 0.006 to 0.25% of parameters, outperforming existing methods that only recover up to 85% performance using 0.03 to 0.8% of the trainable parameter budget.
Authors: Xiangru Jian, Xinjian Zhao, Wei Pang, Chaolong Ying, Yimu Wang, Yaoyao Xu, Tianshu Yu
Abstract: The recent surge in contrast-based graph self-supervised learning has prominently featured an intensified exploration of spectral cues. However, an intriguing paradox emerges, as methods grounded in seemingly conflicting assumptions or heuristic approaches regarding the spectral domain demonstrate notable enhancements in learning performance. This paradox prompts a critical inquiry into the genuine contribution of spectral information to contrast-based graph self-supervised learning. This study undertakes an extensive investigation into this inquiry, conducting a thorough study of the relationship between spectral characteristics and the learning outcomes of contemporary methodologies. Based on this analysis, we claim that the effectiveness and significance of spectral information need to be questioned. Instead, we revisit simple edge perturbation: random edge dropping designed for node-level self-supervised learning and random edge adding intended for graph-level self-supervised learning. Compelling evidence is presented that these simple yet effective strategies consistently yield superior performance while demanding significantly fewer computational resources compared to all prior spectral augmentation methods. The proposed insights represent a significant leap forward in the field, potentially reshaping the understanding and implementation of graph self-supervised learning.
Authors: Ryo Fujii, Masashi Hatano, Hideo Saito, Hiroki Kajita
Abstract: Surgical phase recognition has gained significant attention due to its potential to offer solutions to numerous demands of the modern operating room. However, most existing methods concentrate on minimally invasive surgery (MIS), leaving surgical phase recognition for open surgery understudied. This discrepancy is primarily attributed to the scarcity of publicly available open surgery video datasets for surgical phase recognition. To address this issue, we introduce a new egocentric open surgery video dataset for phase recognition, named EgoSurgery-Phase. This dataset comprises 15 hours of real open surgery videos spanning 9 distinct surgical phases all captured using an egocentric camera attached to the surgeon's head. In addition to video, the EgoSurgery-Phase offers eye gaze. As far as we know, it is the first real open surgery video dataset for surgical phase recognition publicly available. Furthermore, inspired by the notable success of masked autoencoders (MAEs) in video understanding tasks (e.g., action recognition), we propose a gaze-guided masked autoencoder (GGMAE). Considering the regions where surgeons' gaze focuses are often critical for surgical phase recognition (e.g., surgical field), in our GGMAE, the gaze information acts as an empirical semantic richness prior to guiding the masking process, promoting better attention to semantically rich spatial regions. GGMAE significantly improves the previous state-of-the-art recognition method (6.4% in Jaccard) and the masked autoencoder-based method (3.1% in Jaccard) on EgoSurgery-Phase. The dataset will be released at https://github.com/Fujiry0/EgoSurgery.
Authors: Xi Lin, Yilu Liu, Xiaoyuan Zhang, Fei Liu, Zhenkun Wang, Qingfu Zhang
Abstract: Multi-objective optimization can be found in many real-world applications where some conflicting objectives can not be optimized by a single solution. Existing optimization methods often focus on finding a set of Pareto solutions with different optimal trade-offs among the objectives. However, the required number of solutions to well approximate the whole Pareto optimal set could be exponentially large with respect to the number of objectives, which makes these methods unsuitable for handling many optimization objectives. In this work, instead of finding a dense set of Pareto solutions, we propose a novel Tchebycheff set scalarization method to find a few representative solutions (e.g., 5) to cover a large number of objectives (e.g., $>100$) in a collaborative and complementary manner. In this way, each objective can be well addressed by at least one solution in the small solution set. In addition, we further develop a smooth Tchebycheff set scalarization approach for efficient optimization with good theoretical guarantees. Experimental studies on different problems with many optimization objectives demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors: Wei Sun, Qi Zhang, Yanzhao Zhou, Qixiang Ye, Jianbin Jiao, Yuan Li
Abstract: 3D Gaussian splatting has demonstrated impressive performance in real-time novel view synthesis. However, achieving successful reconstruction from RGB images generally requires multiple input views captured under static conditions. To address the challenge of sparse input views, previous approaches have incorporated depth supervision into the training of 3D Gaussians to mitigate overfitting, using dense predictions from pretrained depth networks as pseudo-ground truth. Nevertheless, depth predictions from monocular depth estimation models inherently exhibit significant uncertainty in specific areas. Relying solely on pixel-wise L2 loss may inadvertently incorporate detrimental noise from these uncertain areas. In this work, we introduce a novel method to supervise the depth distribution of 3D Gaussians, utilizing depth priors with integrated uncertainty estimates. To address these localized errors in depth predictions, we integrate a patch-wise optimal transport strategy to complement traditional L2 loss in depth supervision. Extensive experiments conducted on the LLFF, DTU, and Blender datasets demonstrate that our approach, UGOT, achieves superior novel view synthesis and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Masatoshi Uehara, Yulai Zhao, Ehsan Hajiramezanali, Gabriele Scalia, G\"okcen Eraslan, Avantika Lal, Sergey Levine, Tommaso Biancalani
Abstract: AI-driven design problems, such as DNA/protein sequence design, are commonly tackled from two angles: generative modeling, which efficiently captures the feasible design space (e.g., natural images or biological sequences), and model-based optimization, which utilizes reward models for extrapolation. To combine the strengths of both approaches, we adopt a hybrid method that fine-tunes cutting-edge diffusion models by optimizing reward models through RL. Although prior work has explored similar avenues, they primarily focus on scenarios where accurate reward models are accessible. In contrast, we concentrate on an offline setting where a reward model is unknown, and we must learn from static offline datasets, a common scenario in scientific domains. In offline scenarios, existing approaches tend to suffer from overoptimization, as they may be misled by the reward model in out-of-distribution regions. To address this, we introduce a conservative fine-tuning approach, BRAID, by optimizing a conservative reward model, which includes additional penalization outside of offline data distributions. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate the capability of our approach to outperform the best designs in offline data, leveraging the extrapolation capabilities of reward models while avoiding the generation of invalid designs through pre-trained diffusion models.
Authors: Zhaoxi Zhang, Xiaomei Zhang, Yanjun Zhang, Leo Yu Zhang, Chao Chen, Shengshan Hu, Asif Gill, Shirui Pan
Abstract: The Large Language Model (LLM) watermark is a newly emerging technique that shows promise in addressing concerns surrounding LLM copyright, monitoring AI-generated text, and preventing its misuse. The LLM watermark scheme commonly includes generating secret keys to partition the vocabulary into green and red lists, applying a perturbation to the logits of tokens in the green list to increase their sampling likelihood, thus facilitating watermark detection to identify AI-generated text if the proportion of green tokens exceeds a threshold. However, recent research indicates that watermarking methods using numerous keys are susceptible to removal attacks, such as token editing, synonym substitution, and paraphrasing, with robustness declining as the number of keys increases. Therefore, the state-of-the-art watermark schemes that employ fewer or single keys have been demonstrated to be more robust against text editing and paraphrasing. In this paper, we propose a novel green list stealing attack against the state-of-the-art LLM watermark scheme and systematically examine its vulnerability to this attack. We formalize the attack as a mixed integer programming problem with constraints. We evaluate our attack under a comprehensive threat model, including an extreme scenario where the attacker has no prior knowledge, lacks access to the watermark detector API, and possesses no information about the LLM's parameter settings or watermark injection/detection scheme. Extensive experiments on LLMs, such as OPT and LLaMA, demonstrate that our attack can successfully steal the green list and remove the watermark across all settings.
Authors: Haodi He, Colton Stearns, Adam W. Harley, Leonidas J. Guibas
Abstract: Large-scale vision foundation models such as Segment Anything (SAM) demonstrate impressive performance in zero-shot image segmentation at multiple levels of granularity. However, these zero-shot predictions are rarely 3D-consistent. As the camera viewpoint changes in a scene, so do the segmentation predictions, as well as the characterizations of ``coarse" or ``fine" granularity. In this work, we address the challenging task of lifting multi-granular and view-inconsistent image segmentations into a hierarchical and 3D-consistent representation. We learn a novel feature field within a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representing a 3D scene, whose segmentation structure can be revealed at different scales by simply using different thresholds on feature distance. Our key idea is to learn an ultrametric feature space, which unlike a Euclidean space, exhibits transitivity in distance-based grouping, naturally leading to a hierarchical clustering. Put together, our method takes view-inconsistent multi-granularity 2D segmentations as input and produces a hierarchy of 3D-consistent segmentations as output. We evaluate our method and several baselines on synthetic datasets with multi-view images and multi-granular segmentation, showcasing improved accuracy and viewpoint-consistency. We additionally provide qualitative examples of our model's 3D hierarchical segmentations in real world scenes.\footnote{The code and dataset are available at:
Authors: Tianyu Chen, Zhendong Wang, Mingyuan Zhou
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) leverages pre-collected datasets to train optimal policies. Diffusion Q-Learning (DQL), introducing diffusion models as a powerful and expressive policy class, significantly boosts the performance of offline RL. However, its reliance on iterative denoising sampling to generate actions slows down both training and inference. While several recent attempts have tried to accelerate diffusion-QL, the improvement in training and/or inference speed often results in degraded performance. In this paper, we introduce a dual policy approach, Diffusion Trusted Q-Learning (DTQL), which comprises a diffusion policy for pure behavior cloning and a practical one-step policy. We bridge the two polices by a newly introduced diffusion trust region loss. The diffusion policy maintains expressiveness, while the trust region loss directs the one-step policy to explore freely and seek modes within the region defined by the diffusion policy. DTQL eliminates the need for iterative denoising sampling during both training and inference, making it remarkably computationally efficient. We evaluate its effectiveness and algorithmic characteristics against popular Kullback-Leibler (KL) based distillation methods in 2D bandit scenarios and gym tasks. We then show that DTQL could not only outperform other methods on the majority of the D4RL benchmark tasks but also demonstrate efficiency in training and inference speeds. The PyTorch implementation will be made available.
Authors: Yan Yang, Bin Gao, Ya-xiang Yuan
Abstract: Bilevel reinforcement learning (RL), which features intertwined two-level problems, has attracted growing interest recently. The inherent non-convexity of the lower-level RL problem is, however, to be an impediment to developing bilevel optimization methods. By employing the fixed point equation associated with the regularized RL, we characterize the hyper-gradient via fully first-order information, thus circumventing the assumption of lower-level convexity. This, remarkably, distinguishes our development of hyper-gradient from the general AID-based bilevel frameworks since we take advantage of the specific structure of RL problems. Moreover, we propose both model-based and model-free bilevel reinforcement learning algorithms, facilitated by access to the fully first-order hyper-gradient. Both algorithms are provable to enjoy the convergence rate $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-1})$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that AID-based bilevel RL gets rid of additional assumptions on the lower-level problem. In addition, numerical experiments demonstrate that the hyper-gradient indeed serves as an integration of exploitation and exploration.
Authors: Lavanya Prahallad, Radhika Mamidi
Abstract: Gender bias in machine translation (MT) systems poses a significant challenge to achieving accurate and inclusive translations. This paper examines gender bias in machine translation systems for languages such as Telugu and Kannada from the Dravidian family, analyzing how gender inflections affect translation accuracy and neutrality using Google Translate and ChatGPT. It finds that while plural forms can reduce bias, individual-centric sentences often maintain the bias due to historical stereotypes. The study evaluates the Chain of Thought processing, noting significant bias mitigation from 80% to 4% in Telugu and from 40% to 0% in Kannada. It also compares Telugu and Kannada translations, emphasizing the need for language specific strategies to address these challenges and suggesting directions for future research to enhance fairness in both data preparation and prompts during inference.
Authors: Jia Li, Lijie Hu, Zhixian He, Jingfeng Zhang, Tianhang Zheng, Di Wang
Abstract: With the advancement of image-to-image diffusion models guided by text, significant progress has been made in image editing. However, a persistent challenge remains in seamlessly incorporating objects into images based on textual instructions, without relying on extra user-provided guidance. Text and images are inherently distinct modalities, bringing out difficulties in fully capturing the semantic intent conveyed through language and accurately translating that into the desired visual modifications. Therefore, text-guided image editing models often produce generations with residual object attributes that do not fully align with human expectations. To address this challenge, the models should comprehend the image content effectively away from a disconnect between the provided textual editing prompts and the actual modifications made to the image. In our paper, we propose a novel method called Locate and Forget (LaF), which effectively locates potential target concepts in the image for modification by comparing the syntactic trees of the target prompt and scene descriptions in the input image, intending to forget their existence clues in the generated image. Compared to the baselines, our method demonstrates its superiority in text-guided image editing tasks both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Authors: Kaixuan Huang, Xudong Guo, Mengdi Wang
Abstract: Speculative decoding reduces the inference latency of a target large language model via utilizing a smaller and faster draft model. Its performance depends on a hyperparameter K -- the candidate length, i.e., the number of candidate tokens for the target model to verify in each round. However, previous methods often use simple heuristics to choose K, which may result in sub-optimal performance. We study the choice of the candidate length K and formulate it as a Markov Decision Process. We theoretically show that the optimal policy of this Markov decision process takes the form of a threshold policy, i.e., the current speculation should stop and be verified when the probability of getting a rejection exceeds a threshold value. Motivated by this theory, we propose SpecDec++, an enhanced version of speculative decoding that adaptively determines the candidate length on the fly. We augment the draft model with a trained acceptance prediction head to predict the conditional acceptance probability of the candidate tokens. SpecDec++ will stop the current speculation when the predicted probability that at least one token gets rejected exceeds a threshold. We implement SpecDec++ and apply it to the llama-2-chat 7B & 70B model pair. Our adaptive method achieves a 2.04x speedup on the Alpaca dataset (an additional 7.2% improvement over the baseline speculative decoding). On the GSM8K and HumanEval datasets, our method achieves a 2.26x speedup (9.4% improvement) and 2.23x speedup (11.1% improvement), respectively.
Authors: Thong Thanh Nguyen, Zhiyuan Hu, Xiaobao Wu, Cong-Duy T Nguyen, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu
Abstract: Seeking answers effectively for long videos is essential to build video question answering (videoQA) systems. Previous methods adaptively select frames and regions from long videos to save computations. However, this fails to reason over the whole sequence of video, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, we introduce a state space layer (SSL) into multi-modal Transformer to efficiently integrate global semantics of the video, which mitigates the video information loss caused by frame and region selection modules. Our SSL includes a gating unit to enable controllability over the flow of global semantics into visual representations. To further enhance the controllability, we introduce a cross-modal compositional congruence (C^3) objective to encourage global semantics aligned with the question. To rigorously evaluate long-form videoQA capacity, we construct two new benchmarks Ego-QA and MAD-QA featuring videos of considerably long length, i.e. 17.5 minutes and 1.9 hours, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework on these new as well as existing datasets.
Authors: Yutong Chen, Jiandong Gao, Ji Wu
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate dynamic feature selection within multivariate time-series scenario, a common occurrence in clinical prediction monitoring where each feature corresponds to a bio-test result. Many existing feature selection methods fall short in effectively leveraging time-series information, primarily because they are designed for static data. Our approach addresses this limitation by enabling the selection of time-varying feature subsets for each patient. Specifically, we employ reinforcement learning to optimize a policy under maximum cost restrictions. The prediction model is subsequently updated using synthetic data generated by trained policy. Our method can seamlessly integrate with non-differentiable prediction models. We conducted experiments on a sizable clinical dataset encompassing regression and classification tasks. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong feature selection baselines, particularly when subjected to stringent cost limitations. Code will be released once paper is accepted.
Authors: Chengwei Dai, Kun Li, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up and gain powerful Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning abilities, practical resource constraints drive efforts to distill these capabilities into more compact Smaller Language Models (SLMs). We find that CoTs consist mainly of simple reasoning forms, with a small proportion ($\approx 4.7\%$) of key reasoning steps that truly impact conclusions. However, previous distillation methods typically involve supervised fine-tuning student SLMs only on correct CoTs data produced by teacher LLMs, resulting in students struggling to learn the key reasoning steps, instead imitating the teacher's reasoning forms and making errors or omissions on these steps. To address these issues, drawing an analogy to human learning, where analyzing mistakes according to correct solutions often reveals the crucial steps leading to successes or failures, we propose mistak\textbf{E}-\textbf{D}riven key reason\textbf{I}ng step distilla\textbf{T}ion (\textbf{EDIT}), a novel method that further aids SLMs learning key reasoning steps rather than mere simple fine-tuning. Firstly, to expose these crucial steps in CoTs, we design specific prompts to generate dual CoTs data with similar reasoning paths but divergent conclusions. Then, we apply the minimum edit distance algorithm on the dual CoTs data to locate these key steps and optimize the likelihood of these steps. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of EDIT across both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmark reasoning datasets. Further analysis shows that EDIT can generate high-quality CoTs with more correct key reasoning steps. Notably, we also explore how different mistake patterns affect performance and find that EDIT benefits more from logical errors than from knowledge or mathematical calculation errors in dual CoTs\footnote{Code can be found at \url{https://github.com/C-W-D/EDIT}}.
Authors: Jiatong Li, Renjun Hu, Kunzhe Huang, Yan Zhuang, Qi Liu, Mengxiao Zhu, Xing Shi, Wei Lin
Abstract: Expert-designed close-ended benchmarks serve as vital tools in assessing the knowledge capacity of large language models (LLMs). Despite their widespread use, concerns have mounted regarding their reliability due to limited test scenarios and an unavoidable risk of data contamination. To rectify this, we present PertEval, a toolkit devised for in-depth probing of LLMs' knowledge capacity through knowledge-invariant perturbations. These perturbations employ human-like restatement techniques to generate on-the-fly test samples from static benchmarks, meticulously retaining knowledge-critical content while altering irrelevant details. Our toolkit further includes a suite of transition analyses that compare performance on raw vs. perturbed test sets to precisely assess LLMs' genuine knowledge capacity. Six state-of-the-art LLMs are re-evaluated using PertEval. Results reveal significantly inflated performance of the LLMs on raw benchmarks, including an absolute 21% overestimation for GPT-4. Additionally, through a nuanced response pattern analysis, we discover that PertEval retains LLMs' uncertainty to specious knowledge, potentially being resolved through rote memorization and leading to inflated performance. We also find that the detailed transition analyses by PertEval could illuminate weaknesses in existing LLMs' knowledge mastery and guide the development of refinement. Given these insights, we posit that PertEval can act as an essential tool that, when applied alongside any close-ended benchmark, unveils the true knowledge capacity of LLMs, marking a significant step toward more trustworthy LLM evaluation.
Authors: Hyemin Ahn
Abstract: We hypothesize dance as a motion that forms a visual rhythm from music, where the visual rhythm can be perceived from an optical flow. If an agent can recognize the relationship between visual rhythm and music, it will be able to dance by generating a motion to create a visual rhythm that matches the music. Based on this, we propose a framework for any kind of non-humanoid agents to learn how to dance from human videos. Our framework works in two processes: (1) training a reward model which perceives the relationship between optical flow (visual rhythm) and music from human dance videos, (2) training the non-humanoid dancer based on that reward model, and reinforcement learning. Our reward model consists of two feature encoders for optical flow and music. They are trained based on contrastive learning which makes the higher similarity between concurrent optical flow and music features. With this reward model, the agent learns dancing by getting a higher reward when its action creates an optical flow whose feature has a higher similarity with the given music feature. Experiment results show that generated dance motion can align with the music beat properly, and user study result indicates that our framework is more preferred by humans compared to the baselines. To the best of our knowledge, our work of non-humanoid agents which learn dance from human videos is unprecedented. An example video can be found at https://youtu.be/dOUPvo-O3QY.
Authors: Chong Li, Wen Yang, Jiajun Zhang, Jinliang Lu, Shaonan Wang, Chengqing Zong
Abstract: Large language models respond well in high-resource languages like English but struggle in low-resource languages. It may arise from the lack of high-quality instruction following data in these languages. Directly translating English samples into these languages can be a solution but unreliable, leading to responses with translation errors and lacking language-specific or cultural knowledge. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to construct cross-lingual instruction following samples with instruction in English and response in low-resource languages. Specifically, the language model first learns to generate appropriate English instructions according to the natural web texts in other languages as responses. The candidate cross-lingual instruction tuning samples are further refined and diversified. We have employed this method to build a large-scale cross-lingual instruction tuning dataset on 10 languages, namely X-Instruction. The instruction data built using our method incorporate more language-specific knowledge compared with the naive translation method. Experimental results have shown that the response quality of the model tuned on X-Instruction greatly exceeds the model distilled from a powerful teacher model, reaching or even surpassing the ones of ChatGPT. In addition, we find that models tuned on cross-lingual instruction following samples can follow the instruction in the output language without further tuning.
Authors: Wenxuan Liu, Saiqian Zhang
Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently gained substantial attention in both industrial and academic fields for their superior visual generation capabilities, outperforming traditional diffusion models that use U-Net. However,the enhanced performance of DiTs also comes with high parameter counts and implementation costs, seriously restricting their use on resource-limited devices such as mobile phones. To address these challenges, we introduce the Hybrid Floating-point Quantization for DiT(HQ-DiT), an efficient post-training quantization method that utilizes 4-bit floating-point (FP) precision on both weights and activations for DiT inference. Compared to fixed-point quantization (e.g., INT8), FP quantization, complemented by our proposed clipping range selection mechanism, naturally aligns with the data distribution within DiT, resulting in a minimal quantization error. Furthermore, HQ-DiT also implements a universal identity mathematical transform to mitigate the serious quantization error caused by the outliers. The experimental results demonstrate that DiT can achieve extremely low-precision quantization (i.e., 4 bits) with negligible impact on performance. Our approach marks the first instance where both weights and activations in DiTs are quantized to just 4 bits, with only a 0.12 increase in sFID on ImageNet.
Authors: Marta Buetas Arcas, Richard Osuala, Karim Lekadir, Oliver D\'iaz
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a valuable tool for assisting radiologists in breast cancer detection and diagnosis. However, the success of AI applications in this domain is restricted by the quantity and quality of available data, posing challenges due to limited and costly data annotation procedures that often lead to annotation shifts. This study simulates, analyses and mitigates annotation shifts in cancer classification in the breast mammography domain. First, a high-accuracy cancer risk prediction model is developed, which effectively distinguishes benign from malignant lesions. Next, model performance is used to quantify the impact of annotation shift. We uncover a substantial impact of annotation shift on multiclass classification performance particularly for malignant lesions. We thus propose a training data augmentation approach based on single-image generative models for the affected class, requiring as few as four in-domain annotations to considerably mitigate annotation shift, while also addressing dataset imbalance. Lastly, we further increase performance by proposing and validating an ensemble architecture based on multiple models trained under different data augmentation regimes. Our study offers key insights into annotation shift in deep learning breast cancer classification and explores the potential of single-image generative models to overcome domain shift challenges.
Authors: Sungchul Hong, Seunghwan An, Jong-June Jeon
Abstract: Recent advances in a generative neural network model extend the development of data augmentation methods. However, the augmentation methods based on the modern generative models fail to achieve notable performance for class imbalance data compared to the conventional model, the SMOTE. We investigate the problem of the generative model for imbalanced classification and introduce a framework to enhance the SMOTE algorithm using Variational Autoencoders (VAE). Our approach systematically quantifies the density of data points in a low-dimensional latent space using the VAE, simultaneously incorporating information on class labels and classification difficulty. Then, the data points potentially degrading the augmentation are systematically excluded, and the neighboring observations are directly augmented on the data space. Empirical studies on several imbalanced datasets represent that this simple process innovatively improves the conventional SMOTE algorithm over the deep learning models. Consequently, we conclude that the selection of minority data and the interpolation in the data space are beneficial for imbalanced classification problems with a relatively small number of data points.
Authors: Xingyu Wan, Chengquan Zhang, Pengyuan Lyu, Sen Fan, Zihan Ni, Kun Yao, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang
Abstract: Existing OCR engines or document image analysis systems typically rely on training separate models for text detection in varying scenarios and granularities, leading to significant computational complexity and resource demands. In this paper, we introduce "Detect Any Text" (DAT), an advanced paradigm that seamlessly unifies scene text detection, layout analysis, and document page detection into a cohesive, end-to-end model. This design enables DAT to efficiently manage text instances at different granularities, including *word*, *line*, *paragraph* and *page*. A pivotal innovation in DAT is the across-granularity interactive attention module, which significantly enhances the representation learning of text instances at varying granularities by correlating structural information across different text queries. As a result, it enables the model to achieve mutually beneficial detection performances across multiple text granularities. Additionally, a prompt-based segmentation module refines detection outcomes for texts of arbitrary curvature and complex layouts, thereby improving DAT's accuracy and expanding its real-world applicability. Experimental results demonstrate that DAT achieves state-of-the-art performances across a variety of text-related benchmarks, including multi-oriented/arbitrarily-shaped scene text detection, document layout analysis and page detection tasks.
Authors: Jeiyoon Park, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: With the recent introduction of Assistants API, it is expected that document-based language models will be actively used in various domains, especially Role-playing. However, a key challenge lies in utilizing protagonist's persona: Assistants API often fails to achieve with its search because the information extraction part is different each time and it often omits important information such as protagonist's backstory or relationships. It is hard to maintain a consistent persona simply by using the persona document as input to the Assistants API. To address the challenge of achieving stable persona consistency, we propose CharacterGPT, a novel persona reconstruction framework to alleviate the shortcomings of the Assistants API. Our method involves Character Persona Training (CPT), an effective persona rebuilding process that updates the character persona by extracting the character's traits from given summary of the novel for each character as if the story in a novel progresses. In our experiments, we ask each character to take the Big Five Inventory personality test in various settings and analyze the results. To assess whether it can think outside the box, we let each character generate short novels. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that CharacterGPT presents new possibilities for role-playing agent research.
Authors: Jinliang Zheng, Jianxiong Li, Sijie Cheng, Yinan Zheng, Jiaming Li, Jihao Liu, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Xianyuan Zhan
Abstract: Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.
Authors: Haoqiong Bian, Dongyang Geng, Haoyang Li, Anastasia Ailamaki
Abstract: Serverless query processing has become increasingly popular due to its advantages, including automated hardware and software management, high elasticity, and pay-as-you-go pricing. For users who are not system experts, serverless query processing greatly reduces the cost of owning a data analytic system. However, it is still a significant challenge for non-expert users to transform their complex and evolving data analytic needs into proper SQL queries and select a serverless query engine that delivers satisfactory performance and price for each type of query. This paper presents PixelsDB, an open-source data analytic system that allows users who lack system or SQL expertise to explore data efficiently. It allows users to generate and debug SQL queries using a natural language interface powered by fine-tuned language models. The queries are then executed by a serverless query engine that offers varying prices for different service levels on query urgency. The service levels are natively supported by dedicated architecture design and heterogeneous resource scheduling that can apply cost-efficient resources to process non-urgent queries. We envision that the combination of a serverless paradigm, a natural-language-aided interface, and flexible service levels and prices will substantially improve the user experience in data analysis.
Authors: Dylan Zhang, Justin Wang, Francois Charton
Abstract: Instruction tuning -- tuning large language models on instruction-output pairs -- is a promising technique for making models better adapted to the real world. Yet, the key factors driving the model's capability to understand and follow instructions not seen during training remain under-explored. Our investigation begins with a series of synthetic experiments within the theoretical framework of a Turing-complete algorithm called Markov algorithm, which allows fine-grained control over the instruction-tuning data. Generalization and robustness with respect to the training distribution emerge once a diverse enough set of tasks is provided, even though very few examples are provided for each task. We extend these initial results to a real-world application scenario of code generation and find that a more diverse instruction set, extending beyond code-related tasks, improves the performance of code generation. Our observations suggest that a more diverse semantic space for instruction-tuning sets greatly improves the model's ability to follow instructions and perform tasks.
Authors: Ohjoon Kwon, Donghyeon Jeon, Nayoung Choi, Gyu-Hwung Cho, Changbong Kim, Hyunwoo Lee, Inho Kang, Sun Kim, Taiwoo Park
Abstract: Most prior safety research of large language models (LLMs) has focused on enhancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit the safety requirements of humans. However, internalizing such safeguard features into larger models brought challenges of higher training cost and unintended degradation of helpfulness. To overcome such challenges, a modular approach employing a smaller LLM to detect harmful user queries is regarded as a convenient solution in designing LLM-based system with safety requirements. In this paper, we leverage a smaller LLM for both harmful query detection and safeguard response generation. We introduce our safety requirements and the taxonomy of harmfulness categories, and then propose a multi-task learning mechanism fusing the two tasks into a single model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, providing on par or surpassing harmful query detection and safeguard response performance compared to the publicly available LLMs.
Authors: Xiaoliang Wu, Chau Luu, Peter Bell, Ajitha Rajan
Abstract: This paper proposes a fully explainable approach to speaker verification (SV), a task that fundamentally relies on individual speaker characteristics. The opaque use of speaker attributes in current SV systems raises concerns of trust. Addressing this, we propose an attribute-based explainable SV system that identifies speakers by comparing personal attributes such as gender, nationality, and age extracted automatically from voice recordings. We believe this approach better aligns with human reasoning, making it more understandable than traditional methods. Evaluated on the Voxceleb1 test set, the best performance of our system is comparable with the ground truth established when using all correct attributes, proving its efficacy. Whilst our approach sacrifices some performance compared to non-explainable methods, we believe that it moves us closer to the goal of transparent, interpretable AI and lays the groundwork for future enhancements through attribute expansion.
Authors: Chunhui Zhang, Li Liu, Guanjie Huang, Hao Wen, Xi Zhou, Yanfeng Wang
Abstract: Underwater object tracking (UOT) is a foundational task for identifying and tracing submerged entities in underwater video sequences. However, current UOT datasets suffer from limitations in scale, diversity of target categories and scenarios covered, hindering the training and evaluation of modern tracking algorithms. To bridge this gap, we take the first step and introduce WebUOT-1M, \ie, the largest public UOT benchmark to date, sourced from complex and realistic underwater environments. It comprises 1.1 million frames across 1,500 video clips filtered from 408 target categories, largely surpassing previous UOT datasets, \eg, UVOT400. Through meticulous manual annotation and verification, we provide high-quality bounding boxes for underwater targets. Additionally, WebUOT-1M includes language prompts for video sequences, expanding its application areas, \eg, underwater vision-language tracking. Most existing trackers are tailored for open-air environments, leading to performance degradation when applied to UOT due to domain gaps. Retraining and fine-tuning these trackers are challenging due to sample imbalances and limited real-world underwater datasets. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel omni-knowledge distillation framework based on WebUOT-1M, incorporating various strategies to guide the learning of the student Transformer. To the best of our knowledge, this framework is the first to effectively transfer open-air domain knowledge to the UOT model through knowledge distillation, as demonstrated by results on both existing UOT datasets and the newly proposed WebUOT-1M. Furthermore, we comprehensively evaluate WebUOT-1M using 30 deep trackers, showcasing its value as a benchmark for UOT research by presenting new challenges and opportunities for future studies. The complete dataset, codes and tracking results, will be made publicly available.
Authors: Frank A. Ruis, Alma M. Liezenga, Friso G. Heslinga, Luca Ballan, Thijs A. Eker, Richard J. M. den Hollander, Martin C. van Leeuwen, Judith Dijk, Wyke Huizinga
Abstract: Collecting and annotating real-world data for the development of object detection models is a time-consuming and expensive process. In the military domain in particular, data collection can also be dangerous or infeasible. Training models on synthetic data may provide a solution for cases where access to real-world training data is restricted. However, bridging the reality gap between synthetic and real data remains a challenge. Existing methods usually build on top of baseline Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models that have been shown to perform well when trained on real data, but have limited ability to perform well when trained on synthetic data. For example, some architectures allow for fine-tuning with the expectation of large quantities of training data and are prone to overfitting on synthetic data. Related work usually ignores various best practices from object detection on real data, e.g. by training on synthetic data from a single environment with relatively little variation. In this paper we propose a methodology for improving the performance of a pre-trained object detector when training on synthetic data. Our approach focuses on extracting the salient information from synthetic data without forgetting useful features learned from pre-training on real images. Based on the state of the art, we incorporate data augmentation methods and a Transformer backbone. Besides reaching relatively strong performance without any specialized synthetic data transfer methods, we show that our methods improve the state of the art on synthetic data trained object detection for the RarePlanes and DGTA-VisDrone datasets, and reach near-perfect performance on an in-house vehicle detection dataset.
Authors: Junqi Chen, Xu Tan, Sylwan Rahardja, Jiawei Yang, Susanto Rahardja
Abstract: Deep learning-based sequence models are extensively employed in Time Series Anomaly Detection (TSAD) tasks due to their effective sequential modeling capabilities. However, the ability of TSAD is limited by two key challenges: (i) the ability to model long-range dependency and (ii) the generalization issue in the presence of non-stationary data. To tackle these challenges, an anomaly detector that leverages the selective state space model known for its proficiency in capturing long-term dependencies across various domains is proposed. Additionally, a multi-stage detrending mechanism is introduced to mitigate the prominent trend component in non-stationary data to address the generalization issue. Extensive experiments conducted on realworld public datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods surpass all 12 compared baseline methods.
Authors: Chengwei Dai, Kun Li, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced reasoning at larger scales, driving efforts to distill these capabilities into smaller models via teacher-student learning. Previous works simply fine-tune student models on teachers' generated Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) data. Although these methods enhance in-domain (IND) reasoning performance, they struggle to generalize to out-of-domain (OOD) tasks. We believe that the widespread spurious correlations between questions and answers may lead the model to preset a specific answer which restricts the diversity and generalizability of its reasoning process. In this paper, we propose Cascading Decomposed CoTs Distillation (CasCoD) to address these issues by decomposing the traditional single-step learning process into two cascaded learning steps. Specifically, by restructuring the training objectives -- removing the answer from outputs and concatenating the question with the rationale as input -- CasCoD's two-step learning process ensures that students focus on learning rationales without interference from the preset answers, thus improving reasoning generalizability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CasCoD on both IND and OOD benchmark reasoning datasets. Code can be found at https://github.com/C-W-D/CasCoD.
Authors: Chaochen Gao, Xing Wu, Qi Fu, Songlin Hu
Abstract: Large language models, initially pre-trained with a limited context length, can better handle longer texts by continuing training on a corpus with extended contexts. However, obtaining effective long-context data is challenging due to the scarcity and uneven distribution of long documents across different domains. To address this issue, we propose a Query-centric data synthesis method, abbreviated as Quest. Quest is an interpretable method based on the observation that documents retrieved by similar queries are relevant but low-redundant, thus well-suited for synthesizing long-context data. The method is also scalable and capable of constructing large amounts of long-context data. Using Quest, we synthesize a long-context dataset up to 128k context length, significantly outperforming other data synthesis methods on multiple long-context benchmark datasets. In addition, we further verify that the Quest method is predictable through scaling law experiments, making it a reliable solution for advancing long-context models.
Authors: Riccardo Renzulli
Abstract: Capsule networks (CapsNets) were introduced to address convolutional neural networks limitations, learning object-centric representations that are more robust, pose-aware, and interpretable. They organize neurons into groups called capsules, where each capsule encodes the instantiation parameters of an object or one of its parts. Moreover, a routing algorithm connects capsules in different layers, thereby capturing hierarchical part-whole relationships in the data. This thesis investigates the intriguing aspects of CapsNets and focuses on three key questions to unlock their full potential. First, we explore the effectiveness of the routing algorithm, particularly in small-sized networks. We propose a novel method that anneals the number of routing iterations during training, enhancing performance in architectures with fewer parameters. Secondly, we investigate methods to extract more effective first-layer capsules, also known as primary capsules. By exploiting pruned backbones, we aim to improve computational efficiency by reducing the number of capsules while achieving high generalization. This approach reduces CapsNets memory requirements and computational effort. Third, we explore part-relationship learning in CapsNets. Through extensive research, we demonstrate that capsules with low entropy can extract more concise and discriminative part-whole relationships compared to traditional capsule networks, even with reasonable network sizes. Lastly, we showcase how CapsNets can be utilized in real-world applications, including autonomous localization of unmanned aerial vehicles, quaternion-based rotations prediction in synthetic datasets, and lung nodule segmentation in biomedical imaging. The findings presented in this thesis contribute to a deeper understanding of CapsNets and highlight their potential to address complex computer vision challenges.
Authors: Taisei Tosaki, Eiichiro Uchino, Ryosuke Kojima, Yohei Mineharu, Mikio Arita, Nobuyuki Miyai, Yoshinori Tamada, Tatsuya Mikami, Koichi Murashita, Shigeyuki Nakaji, Yasushi Okuno
Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly used to predict lifestyle-related disease onset using health and medical data. However, the prediction effectiveness is hindered by dataset shift, which involves discrepancies in data distribution between the training and testing datasets, misclassifying out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To diminish dataset shift effects, this paper proposes the out-of-distribution reject option for prediction (ODROP), which integrates OOD detection models to preclude OOD data from the prediction phase. We investigated the efficacy of five OOD detection methods (variational autoencoder, neural network ensemble std, neural network ensemble epistemic, neural network energy, and neural network gaussian mixture based energy measurement) across two datasets, the Hirosaki and Wakayama health checkup data, in the context of three disease onset prediction tasks: diabetes, dyslipidemia, and hypertension. To evaluate the ODROP method, we trained disease onset prediction models and OOD detection models on Hirosaki data and used AUROC-rejection curve plots from Wakayama data. The variational autoencoder method showed superior stability and magnitude of improvement in Area Under the Receiver Operating Curve (AUROC) in five cases: AUROC in the Wakayama data was improved from 0.80 to 0.90 at a 31.1% rejection rate for diabetes onset and from 0.70 to 0.76 at a 34% rejection rate for dyslipidemia. We categorized dataset shifts into two types using SHAP clustering - those that considerably affect predictions and those that do not. We expect that this classification will help standardize measuring instruments. This study is the first to apply OOD detection to actual health and medical data, demonstrating its potential to substantially improve the accuracy and reliability of disease prediction models amidst dataset shift.
Authors: Hao Zhao, Maksym Andriushchenko, Francesco Croce, Nicolas Flammarion
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) allows LLMs to learn from examples without changing their weights, which is a particularly promising capability for long-context LLMs that can potentially learn from many examples. Recently, Lin et al. (2024) proposed URIAL, a method using only three in-context examples to align base LLMs, achieving non-trivial instruction following performance. In this work, we show that, while effective, ICL alignment with URIAL still underperforms compared to instruction fine-tuning on established benchmarks such as MT-Bench and AlpacaEval 2.0 (LC), especially with more capable base LMs. Unlike for tasks such as classification, translation, or summarization, adding more ICL demonstrations for long-context LLMs does not systematically improve instruction following performance. To address this limitation, we derive a greedy selection approach for ICL examples that noticeably improves performance, yet without bridging the gap to instruction fine-tuning. Finally, we provide a series of ablation studies to better understand the reasons behind the remaining gap, and we show how some aspects of ICL depart from the existing knowledge and are specific to the instruction tuning setting. Overall, our work advances the understanding of ICL as an alignment technique. We provide our code at https://github.com/tml-epfl/icl-alignment.
Authors: Seun-An Choe, Ah-Hyung Shin, Keon-Hee Park, Jinwoo Choi, Gyeong-Moon Park
Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation aims to transfer the pixel-wise knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. However, current UDA methods typically assume a shared label space between source and target, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where novel categories may emerge in the target domain. In this paper, we introduce Open-Set Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation (OSDA-SS) for the first time, where the target domain includes unknown classes. We identify two major problems in the OSDA-SS scenario as follows: 1) the existing UDA methods struggle to predict the exact boundary of the unknown classes, and 2) they fail to accurately predict the shape of the unknown classes. To address these issues, we propose Boundary and Unknown Shape-Aware open-set domain adaptation, coined BUS. Our BUS can accurately discern the boundaries between known and unknown classes in a contrastive manner using a novel dilation-erosion-based contrastive loss. In addition, we propose OpenReMix, a new domain mixing augmentation method that guides our model to effectively learn domain and size-invariant features for improving the shape detection of the known and unknown classes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed BUS effectively detects unknown classes in the challenging OSDA-SS scenario compared to the previous methods by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/KHU-AGI/BUS.
Authors: Tenglong Liu, Yang Li, Yixing Lan, Hao Gao, Wei Pan, Xin Xu
Abstract: In offline reinforcement learning, the challenge of out-of-distribution (OOD) is pronounced. To address this, existing methods often constrain the learned policy through policy regularization. However, these methods often suffer from the issue of unnecessary conservativeness, hampering policy improvement. This occurs due to the indiscriminate use of all actions from the behavior policy that generates the offline dataset as constraints. The problem becomes particularly noticeable when the quality of the dataset is suboptimal. Thus, we propose Adaptive Advantage-guided Policy Regularization (A2PR), obtaining high-advantage actions from an augmented behavior policy combined with VAE to guide the learned policy. A2PR can select high-advantage actions that differ from those present in the dataset, while still effectively maintaining conservatism from OOD actions. This is achieved by harnessing the VAE capacity to generate samples matching the distribution of the data points. We theoretically prove that the improvement of the behavior policy is guaranteed. Besides, it effectively mitigates value overestimation with a bounded performance gap. Empirically, we conduct a series of experiments on the D4RL benchmark, where A2PR demonstrates state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, experimental results on additional suboptimal mixed datasets reveal that A2PR exhibits superior performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ltlhuuu/A2PR.
Authors: Xiaoyu Wu, Jiaru Zhang, Yang Hua, Bohan Lyu, Hao Wang, Tao Song, Haibing Guan
Abstract: Few-shot fine-tuning of Diffusion Models (DMs) is a key advancement, significantly reducing training costs and enabling personalized AI applications. However, we explore the training dynamics of DMs and observe an unanticipated phenomenon: during the training process, image fidelity initially improves, then unexpectedly deteriorates with the emergence of noisy patterns, only to recover later with severe overfitting. We term the stage with generated noisy patterns as corruption stage. To understand this corruption stage, we begin by theoretically modeling the one-shot fine-tuning scenario, and then extend this modeling to more general cases. Through this modeling, we identify the primary cause of this corruption stage: a narrowed learning distribution inherent in the nature of few-shot fine-tuning. To tackle this, we apply Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) on DMs with variational inference to implicitly broaden the learned distribution, and present that the learning target of the BNNs can be naturally regarded as an expectation of the diffusion loss and a further regularization with the pretrained DMs. This approach is highly compatible with current few-shot fine-tuning methods in DMs and does not introduce any extra inference costs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates corruption, and improves the fidelity, quality and diversity of the generated images in both object-driven and subject-driven generation tasks.
Authors: Alessandro Manenti, Daniele Zambon, Cesare Alippi
Abstract: Within a prediction task, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) use relational information as an inductive bias to enhance the model's accuracy. As task-relevant relations might be unknown, graph structure learning approaches have been proposed to learn them while solving the downstream prediction task. In this paper, we demonstrate that minimization of a point-prediction loss function, e.g., the mean absolute error, does not guarantee proper learning of the latent relational information and its associated uncertainty. Conversely, we prove that a suitable loss function on the stochastic model outputs simultaneously grants (i) the unknown adjacency matrix latent distribution and (ii) optimal performance on the prediction task. Finally, we propose a sampling-based method that solves this joint learning task. Empirical results validate our theoretical claims and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Authors: Konstantin Hemker, Nikola Simidjievski, Mateja Jamnik
Abstract: Learning holistic computational representations in physical, chemical or biological systems requires the ability to process information from different distributions and modalities within the same model. Thus, the demand for multimodal machine learning models has sharply risen for modalities that go beyond vision and language, such as sequences, graphs, time series, or tabular data. While there are many available multimodal fusion and alignment approaches, most of them require end-to-end training, scale quadratically with the number of modalities, cannot handle cases of high modality imbalance in the training set, or are highly topology-specific, making them too restrictive for many biomedical learning tasks. This paper presents Multimodal Lego (MM-Lego), a modular and general-purpose fusion and model merging framework to turn any set of encoders into a competitive multimodal model with no or minimal fine-tuning. We achieve this by introducing a wrapper for unimodal encoders that enforces lightweight dimensionality assumptions between modalities and harmonises their representations by learning features in the frequency domain to enable model merging with little signal interference. We show that MM-Lego 1) can be used as a model merging method which achieves competitive performance with end-to-end fusion models without any fine-tuning, 2) can operate on any unimodal encoder, and 3) is a model fusion method that, with minimal fine-tuning, achieves state-of-the-art results on six benchmarked multimodal biomedical tasks.
Authors: Qiaowei Miao, Yawei Luo, Yi Yang
Abstract: As text-conditioned diffusion models (DMs) achieve breakthroughs in image, video, and 3D generation, the research community's focus has shifted to the more challenging task of text-to-4D synthesis, which introduces a temporal dimension to generate dynamic 3D objects. In this context, we identify Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), a widely used technique for text-to-3D synthesis, as a significant hindrance to text-to-4D performance due to its Janus-faced and texture-unrealistic problems coupled with high computational costs. In this paper, we propose \textbf{P}ixel-\textbf{L}evel \textbf{A}lignments for Text-to-\textbf{4D} Gaussian Splatting (\textbf{PLA4D}), a novel method that utilizes text-to-video frames as explicit pixel alignment targets to generate static 3D objects and inject motion into them. Specifically, we introduce Focal Alignment to calibrate camera poses for rendering and GS-Mesh Contrastive Learning to distill geometry priors from rendered image contrasts at the pixel level. Additionally, we develop Motion Alignment using a deformation network to drive changes in Gaussians and implement Reference Refinement for smooth 4D object surfaces. These techniques enable 4D Gaussian Splatting to align geometry, texture, and motion with generated videos at the pixel level. Compared to previous methods, PLA4D produces synthesized outputs with better texture details in less time and effectively mitigates the Janus-faced problem. PLA4D is fully implemented using open-source models, offering an accessible, user-friendly, and promising direction for 4D digital content creation. Our project page: \href{https://github.com/MiaoQiaowei/PLA4D.github.io}{https://github.com/MiaoQiaowei/PLA4D.github.io}.
URLs: https://github.com/MiaoQiaowei/PLA4D.github.io, https://github.com/MiaoQiaowei/PLA4D.github.io
Authors: Yi Liu, Xiangyu Liu, Xiangrong Zhu, Wei Hu
Abstract: Multi-aspect controllable text generation aims to control the generated texts in attributes from multiple aspects (e.g., "positive" from sentiment and "sport" from topic). For ease of obtaining training samples, existing works neglect attribute correlations formed by the intertwining of different attributes. Particularly, the stereotype formed by imbalanced attribute correlations significantly affects multi-aspect control. In this paper, we propose MAGIC, a new multi-aspect controllable text generation method with disentangled counterfactual augmentation. We alleviate the issue of imbalanced attribute correlations during training using counterfactual feature vectors in the attribute latent space by disentanglement. During inference, we enhance attribute correlations by target-guided counterfactual augmentation to further improve multi-aspect control. Experiments show that MAGIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both imbalanced and balanced attribute correlation scenarios. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/nju-websoft/MAGIC.
Authors: Davoud Sarani, Dr. Parviz Rashidi-Khazaee
Abstract: In today's forex market traders increasingly turn to algorithmic trading, leveraging computers to seek more profits. Deep learning techniques as cutting-edge advancements in machine learning, capable of identifying patterns in financial data. Traders utilize these patterns to execute more effective trades, adhering to algorithmic trading rules. Deep reinforcement learning methods (DRL), by directly executing trades based on identified patterns and assessing their profitability, offer advantages over traditional DL approaches. This research pioneers the application of a multi-agent (MA) RL framework with the state-of-the-art Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm. The proposed method employs parallel learning across multiple asynchronous workers, each specialized in trading across multiple currency pairs to explore the potential for nuanced strategies tailored to different market conditions and currency pairs. Two different A3C with lock and without lock MA model was proposed and trained on single currency and multi-currency. The results indicate that both model outperform on Proximal Policy Optimization model. A3C with lock outperforms other in single currency training scenario and A3C without Lock outperforms other in multi-currency scenario. The findings demonstrate that this approach facilitates broader and faster exploration of different currency pairs, significantly enhancing trading returns. Additionally, the agent can learn a more profitable trading strategy in a shorter time.
Authors: Minttu Alakuijala, Reginald McLean, Isaac Woungang, Nariman Farsad, Samuel Kaski, Pekka Marttinen, Kai Yuan
Abstract: Natural language is often the easiest and most convenient modality for humans to specify tasks for robots. However, learning to ground language to behavior typically requires impractical amounts of diverse, language-annotated demonstrations collected on each target robot. In this work, we aim to separate the problem of what to accomplish from how to accomplish it, as the former can benefit from substantial amounts of external observation-only data, and only the latter depends on a specific robot embodiment. To this end, we propose Video-Language Critic, a reward model that can be trained on readily available cross-embodiment data using contrastive learning and a temporal ranking objective, and use it to score behavior traces from a separate reinforcement learning actor. When trained on Open X-Embodiment data, our reward model enables 2x more sample-efficient policy training on Meta-World tasks than a sparse reward only, despite a significant domain gap. Using in-domain data but in a challenging task generalization setting on Meta-World, we further demonstrate more sample-efficient training than is possible with prior language-conditioned reward models that are either trained with binary classification, use static images, or do not leverage the temporal information present in video data.
Authors: Honghao Fu, Yufei Wang, Wenhan Yang, Bihan Wen
Abstract: Image quality assessment (IQA) plays a critical role in selecting high-quality images and guiding compression and enhancement methods in a series of applications. The blind IQA, which assesses the quality of in-the-wild images containing complex authentic distortions without reference images, poses greater challenges. Existing methods are limited to modeling a uniform distribution with local patches and are bothered by the gap between low and high-level visions (caused by widely adopted pre-trained classification networks). In this paper, we propose a novel IQA method called diffusion priors-based IQA (DP-IQA), which leverages the prior knowledge from the pre-trained diffusion model with its excellent powers to bridge semantic gaps in the perception of the visual quality of images. Specifically, we use pre-trained stable diffusion as the backbone, extract multi-level features from the denoising U-Net during the upsampling process at a specified timestep, and decode them to estimate the image quality score. The text and image adapters are adopted to mitigate the domain gap for downstream tasks and correct the information loss caused by the variational autoencoder bottleneck. Finally, we distill the knowledge in the above model into a CNN-based student model, significantly reducing the parameter to enhance applicability, with the student model performing similarly or even better than the teacher model surprisingly. Experimental results demonstrate that our DP-IQA achieves state-of-the-art results on various in-the-wild datasets with better generalization capability, which shows the superiority of our method in global modeling and utilizing the hierarchical feature clues of diffusion for evaluating image quality.
Authors: Alexander Nikitin, Jannik Kossen, Yarin Gal, Pekka Marttinen
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for applications where safety and reliability are important. In particular, uncertainty can be used to improve the trustworthiness of LLMs by detecting factually incorrect model responses, commonly called hallucinations. Critically, one should seek to capture the model's semantic uncertainty, i.e., the uncertainty over the meanings of LLM outputs, rather than uncertainty over lexical or syntactic variations that do not affect answer correctness. To address this problem, we propose Kernel Language Entropy (KLE), a novel method for uncertainty estimation in white- and black-box LLMs. KLE defines positive semidefinite unit trace kernels to encode the semantic similarities of LLM outputs and quantifies uncertainty using the von Neumann entropy. It considers pairwise semantic dependencies between answers (or semantic clusters), providing more fine-grained uncertainty estimates than previous methods based on hard clustering of answers. We theoretically prove that KLE generalizes the previous state-of-the-art method called semantic entropy and empirically demonstrate that it improves uncertainty quantification performance across multiple natural language generation datasets and LLM architectures.
Authors: Thai-Hoc Vu, Senthil Kumar Jagatheesaperumal, Minh-Duong Nguyen, Nguyen Van Huynh, Sunghwan Kim, Quoc-Viet Pham
Abstract: The success of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in multiple disciplines and vertical domains in recent years has promoted the evolution of mobile networking and the future Internet toward an AI-integrated Internet-of-Things (IoT) era. Nevertheless, most AI techniques rely on data generated by physical devices (e.g., mobile devices and network nodes) or specific applications (e.g., fitness trackers and mobile gaming). To bypass this circumvent, Generative AI (GAI), a.k.a. AI-generated content (AIGC), has emerged as a powerful AI paradigm; thanks to its ability to efficiently learn complex data distributions and generate synthetic data to represent the original data in various forms. This impressive feature is projected to transform the management of mobile networking and diversify the current services and applications provided. On this basis, this work presents a concise tutorial on the role of GAIs in mobile and wireless networking. In particular, this survey first provides the fundamentals of GAI and representative GAI models, serving as an essential preliminary to the understanding of the applications of GAI in mobile and wireless networking. Then, this work provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art studies and GAI applications in network management, wireless security, semantic communication, and lessons learned from the open literature. Finally, this work summarizes the current research on GAI for mobile and wireless networking by outlining important challenges that need to be resolved to facilitate the development and applicability of GAI in this edge-cutting area.
Authors: Jiangkai Wu, Liming Liu, Yunpeng Tan, Junlin Hao, Xinggong Zhang
Abstract: With the exponential growth of video traffic, traditional video streaming systems are approaching their limits in compression efficiency and communication capacity. To further reduce bitrate while maintaining quality, we propose Promptus, a disruptive novel system that streaming prompts instead of video content with Stable Diffusion, which converts video frames into a series of "prompts" for delivery. To ensure pixel alignment, a gradient descent-based prompt fitting framework is proposed. To achieve adaptive bitrate for prompts, a low-rank decomposition-based bitrate control algorithm is introduced. For inter-frame compression of prompts, a temporal smoothing-based prompt interpolation algorithm is proposed. Evaluations across various video domains and real network traces demonstrate Promptus can enhance the perceptual quality by 0.111 and 0.092 (in LPIPS) compared to VAE and H.265, respectively, and decreases the ratio of severely distorted frames by 89.3% and 91.7%. Moreover, Promptus achieves real-time video generation from prompts at over 150 FPS. To the best of our knowledge, Promptus is the first attempt to replace video codecs with prompt inversion and the first to use prompt streaming instead of video streaming. Our work opens up a new paradigm for efficient video communication beyond the Shannon limit.
Authors: Adam Sorrenti
Abstract: Separating vocal elements from musical tracks is a longstanding challenge in audio signal processing. This study tackles the distinct separation of vocal components from musical spectrograms. We employ the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) to extract audio waves into detailed frequency-time spectrograms, utilizing the benchmark MUSDB18 dataset for music separation. Subsequently, we implement a UNet neural network to segment the spectrogram image, aiming to delineate and extract singing voice components accurately. We achieved noteworthy results in audio source separation using of our U-Net-based models. The combination of frequency-axis normalization with Min/Max scaling and the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) loss function achieved the highest Source-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR) of 7.1 dB, indicating a high level of accuracy in preserving the quality of the original signal during separation. This setup also recorded impressive Source-to-Interference Ratio (SIR) and Source-to-Artifact Ratio (SAR) scores of 25.2 dB and 7.2 dB, respectively. These values significantly outperformed other configurations, particularly those using Quantile-based normalization or a Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss function. Our source code, model weights, and demo material can be found at the project's GitHub repository: https://github.com/mbrotos/SoundSeg
Authors: Kai Wu, Boyuan Jiang, Zhengkai Jiang, Qingdong He, Donghao Luo, Shengzhi Wang, Qingwen Liu, Chengjie Wang
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) contribute a powerful mechanism to understanding visual information building on large language models. However, MLLMs are notorious for suffering from hallucinations, especially when generating lengthy, detailed descriptions for images. Our analysis reveals that hallucinations stem from the inherent summarization mechanism of large language models, leading to excessive dependence on linguistic tokens while neglecting vision information. In this paper, we propose NoiseBoost, a broadly applicable and simple method for alleviating hallucinations for MLLMs through the integration of noise feature perturbations. Noise perturbation acts as a regularizer, facilitating a balanced distribution of attention weights among visual and linguistic tokens. Despite its simplicity, NoiseBoost consistently enhances the performance of MLLMs across common training strategies, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Further, NoiseBoost pioneerly enables semi-supervised learning for MLLMs, unleashing the power of unlabeled data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that NoiseBoost improves dense caption accuracy by 8.1% with human evaluation and achieves comparable results with 50% of the data by mining unlabeled data. Code and models are available at https://kaiwu5.github.io/noiseboost.
Authors: Shivam Grover, Amin Jalali, Ali Etemad
Abstract: Existing approaches for learning representations of time-series keep the temporal arrangement of the time-steps intact with the presumption that the original order is the most optimal for learning. However, non-adjacent sections of real-world time-series may have strong dependencies. Accordingly we raise the question: Is there an alternative arrangement for time-series which could enable more effective representation learning? To address this, we propose a simple plug-and-play mechanism called Segment, Shuffle, and Stitch (S3) designed to improve time-series representation learning of existing models. S3 works by creating non-overlapping segments from the original sequence and shuffling them in a learned manner that is the most optimal for the task at hand. It then re-attaches the shuffled segments back together and performs a learned weighted sum with the original input to capture both the newly shuffled sequence along with the original sequence. S3 is modular and can be stacked to create various degrees of granularity, and can be added to many forms of neural architectures including CNNs or Transformers with negligible computation overhead. Through extensive experiments on several datasets and state-of-the-art baselines, we show that incorporating S3 results in significant improvements for the tasks of time-series classification and forecasting, improving performance on certain datasets by up to 68\%. We also show that S3 makes the learning more stable with a smoother training loss curve and loss landscape compared to the original baseline. The code is available at https://github.com/shivam-grover/S3-TimeSeries .
Authors: Rustem Islamov, Yuan Gao, Sebastian U. Stich
Abstract: Communication efficiency has garnered significant attention as it is considered the main bottleneck for large-scale decentralized Machine Learning applications in distributed and federated settings. In this regime, clients are restricted to transmitting small amounts of quantized information to their neighbors over a communication graph. Numerous endeavors have been made to address this challenging problem by developing algorithms with compressed communication for decentralized non-convex optimization problems. Despite considerable efforts, the current results suffer from various issues such as non-scalability with the number of clients, requirements for large batches, or bounded gradient assumption. In this paper, we introduce MoTEF, a novel approach that integrates communication compression with Momentum Tracking and Error Feedback. Our analysis demonstrates that MoTEF achieves most of the desired properties, and significantly outperforms existing methods under arbitrary data heterogeneity. We provide numerical experiments to validate our theoretical findings and confirm the practical superiority of MoTEF.
Authors: Yingshan Chang, Yonatan Bisk
Abstract: Counting is a fundamental example of generalization, whether viewed through the mathematical lens of Peano's axioms defining the natural numbers or the cognitive science literature for children learning to count. The argument holds for both cases that learning to count means learning to count infinitely. While few papers have tried to distill transformer "reasoning" to the simplest case of counting, investigating length generalization does occur throughout the literature. In the "train short, test long" paradigm of NLP, length refers to the training sentence length. In formal language recognition, length refers to the input sequence length, or the maximum stack size induced by a pushdown automata. In general problem solving, length refers to the number of hops in a deductive reasoning chain or the recursion depth. For all cases, counting is central to task success. And crucially, generalizing counting inductively is central to success on OOD instances. This work provides extensive empirical results on training language models to count. We experiment with architectures ranging from RNNs, Transformers, State-Space Models and RWKV. We present carefully-designed task formats, auxiliary tasks and positional embeddings to avoid limitations in generalization with OOD-position and OOD-vocabulary. We find that while traditional RNNs trivially achieve inductive counting, Transformers have to rely on positional embeddings to count out-of-domain. As counting is the basis for many arguments concerning the expressivity of Transformers, our finding calls for the community to reexamine the application scope of primitive functions defined in formal characterizations. Finally, modern RNNs also largely underperform traditional RNNs in generalizing counting inductively. We discuss how design choices that enable parallelized training of modern RNNs cause them to lose merits of a recurrent nature.
Authors: Niki van Stein, Thomas B\"ack
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have demonstrated their ability to understand natural language and generate complex code snippets. This paper introduces a novel Large Language Model Evolutionary Algorithm (LLaMEA) framework, leveraging GPT models for the automated generation and refinement of algorithms. Given a set of criteria and a task definition (the search space), LLaMEA iteratively generates, mutates and selects algorithms based on performance metrics and feedback from runtime evaluations. This framework offers a unique approach to generating optimized algorithms without requiring extensive prior expertise. We show how this framework can be used to generate novel black-box metaheuristic optimization algorithms automatically. LLaMEA generates multiple algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art optimization algorithms (Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy and Differential Evolution) on the five dimensional black box optimization benchmark (BBOB). The results demonstrate the feasibility of the framework and identify future directions for automated generation and optimization of algorithms via LLMs.
Authors: Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Maria Chang, Moninder Singh
Abstract: The ability to summarize and organize knowledge into abstract concepts is key to learning and reasoning. Many industrial applications rely on the consistent and systematic use of concepts, especially when dealing with decision-critical knowledge. However, we demonstrate that, when methodically questioned, large language models (LLMs) often display and demonstrate significant inconsistencies in their knowledge. Computationally, the basic aspects of the conceptualization of a given domain can be represented as Is-A hierarchies in a knowledge graph (KG) or ontology, together with a few properties or axioms that enable straightforward reasoning. We show that even simple ontologies can be used to reveal conceptual inconsistencies across several LLMs. We also propose strategies that domain experts can use to evaluate and improve the coverage of key domain concepts in LLMs of various sizes. In particular, we have been able to significantly enhance the performance of LLMs of various sizes with openly available weights using simple knowledge-graph (KG) based prompting strategies.
Authors: Alaa Nfissi, Wassim Bouachir, Nizar Bouguila, Brian Mishara
Abstract: In speech emotion recognition (SER), using predefined features without considering their practical importance may lead to high dimensional datasets, including redundant and irrelevant information. Consequently, high-dimensional learning often results in decreasing model accuracy while increasing computational complexity. Our work underlines the importance of carefully considering and analyzing features in order to build efficient SER systems. We present a new supervised SER method based on an efficient feature engineering approach. We pay particular attention to the explainability of results to evaluate feature relevance and refine feature sets. This is performed iteratively through feature evaluation loop, using Shapley values to boost feature selection and improve overall framework performance. Our approach allows thus to balance the benefits between model performance and transparency. The proposed method outperforms human-level performance (HLP) and state-of-the-art machine learning methods in emotion recognition on the TESS dataset.
Authors: Kuang-Ming Chen, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract: The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent years has largely focused on English, resulting in models that respond exclusively in English. To adapt these models to other languages, continual pre-training (CP) is often employed, followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to maintain conversational abilities. However, CP and SFT can reduce a model's ability to filter harmful content. We propose Instruction Continual Pre-training (InsCP), which integrates instruction tags into the CP process to prevent loss of conversational proficiency while acquiring new languages. Our experiments demonstrate that InsCP retains conversational and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) abilities. Empirical evaluations on language alignment, reliability, and knowledge benchmarks confirm the efficacy of InsCP. Notably, this approach requires only 0.1 billion tokens of high-quality instruction-following data, thereby reducing resource consumption.
Authors: Zichao Hu, Junyi Jessy Li, Arjun Guha, Joydeep Biswas
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise at generating robot programs from natural language given domain-specific robot application programming interfaces (APIs). However, the performance gap between proprietary LLMs and smaller open-weight LLMs remains wide. This raises a question: Can we fine-tune smaller open-weight LLMs for generating domain-specific robot programs to close the performance gap with proprietary LLMs? While Self-Instruct is a promising solution by generating a diverse set of training data, it cannot verify the correctness of these programs. In contrast, a robot simulator with a well-defined world can identify execution errors but limits the diversity of programs that it can verify. In this work, we introduce Robo-Instruct, which brings the best of both worlds -- it promotes the diversity of Self-Instruct while providing the correctness of simulator-based checking. Robo-Instruct introduces RoboSim to synthesize a consistent world state on the fly by inferring properties relevant to the program being checked, and simulating actions accordingly. Furthermore, the instructions and programs generated by Self-Instruct may be subtly inconsistent -- such as the program missing a step implied by the instruction. Robo-Instruct further addresses this with InstAlign, an instruction-program alignment procedure that revises the task instruction to reflect the actual results of the generated program. Given a few seed task descriptions and the robot APIs, Robo-Instruct is capable of generating a training dataset using only a small open-weight model. This dataset can then be used to fine-tune small open-weight language models, enabling them to match or even exceed the performance of several proprietary LLMs, such as GPT-3.5-Turbo and Gemini-Pro.
Authors: Francesco Petri, Luigi Asprino, Aldo Gangemi
Abstract: World modelling, i.e. building a representation of the rules that govern the world so as to predict its evolution, is an essential ability for any agent interacting with the physical world. Recent applications of the Transformer architecture to the problem of world modelling from video input show notable improvements in sample efficiency. However, existing approaches tend to work only at the image level thus disregarding that the environment is composed of objects interacting with each other. In this paper, we propose an architecture combining Transformers for world modelling with the slot-attention paradigm, an approach for learning representations of objects appearing in a scene. We describe the resulting neural architecture and report experimental results showing an improvement over the existing solutions in terms of sample efficiency and a reduction of the variation of the performance over the training examples. The code for our architecture and experiments is available at https://github.com/torchipeppo/transformers-and-slot-encoding-for-wm
URLs: https://github.com/torchipeppo/transformers-and-slot-encoding-for-wm
Authors: Hangyeol Kang, Maher Ben Moussa, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann
Abstract: In this work, we describe our approach to developing an intelligent and robust social robotic system for the Nadine social robot platform. We achieve this by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and skilfully leveraging the powerful reasoning and instruction-following capabilities of these types of models to achieve advanced human-like affective and cognitive capabilities. This approach is novel compared to the current state-of-the-art LLM-based agents which do not implement human-like long-term memory or sophisticated emotional appraisal. The naturalness of social robots, consisting of multiple modules, highly depends on the performance and capabilities of each component of the system and the seamless integration of the components. We built a social robot system that enables generating appropriate behaviours through multimodal input processing, bringing episodic memories accordingly to the recognised user, and simulating the emotional states of the robot induced by the interaction with the human partner. In particular, we introduce an LLM-agent frame for social robots, SoR-ReAct, serving as a core component for the interaction module in our system. This design has brought forth the advancement of social robots and aims to increase the quality of human-robot interaction.
Authors: Andreas Koukounas, Georgios Mastrapas, Michael G\"unther, Bo Wang, Scott Martens, Isabelle Mohr, Saba Sturua, Mohammad Kalim Akram, Joan Fontanals Mart\'inez, Saahil Ognawala, Susana Guzman, Maximilian Werk, Nan Wang, Han Xiao
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) is widely used to train models to align images and texts in a common embedding space by mapping them to fixed-sized vectors. These models are key to multimodal information retrieval and related tasks. However, CLIP models generally underperform in text-only tasks compared to specialized text models. This creates inefficiencies for information retrieval systems that keep separate embeddings and models for text-only and multimodal tasks. We propose a novel, multi-task contrastive training method to address this issue, which we use to train the jina-clip-v1 model to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on both text-image and text-text retrieval tasks.
Authors: Sanghyeon Na, Yonggyu Kim, Hyunjoon Lee
Abstract: The generation of high-quality human images through text-to-image (T2I) methods is a significant yet challenging task. Distinct from general image generation, human image synthesis must satisfy stringent criteria related to human pose, anatomy, and alignment with textual prompts, making it particularly difficult to achieve realistic results. Recent advancements in T2I generation based on diffusion models have shown promise, yet challenges remain in meeting human-specific preferences. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach tailored specifically for human image generation utilizing Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Specifically, we introduce an efficient method for constructing a specialized DPO dataset for training human image generation models without the need for costly human feedback. We also propose a modified loss function that enhances the DPO training process by minimizing artifacts and improving image fidelity. Our method demonstrates its versatility and effectiveness in generating human images, including personalized text-to-image generation. Through comprehensive evaluations, we show that our approach significantly advances the state of human image generation, achieving superior results in terms of natural anatomies, poses, and text-image alignment.
Authors: Muyao Niu, Xiaodong Cun, Xintao Wang, Yong Zhang, Ying Shan, Yinqiang Zheng
Abstract: We present MOFA-Video, an advanced controllable image animation method that generates video from the given image using various additional controllable signals (such as human landmarks reference, manual trajectories, and another even provided video) or their combinations. This is different from previous methods which only can work on a specific motion domain or show weak control abilities with diffusion prior. To achieve our goal, we design several domain-aware motion field adapters (\ie, MOFA-Adapters) to control the generated motions in the video generation pipeline. For MOFA-Adapters, we consider the temporal motion consistency of the video and generate the dense motion flow from the given sparse control conditions first, and then, the multi-scale features of the given image are wrapped as a guided feature for stable video diffusion generation. We naively train two motion adapters for the manual trajectories and the human landmarks individually since they both contain sparse information about the control. After training, the MOFA-Adapters in different domains can also work together for more controllable video generation.
Authors: Ayyub Alzahem, Wadii Boulila, Maha Driss, Anis Koubaa
Abstract: Addressing uncertainty in Deep Learning (DL) is essential, as it enables the development of models that can make reliable predictions and informed decisions in complex, real-world environments where data may be incomplete or ambiguous. This paper introduces a novel algorithm leveraging Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) to integrate multiple pre-trained models to form an ensemble capable of providing more reliable and enhanced classifications. The main steps of the proposed method include feature extraction, mass function calculation, fusion, and expected utility calculation. Several experiments have been conducted on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, demonstrating superior classification accuracy of the proposed DST-based method, achieving improvements of 5.4% and 8.4%, respectively, compared to the best individual pre-trained models. Results highlight the potential of DST as a robust framework for managing uncertainties related to data when applying DL in real-world scenarios.
Authors: Derek Lim, Moe Putterman, Robin Walters, Haggai Maron, Stefanie Jegelka
Abstract: Many algorithms and observed phenomena in deep learning appear to be affected by parameter symmetries -- transformations of neural network parameters that do not change the underlying neural network function. These include linear mode connectivity, model merging, Bayesian neural network inference, metanetworks, and several other characteristics of optimization or loss-landscapes. However, theoretical analysis of the relationship between parameter space symmetries and these phenomena is difficult. In this work, we empirically investigate the impact of neural parameter symmetries by introducing new neural network architectures that have reduced parameter space symmetries. We develop two methods, with some provable guarantees, of modifying standard neural networks to reduce parameter space symmetries. With these new methods, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study consisting of multiple tasks aimed at assessing the effect of removing parameter symmetries. Our experiments reveal several interesting observations on the empirical impact of parameter symmetries; for instance, we observe linear mode connectivity between our networks without alignment of weight spaces, and we find that our networks allow for faster and more effective Bayesian neural network training.
Authors: Jaerin Lee, Bong Gyun Kang, Kihoon Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee
Abstract: One puzzling artifact in machine learning dubbed grokking is where delayed generalization is achieved tenfolds of iterations after near perfect overfitting to the training data. Focusing on the long delay itself on behalf of machine learning practitioners, our goal is to accelerate generalization of a model under grokking phenomenon. By regarding a series of gradients of a parameter over training iterations as a random signal over time, we can spectrally decompose the parameter trajectories under gradient descent into two components: the fast-varying, overfitting-yielding component and the slow-varying, generalization-inducing component. This analysis allows us to accelerate the grokking phenomenon more than $\times 50$ with only a few lines of code that amplifies the slow-varying components of gradients. The experiments show that our algorithm applies to diverse tasks involving images, languages, and graphs, enabling practical availability of this peculiar artifact of sudden generalization. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ironjr/grokfast}.
Authors: Brian Coyle, El Amine Cherrat, Nishant Jain, Natansh Mathur, Snehal Raj, Skander Kazdaghli, Iordanis Kerenidis
Abstract: Quantum machine learning requires powerful, flexible and efficiently trainable models to be successful in solving challenging problems. In this work, we present density quantum neural networks, a learning model incorporating randomisation over a set of trainable unitaries. These models generalise quantum neural networks using parameterised quantum circuits, and allow a trade-off between expressibility and efficient trainability, particularly on quantum hardware. We demonstrate the flexibility of the formalism by applying it to two recently proposed model families. The first are commuting-block quantum neural networks (QNNs) which are efficiently trainable but may be limited in expressibility. The second are orthogonal (Hamming-weight preserving) quantum neural networks which provide well-defined and interpretable transformations on data but are challenging to train at scale on quantum devices. Density commuting QNNs improve capacity with minimal gradient complexity overhead, and density orthogonal neural networks admit a quadratic-to-constant gradient query advantage with minimal to no performance loss. We conduct numerical experiments on synthetic translationally invariant data and MNIST image data with hyperparameter optimisation to support our findings. Finally, we discuss the connection to post-variational quantum neural networks, measurement-based quantum machine learning and the dropout mechanism.
Authors: Franz Louis Cesista, Rui Aguiar, Jason Kim, Paolo Acilo
Abstract: Business Document Information Extraction (BDIE) is the problem of transforming a blob of unstructured information (raw text, scanned documents, etc.) into a structured format that downstream systems can parse and use. It has two main tasks: Key-Information Extraction (KIE) and Line Items Recognition (LIR). In this paper, we argue that BDIE is best modeled as a Tool Use problem, where the tools are these downstream systems. We then present Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation (RASG), a novel general framework for BDIE that achieves state of the art (SOTA) results on both KIE and LIR tasks on BDIE benchmarks. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) We show, with ablation benchmarks, that Large Language Models (LLMs) with RASG are already competitive with or surpasses current SOTA Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) without RASG on BDIE benchmarks. (2) We propose a new metric class for Line Items Recognition, General Line Items Recognition Metric (GLIRM), that is more aligned with practical BDIE use cases compared to existing metrics, such as ANLS*, DocILE, and GriTS. (3) We provide a heuristic algorithm for backcalculating bounding boxes of predicted line items and tables without the need for vision encoders. Finally, we claim that, while LMMs might sometimes offer marginal performance benefits, LLMs + RASG is oftentimes superior given real-world applications and constraints of BDIE.
Authors: Siva Uday Sampreeth Chebolu, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Thamar Solorio
Abstract: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has experienced tremendous expansion and diversity due to various shared tasks spanning several languages and fields and organized via SemEval workshops and Germeval. Nonetheless, a few shortcomings still need to be addressed, such as the lack of low-resource language evaluations and the emphasis on sentence-level analysis. To thoroughly assess ABSA techniques in the context of complete reviews, this research presents a novel task, Review-Level Opinion Aspect Sentiment Target (ROAST). ROAST seeks to close the gap between sentence-level and text-level ABSA by identifying every ABSA constituent at the review level. We extend the available datasets to enable ROAST, addressing the drawbacks noted in previous research by incorporating low-resource languages, numerous languages, and a variety of topics. Through this effort, ABSA research will be able to cover more ground and get a deeper comprehension of the task and its practical application in a variety of languages and domains (https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/ROAST-ABSA).
Authors: D\'aniel R\'acz, Mih\'aly Petreczky, B\'alint Dar\'oczy
Abstract: Many state-of-the-art models trained on long-range sequences, for example S4, S5 or LRU, are made of sequential blocks combining State-Space Models (SSMs) with neural networks. In this paper we provide a PAC bound that holds for these kind of architectures with stable SSM blocks and does not depend on the length of the input sequence. Imposing stability of the SSM blocks is a standard practice in the literature, and it is known to help performance. Our results provide a theoretical justification for the use of stable SSM blocks as the proposed PAC bound decreases as the degree of stability of the SSM blocks increases.
Authors: Sijie Zhao, Yong Zhang, Xiaodong Cun, Shaoshu Yang, Muyao Niu, Xiaoyu Li, Wenbo Hu, Ying Shan
Abstract: Spatio-temporal compression of videos, utilizing networks such as Variational Autoencoders (VAE), plays a crucial role in OpenAI's SORA and numerous other video generative models. For instance, many LLM-like video models learn the distribution of discrete tokens derived from 3D VAEs within the VQVAE framework, while most diffusion-based video models capture the distribution of continuous latent extracted by 2D VAEs without quantization. The temporal compression is simply realized by uniform frame sampling which results in unsmooth motion between consecutive frames. Currently, there lacks of a commonly used continuous video (3D) VAE for latent diffusion-based video models in the research community. Moreover, since current diffusion-based approaches are often implemented using pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models, directly training a video VAE without considering the compatibility with existing T2I models will result in a latent space gap between them, which will take huge computational resources for training to bridge the gap even with the T2I models as initialization. To address this issue, we propose a method for training a video VAE of latent video models, namely CV-VAE, whose latent space is compatible with that of a given image VAE, e.g., image VAE of Stable Diffusion (SD). The compatibility is achieved by the proposed novel latent space regularization, which involves formulating a regularization loss using the image VAE. Benefiting from the latent space compatibility, video models can be trained seamlessly from pre-trained T2I or video models in a truly spatio-temporally compressed latent space, rather than simply sampling video frames at equal intervals. With our CV-VAE, existing video models can generate four times more frames with minimal finetuning. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed video VAE.
Authors: Maria B{\aa}nkestad, Olof Mogren, Aleksis Pirinen
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for constructing graph neural networks equivariant to 2D rotations and translations and leveraging them as PDE surrogates on non-gridded domains. We show that aligning the representations with the principal axis allows us to sidestep many constraints while preserving SE(2) equivariance. By applying our model as a surrogate for fluid flow simulations and conducting thorough benchmarks against non-equivariant models, we demonstrate significant gains in terms of both data efficiency and accuracy.
Authors: Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Nicholas Bryan
Abstract: Controllable music generation methods are critical for human-centered AI-based music creation, but are currently limited by speed, quality, and control design trade-offs. Diffusion Inference-Time T-optimization (DITTO), in particular, offers state-of-the-art results, but is over 10x slower than real-time, limiting practical use. We propose Distilled Diffusion Inference-Time T -Optimization (or DITTO-2), a new method to speed up inference-time optimization-based control and unlock faster-than-real-time generation for a wide-variety of applications such as music inpainting, outpainting, intensity, melody, and musical structure control. Our method works by (1) distilling a pre-trained diffusion model for fast sampling via an efficient, modified consistency or consistency trajectory distillation process (2) performing inference-time optimization using our distilled model with one-step sampling as an efficient surrogate optimization task and (3) running a final multi-step sampling generation (decoding) using our estimated noise latents for best-quality, fast, controllable generation. Through thorough evaluation, we find our method not only speeds up generation over 10-20x, but simultaneously improves control adherence and generation quality all at once. Furthermore, we apply our approach to a new application of maximizing text adherence (CLAP score) and show we can convert an unconditional diffusion model without text inputs into a model that yields state-of-the-art text control. Sound examples can be found at https://ditto-music.github.io/ditto2/.
Authors: Ajay Patel, Markus Hofmarcher, Claudiu Leoveanu-Condrei, Marius-Constantin Dinu, Chris Callison-Burch, Sepp Hochreiter
Abstract: Training models to act as agents that can effectively navigate and perform actions in a complex environment, such as a web browser, has typically been challenging due to lack of training data. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated some capability to navigate novel environments as agents in a zero-shot or few-shot fashion, purely guided by natural language instructions as prompts. Recent research has also demonstrated LLMs have the capability to exceed their base performance through self-improvement, i.e. fine-tuning on data generated by the model itself. In this work, we explore the extent to which LLMs can self-improve their performance as agents in long-horizon tasks in a complex environment using the WebArena benchmark. In WebArena, an agent must autonomously navigate and perform actions on web pages to achieve a specified objective. We explore fine-tuning on three distinct synthetic training data mixtures and achieve a 31\% improvement in task completion rate over the base model on the WebArena benchmark through a self-improvement procedure. We additionally contribute novel evaluation metrics for assessing the performance, robustness, capabilities, and quality of trajectories of our fine-tuned agent models to a greater degree than simple, aggregate-level benchmark scores currently used to measure self-improvement.
Authors: Ziwei Ji, Yuzhe Gu, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen
Abstract: Reducing the `$\textit{hallucination}$' problem of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for their wide applications. A comprehensive and fine-grained measurement of the hallucination is the first key step for the governance of this issue but is under-explored in the community. Thus, we present $\textbf{ANAH}$, a bilingual dataset that offers $\textbf{AN}$alytical $\textbf{A}$nnotation of $\textbf{H}$allucinations in LLMs within Generative Question Answering. Each answer sentence in our dataset undergoes rigorous annotation, involving the retrieval of a reference fragment, the judgment of the hallucination type, and the correction of hallucinated content. ANAH consists of ~12k sentence-level annotations for ~4.3k LLM responses covering over 700 topics, constructed by a human-in-the-loop pipeline. Thanks to the fine granularity of the hallucination annotations, we can quantitatively confirm that the hallucinations of LLMs progressively accumulate in the answer and use ANAH to train and evaluate hallucination annotators. We conduct extensive experiments on studying generative and discriminative annotators and show that, although current open-source LLMs have difficulties in fine-grained hallucination annotation, the generative annotator trained with ANAH can surpass all open-source LLMs and GPT-3.5, obtain performance competitive with GPT-4, and exhibits better generalization ability on unseen questions.
Authors: Roberto Ceraolo, Dmitrii Kharlapenko, Am\'elie Reymond, Rada Mihalcea, Mrinmaya Sachan, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing Jin
Abstract: Humans have an innate drive to seek out causality. Whether fuelled by curiosity or specific goals, we constantly question why things happen, how they are interconnected, and many other related phenomena. To develop AI agents capable of addressing this natural human quest for causality, we urgently need a comprehensive dataset of natural causal questions. Unfortunately, existing datasets either contain only artificially-crafted questions that do not reflect real AI usage scenarios or have limited coverage of questions from specific sources. To address this gap, we present CausalQuest, a dataset of 13,500 naturally occurring questions sourced from social networks, search engines, and AI assistants. We formalize the definition of causal questions and establish a taxonomy for finer-grained classification. Through a combined effort of human annotators and large language models (LLMs), we carefully label the dataset. We find that 42% of the questions humans ask are indeed causal, with the majority seeking to understand the causes behind given effects. Using this dataset, we train efficient classifiers (up to 2.85B parameters) for the binary task of identifying causal questions, achieving high performance with F1 scores of up to 0.877. We conclude with a rich set of future research directions that can build upon our data and models.
Authors: Aditya Ganeshan, Ryan Y. Huang, Xianghao Xu, R. Kenny Jones, Daniel Ritchie
Abstract: The ability to edit 3D assets from natural language presents a compelling paradigm to aid in the democratization of 3D content creation. However, while natural language is often effective at communicating general intent, it is poorly suited for specifying precise manipulation. To address this gap, we introduce ParSEL, a system that enables controllable editing of high-quality 3D assets from natural language. Given a segmented 3D mesh and an editing request, ParSEL produces a parameterized editing program. Adjusting the program parameters allows users to explore shape variations with a precise control over the magnitudes of edits. To infer editing programs which align with an input edit request, we leverage the abilities of large-language models (LLMs). However, while we find that LLMs excel at identifying initial edit operations, they often fail to infer complete editing programs, and produce outputs that violate shape semantics. To overcome this issue, we introduce Analytical Edit Propagation (AEP), an algorithm which extends a seed edit with additional operations until a complete editing program has been formed. Unlike prior methods, AEP searches for analytical editing operations compatible with a range of possible user edits through the integration of computer algebra systems for geometric analysis. Experimentally we demonstrate ParSEL's effectiveness in enabling controllable editing of 3D objects through natural language requests over alternative system designs.
Authors: Sangyun Lee, Zinan Lin, Giulia Fanti
Abstract: Diffusion models have shown great promise for image and video generation, but sampling from state-of-the-art models requires expensive numerical integration of a generative ODE. One approach for tackling this problem is rectified flows, which iteratively learn smooth ODE paths that are less susceptible to truncation error. However, rectified flows still require a relatively large number of function evaluations (NFEs). In this work, we propose improved techniques for training rectified flows, allowing them to compete with knowledge distillation methods even in the low NFE setting. Our main insight is that under realistic settings, a single iteration of the Reflow algorithm for training rectified flows is sufficient to learn nearly straight trajectories; hence, the current practice of using multiple Reflow iterations is unnecessary. We thus propose techniques to improve one-round training of rectified flows, including a U-shaped timestep distribution and LPIPS-Huber premetric. With these techniques, we improve the FID of the previous 2-rectified flow by up to 72% in the 1 NFE setting on CIFAR-10. On ImageNet 64$\times$64, our improved rectified flow outperforms the state-of-the-art distillation methods such as consistency distillation and progressive distillation in both one-step and two-step settings and rivals the performance of improved consistency training (iCT) in FID. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/rfpp.
Authors: Nan Huang, Xiaobao Wei, Wenzhao Zheng, Pengju An, Ming Lu, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Kurt Keutzer, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract: Photorealistic 3D reconstruction of street scenes is a critical technique for developing real-world simulators for autonomous driving. Despite the efficacy of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for driving scenes, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) emerges as a promising direction due to its faster speed and more explicit representation. However, most existing street 3DGS methods require tracked 3D vehicle bounding boxes to decompose the static and dynamic elements for effective reconstruction, limiting their applications for in-the-wild scenarios. To facilitate efficient 3D scene reconstruction without costly annotations, we propose a self-supervised street Gaussian ($\textit{S}^3$Gaussian) method to decompose dynamic and static elements from 4D consistency. We represent each scene with 3D Gaussians to preserve the explicitness and further accompany them with a spatial-temporal field network to compactly model the 4D dynamics. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging Waymo-Open dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Our $\textit{S}^3$Gaussian demonstrates the ability to decompose static and dynamic scenes and achieves the best performance without using 3D annotations. Code is available at: https://github.com/nnanhuang/S3Gaussian/.
Authors: Dixuan Lin, Yuxiang Zhang, Mengcheng Li, Yebin Liu, Wei Jing, Qi Yan, Qianying Wang, Hongwen Zhang
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce 4DHands, a robust approach to recovering interactive hand meshes and their relative movement from monocular inputs. Our approach addresses two major limitations of previous methods: lacking a unified solution for handling various hand image inputs and neglecting the positional relationship of two hands within images. To overcome these challenges, we develop a transformer-based architecture with novel tokenization and feature fusion strategies. Specifically, we propose a Relation-aware Two-Hand Tokenization (RAT) method to embed positional relation information into the hand tokens. In this way, our network can handle both single-hand and two-hand inputs and explicitly leverage relative hand positions, facilitating the reconstruction of intricate hand interactions in real-world scenarios. As such tokenization indicates the relative relationship of two hands, it also supports more effective feature fusion. To this end, we further develop a Spatio-temporal Interaction Reasoning (SIR) module to fuse hand tokens in 4D with attention and decode them into 3D hand meshes and relative temporal movements. The efficacy of our approach is validated on several benchmark datasets. The results on in-the-wild videos and real-world scenarios demonstrate the superior performances of our approach for interactive hand reconstruction. More video results can be found on the project page: https://4dhands.github.io.
Authors: Laura Kopf, Philine Lou Bommer, Anna Hedstr\"om, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Marina M. -C. H\"ohne, Kirill Bykov
Abstract: A crucial aspect of understanding the complex nature of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is the ability to explain learned concepts within their latent representations. While various methods exist to connect neurons to textual descriptions of human-understandable concepts, evaluating the quality of these explanation methods presents a major challenge in the field due to a lack of unified, general-purpose quantitative evaluation. In this work, we introduce CoSy (Concept Synthesis) -- a novel, architecture-agnostic framework to evaluate the quality of textual explanations for latent neurons. Given textual explanations, our proposed framework leverages a generative model conditioned on textual input to create data points representing the textual explanation. Then, the neuron's response to these explanation data points is compared with the response to control data points, providing a quality estimate of the given explanation. We ensure the reliability of our proposed framework in a series of meta-evaluation experiments and demonstrate practical value through insights from benchmarking various concept-based textual explanation methods for Computer Vision tasks, showing that tested explanation methods significantly differ in quality.
Authors: Lening Wang, Wenzhao Zheng, Yilong Ren, Han Jiang, Zhiyong Cui, Haiyang Yu, Jiwen Lu
Abstract: Understanding the evolution of 3D scenes is important for effective autonomous driving. While conventional methods mode scene development with the motion of individual instances, world models emerge as a generative framework to describe the general scene dynamics. However, most existing methods adopt an autoregressive framework to perform next-token prediction, which suffer from inefficiency in modeling long-term temporal evolutions. To address this, we propose a diffusion-based 4D occupancy generation model, OccSora, to simulate the development of the 3D world for autonomous driving. We employ a 4D scene tokenizer to obtain compact discrete spatial-temporal representations for 4D occupancy input and achieve high-quality reconstruction for long-sequence occupancy videos. We then learn a diffusion transformer on the spatial-temporal representations and generate 4D occupancy conditioned on a trajectory prompt. We conduct extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes dataset with Occ3D occupancy annotations. OccSora can generate 16s-videos with authentic 3D layout and temporal consistency, demonstrating its ability to understand the spatial and temporal distributions of driving scenes. With trajectory-aware 4D generation, OccSora has the potential to serve as a world simulator for the decision-making of autonomous driving. Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/OccSora.
Authors: Matthew Olckers, Toby Walsh
Abstract: In peer mechanisms, the competitors for a prize also determine who wins. Each competitor may be asked to rank, grade, or nominate peers for the prize. Since the prize can be valuable, such as financial aid, course grades, or an award at a conference, competitors may be tempted to manipulate the mechanism. We survey approaches to prevent or discourage the manipulation of peer mechanisms. We conclude our survey by identifying several important research challenges.
Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett
Abstract: The concept of intelligent software is flawed. The behaviour of software is determined by the hardware that "interprets" it. This undermines claims regarding the behaviour of theorised, software superintelligence. Here we characterise this problem as "computational dualism", where instead of mental and physical substance, we have software and hardware. We argue that to make objective claims regarding performance we must avoid computational dualism. We propose a pancomputational alternative wherein every aspect of the environment is a relation between irreducible states. We formalise systems as behaviour (inputs and outputs), and cognition as embodied, embedded, extended and enactive. The result is cognition formalised as a part of the environment, rather than as a disembodied policy interacting with the environment through an interpreter. This allows us to make objective claims regarding intelligence, which we argue is the ability to "generalise", identify causes and adapt. We then establish objective upper bounds for intelligent behaviour. This suggests AGI will be safer, but more limited, than theorised.
Authors: Assaf Libman, Nir Oren, Bruno Yun
Abstract: Weighted gradual semantics provide an acceptability degree to each argument representing the strength of the argument, computed based on factors including background evidence for the argument, and taking into account interactions between this argument and others. We introduce four important problems linking gradual semantics and acceptability degrees. First, we reexamine the inverse problem, seeking to identify the argument weights of the argumentation framework which lead to a specific final acceptability degree. Second, we ask whether the function mapping between argument weights and acceptability degrees is injective or a homeomorphism onto its image. Third, we ask whether argument weights can be found when preferences, rather than acceptability degrees for arguments are considered. Fourth, we consider the topology of the space of valid acceptability degrees, asking whether "gaps" exist in this space. While different gradual semantics have been proposed in the literature, in this paper, we identify a large family of weighted gradual semantics, called abstract weighted based gradual semantics. These generalise many of the existing semantics while maintaining desirable properties such as convergence to a unique fixed point. We also show that a sub-family of the weighted gradual semantics, called abstract weighted (L^p,\lambda,\mu)-based gradual semantics and which include well-known semantics, solve all four of the aforementioned problems.
Authors: Akbir Khan, John Hughes, Dan Valentine, Laura Ruis, Kshitij Sachan, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Edward Grefenstette, Samuel R. Bowman, Tim Rockt\"aschel, Ethan Perez
Abstract: Common methods for aligning large language models (LLMs) with desired behaviour heavily rely on human-labelled data. However, as models grow increasingly sophisticated, they will surpass human expertise, and the role of human evaluation will evolve into non-experts overseeing experts. In anticipation of this, we ask: can weaker models assess the correctness of stronger models? We investigate this question in an analogous setting, where stronger models (experts) possess the necessary information to answer questions and weaker models (non-experts) lack this information. The method we evaluate is debate, where two LLM experts each argue for a different answer, and a non-expert selects the answer. We find that debate consistently helps both non-expert models and humans answer questions, achieving 76% and 88% accuracy respectively (naive baselines obtain 48% and 60%). Furthermore, optimising expert debaters for persuasiveness in an unsupervised manner improves non-expert ability to identify the truth in debates. Our results provide encouraging empirical evidence for the viability of aligning models with debate in the absence of ground truth.
Authors: Dexun Li, Cong Zhang, Kuicai Dong, Derrick Goh Xin Deik, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu
Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning is widely used for aligning Large Language Models (LLM) with human preference. However, the conventional reward modelling is predominantly dependent on human annotations provided by a select cohort of individuals. Such dependence may unintentionally result in skewed models that reflect the inclinations of these annotators, thereby failing to adequately represent the wider population's expectations. We propose the Distributional Preference Reward Model (DPRM), a simple yet effective framework to align large language models with diverse human preferences. To this end, we characterize multiple preferences by a categorical distribution and introduce a Bayesian updater to accommodate shifted or new preferences. On top of that, we design an optimal-transportation-based loss to calibrate DPRM to align with the preference distribution. Finally, the expected reward is utilized to fine-tune an LLM policy to generate responses favoured by the population. Our experiments show that DPRM significantly enhances the alignment of LLMs with population preference, yielding more accurate, unbiased, and contextually appropriate responses.
Authors: Wentao Zhu, Zhining Zhang, Yizhou Wang
Abstract: Understanding and attributing mental states, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), emerges as a fundamental capability for human social reasoning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) appear to possess certain ToM abilities, the mechanisms underlying these capabilities remain elusive. In this study, we discover that it is possible to linearly decode the belief status from the perspectives of various agents through neural activations of language models, indicating the existence of internal representations of self and others' beliefs. By manipulating these representations, we observe dramatic changes in the models' ToM performance, underscoring their pivotal role in the social reasoning process. Additionally, our findings extend to diverse social reasoning tasks that involve different causal inference patterns, suggesting the potential generalizability of these representations.
Authors: Qusai Abo Obaidah, Muhy Eddin Za'ter, Adnan Jaljuli, Ali Mahboub, Asma Hakouz, Bashar Al-Rfooh, Yazan Estaitia
Abstract: This work is an attempt to introduce a comprehensive benchmark for Arabic speech recognition, specifically tailored to address the challenges of telephone conversations in Arabic language. Arabic, characterized by its rich dialectal diversity and phonetic complexity, presents a number of unique challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. These challenges are further amplified in the domain of telephone calls, where audio quality, background noise, and conversational speech styles negatively affect recognition accuracy. Our work aims to establish a robust benchmark that not only encompasses the broad spectrum of Arabic dialects but also emulates the real-world conditions of call-based communications. By incorporating diverse dialectical expressions and accounting for the variable quality of call recordings, this benchmark seeks to provide a rigorous testing ground for the development and evaluation of ASR systems capable of navigating the complexities of Arabic speech in telephonic contexts. This work also attempts to establish a baseline performance evaluation using state-of-the-art ASR technologies.
Authors: Nikita Durasov, Doruk Oner, Jonathan Donier, Hieu Le, Pascal Fua
Abstract: Turning pass-through network architectures into iterative ones, which use their own output as input, is a well-known approach for boosting performance. In this paper, we argue that such architectures offer an additional benefit: The convergence rate of their successive outputs is highly correlated with the accuracy of the value to which they converge. Thus, we can use the convergence rate as a useful proxy for uncertainty. This results in an approach to uncertainty estimation that provides state-of-the-art estimates at a much lower computational cost than techniques like Ensembles, and without requiring any modifications to the original iterative model. We demonstrate its practical value by embedding it in two application domains: road detection in aerial images and the estimation of aerodynamic properties of 2D and 3D shapes.
Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett
Abstract: Simplicity is held by many to be the key to general intelligence. Simpler models tend to "generalise", identifying the cause or generator of data with greater sample efficiency. The implications of the correlation between simplicity and generalisation extend far beyond computer science, addressing questions of physics and even biology. Yet simplicity is a property of form, while generalisation is of function. In interactive settings, any correlation between the two depends on interpretation. In theory there could be no correlation and yet in practice, there is. Previous theoretical work showed generalisation to be a consequence of "weak" constraints implied by function, not form. Experiments demonstrated choosing weak constraints over simple forms yielded a 110-500% improvement in generalisation rate. Here we show that all constraints can take equally simple forms, regardless of weakness. However if forms are spatially extended, then function is represented using a finite subset of forms. If function is represented using a finite subset of forms, then we can force a correlation between simplicity and generalisation by making weak constraints take simple forms. If function is determined by a goal directed process that favours versatility (e.g. natural selection), then efficiency demands weak constraints take simple forms. Complexity has no causal influence on generalisation, but appears to due to confounding.
Authors: Tianbao Xie, Danyang Zhang, Jixuan Chen, Xiaochuan Li, Siheng Zhao, Ruisheng Cao, Toh Jing Hua, Zhoujun Cheng, Dongchan Shin, Fangyu Lei, Yitao Liu, Yiheng Xu, Shuyan Zhou, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Victor Zhong, Tao Yu
Abstract: Autonomous agents that accomplish complex computer tasks with minimal human interventions have the potential to transform human-computer interaction, significantly enhancing accessibility and productivity. However, existing benchmarks either lack an interactive environment or are limited to environments specific to certain applications or domains, failing to reflect the diverse and complex nature of real-world computer use, thereby limiting the scope of tasks and agent scalability. To address this issue, we introduce OSWorld, the first-of-its-kind scalable, real computer environment for multimodal agents, supporting task setup, execution-based evaluation, and interactive learning across various operating systems such as Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS. OSWorld can serve as a unified, integrated computer environment for assessing open-ended computer tasks that involve arbitrary applications. Building upon OSWorld, we create a benchmark of 369 computer tasks involving real web and desktop apps in open domains, OS file I/O, and workflows spanning multiple applications. Each task example is derived from real-world computer use cases and includes a detailed initial state setup configuration and a custom execution-based evaluation script for reliable, reproducible evaluation. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents on OSWorld reveals significant deficiencies in their ability to serve as computer assistants. While humans can accomplish over 72.36% of the tasks, the best model achieves only 12.24% success, primarily struggling with GUI grounding and operational knowledge. Comprehensive analysis using OSWorld provides valuable insights for developing multimodal generalist agents that were not possible with previous benchmarks. Our code, environment, baseline models, and data are publicly available at https://os-world.github.io.
Authors: Chengpeng Hu, Yunlong Zhao, Jialin Liu
Abstract: Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked new opportunities for procedural content generation. However, recent attempts mainly focus on level generation for specific games with defined game rules such as Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. This paper investigates the game generation via LLMs. Based on video game description language, this paper proposes an LLM-based framework to generate game rules and levels simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate how the framework works with prompts considering different combinations of context. Our findings extend the current applications of LLMs and offer new insights for generating new games in the area of procedural content generation.
Authors: Ningsheng Zhao, Jia Yuan Yu, Krzysztof Dzieciolowski, Trang Bui
Abstract: Shapley value attribution (SVA) is an increasingly popular explainable AI (XAI) method, which quantifies the contribution of each feature to the model's output. However, recent work has shown that most existing methods to implement SVAs have some drawbacks, resulting in biased or unreliable explanations that fail to correctly capture the true intrinsic relationships between features and model outputs. Moreover, the mechanism and consequences of these drawbacks have not been discussed systematically. In this paper, we propose a novel error theoretical analysis framework, in which the explanation errors of SVAs are decomposed into two components: observation bias and structural bias. We further clarify the underlying causes of these two biases and demonstrate that there is a trade-off between them. Based on this error analysis framework, we develop two novel concepts: over-informative and underinformative explanations. We demonstrate how these concepts can be effectively used to understand potential errors of existing SVA methods. In particular, for the widely deployed assumption-based SVAs, we find that they can easily be under-informative due to the distribution drift caused by distributional assumptions. We propose a measurement tool to quantify such a distribution drift. Finally, our experiments illustrate how different existing SVA methods can be over- or under-informative. Our work sheds light on how errors incur in the estimation of SVAs and encourages new less error-prone methods.
Authors: Shenzhe Zhu, Shengxiang Sun
Abstract: Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep neural networks have driven significant progress in vision and text processing. However, achieving human-like reasoning and interpretability in AI systems remains a substantial challenge. The Neural-Symbolic paradigm, which integrates neural networks with symbolic systems, presents a promising pathway toward more interpretable AI. Within this paradigm, Knowledge Graphs (KG) are crucial, offering a structured and dynamic method for representing knowledge through interconnected entities and relationships, typically as triples (subject, predicate, object). This paper explores recent advancements in neural-symbolic integration based on KG, examining how it supports integration in three categories: enhancing the reasoning and interpretability of neural networks with symbolic knowledge (Symbol for Neural), refining the completeness and accuracy of symbolic systems via neural network methodologies (Neural for Symbol), and facilitating their combined application in Hybrid Neural-Symbolic Integration. It highlights current trends and proposes future research directions in Neural-Symbolic AI.
Authors: Guy Davidson, Graham Todd, Julian Togelius, Todd M. Gureckis, Brenden M. Lake
Abstract: People are remarkably capable of generating their own goals, beginning with child's play and continuing into adulthood. Despite considerable empirical and computational work on goals and goal-oriented behavior, models are still far from capturing the richness of everyday human goals. Here, we bridge this gap by collecting a dataset of human-generated playful goals, modeling them as reward-producing programs, and generating novel human-like goals through program synthesis. Reward-producing programs capture the rich semantics of goals through symbolic operations that compose, add temporal constraints, and allow for program execution on behavioral traces to evaluate progress. To build a generative model of goals, we learn a fitness function over the infinite set of possible goal programs and sample novel goals with a quality-diversity algorithm. Human evaluators found that model-generated goals, when sampled from partitions of program space occupied by human examples, were indistinguishable from human-created games. We also discovered that our model's internal fitness scores predict games that are evaluated as more fun to play and more human-like.
Authors: Cong Zhang, Derrick Goh Xin Deik, Dexun Li, Hao Zhang, Yong Liu
Abstract: The rapid advancement of neural language models has sparked a new surge of intelligent agent research. Unlike traditional agents, large language model-based agents (LLM agents) have emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) due to their superior reasoning and generalization capabilities. Effective planning is crucial for the success of LLM agents in real-world tasks, making it a highly pursued topic in the community. Current planning methods typically translate tasks into executable action sequences. However, determining a feasible or optimal sequence for complex tasks at fine granularity, which often requires compositing long chains of heterogeneous actions, remains challenging. This paper introduces Meta-Task Planning (MTP), a zero-shot methodology for collaborative LLM-based multi-agent systems that simplifies complex task planning by decomposing it into a hierarchy of subordinate tasks, or meta-tasks. Each meta-task is then mapped into executable actions. MTP was assessed on two rigorous benchmarks, TravelPlanner and API-Bank. Notably, MTP achieved an average $\sim40\%$ success rate on TravelPlanner, significantly higher than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline ($2.92\%$), and outperforming $LLM_{api}$-4 with ReAct on API-Bank by $\sim14\%$, showing the immense potential of integrating LLM with multi-agent systems.
Authors: Zhenjie Zhang, Yuyang Rao, Hao Xiao, Xiaokui Xiao, Yin Yang
Abstract: Generative AI models, such as GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion, have demonstrated powerful and disruptive capabilities in natural language and image tasks. However, deploying these models in decentralized environments remains challenging. Unlike traditional centralized deployment, systematically guaranteeing the integrity of AI model services in fully decentralized environments, particularly on trustless blockchains, is both crucial and difficult. In this paper, we present a new inference paradigm called \emph{proof of quality} (PoQ) to enable the deployment of arbitrarily large generative models on blockchain architecture. Unlike traditional approaches based on validating inference procedures, such as ZKML or OPML, our PoQ paradigm focuses on the outcome quality of model inference. Using lightweight BERT-based cross-encoders as our underlying quality evaluation model, we design and implement PQML, the first practical protocol for real-world NLP generative model inference on blockchains, tailored for popular open-source models such as Llama 3 and Mixtral. Our analysis demonstrates that our protocol is robust against adversarial but rational participants in ecosystems, where lazy or dishonest behavior results in fewer benefits compared to well-behaving participants. The computational overhead of validating the quality evaluation is minimal, allowing quality validators to complete the quality check within a second, even using only a CPU. Preliminary simulation results show that PoQ consensus is generated in milliseconds, 1,000 times faster than any existing scheme.
Authors: Anirudhan Badrinath, Prabhat Agarwal, Jiajing Xu
Abstract: For aligning large language models (LLMs), prior work has leveraged reinforcement learning via human feedback (RLHF) or variations of direct preference optimization (DPO). While DPO offers a simpler framework based on maximum likelihood estimation, it compromises on the ability to tune language models to easily maximize non-differentiable and non-binary objectives according to the LLM designer's preferences (e.g., using simpler language or minimizing specific kinds of harmful content). These may neither align with user preferences nor even be able to be captured tractably by binary preference data. To leverage the simplicity and performance of DPO with the generalizability of RL, we propose a hybrid approach between DPO and RLHF. With a simple augmentation to the implicit reward decomposition of DPO, we allow for tuning LLMs to maximize a set of arbitrary auxiliary rewards using offline RL. The proposed method, Hybrid Preference Optimization (HPO), shows the ability to effectively generalize to both user preferences and auxiliary designer objectives, while preserving alignment performance across a range of challenging benchmarks and model sizes.
Authors: Ho Long Fung, Victor-Alexandru Darvariu, Stephen Hailes, Mirco Musolesi
Abstract: An often neglected issue in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is the potential presence of unreliable agents in the environment whose deviations from expected behavior can prevent a system from accomplishing its intended tasks. In particular, consensus is a fundamental underpinning problem of cooperative distributed multi-agent systems. Consensus requires different agents, situated in a decentralized communication network, to reach an agreement out of a set of initial proposals that they put forward. Learning-based agents should adopt a protocol that allows them to reach consensus despite having one or more unreliable agents in the system. This paper investigates the problem of unreliable agents in MARL, considering consensus as a case study. Echoing established results in the distributed systems literature, our experiments show that even a moderate fraction of such agents can greatly impact the ability of reaching consensus in a networked environment. We propose Reinforcement Learning-based Trusted Consensus (RLTC), a decentralized trust mechanism, in which agents can independently decide which neighbors to communicate with. We empirically demonstrate that our trust mechanism is able to handle unreliable agents effectively, as evidenced by higher consensus success rates.
Authors: Eva Memmel, Clara Menzen, Jetze Schuurmans, Frederiek Wesel, Kim Batselier
Abstract: For the first time, this position paper introduces a fundamental link between tensor networks (TNs) and Green AI, highlighting their synergistic potential to enhance both the inclusivity and sustainability of AI research. We argue that TNs are valuable for Green AI due to their strong mathematical backbone and inherent logarithmic compression potential. We undertake a comprehensive review of the ongoing discussions on Green AI, emphasizing the importance of sustainability and inclusivity in AI research to demonstrate the significance of establishing the link between Green AI and TNs. To support our position, we first provide a comprehensive overview of efficiency metrics proposed in Green AI literature and then evaluate examples of TNs in the fields of kernel machines and deep learning using the proposed efficiency metrics. This position paper aims to incentivize meaningful, constructive discussions by bridging fundamental principles of Green AI and TNs. We advocate for researchers to seriously evaluate the integration of TNs into their research projects, and in alignment with the link established in this paper, we support prior calls encouraging researchers to treat Green AI principles as a research priority.
Authors: Shih-Cheng Huang, Shih-Heng Wang, Min-Han Shih, Saurav Sahay, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract: Parameter-efficient (PE) methods (like Prompts or Adapters) for adapting pre-trained language models (PLM) to downstream tasks have been popular recently. However, hindrances still prevent these methods from reaching their full potential. For example, two significant challenges are few-shot adaptation and cross-task generalization. To tackle these issues, we propose a general PE priming framework to enhance and explore the few-shot adaptation and generalization ability of PE methods. In this framework, PLMs are primed with PE methods for rapidly adapting to various target tasks. To evaluate the generalization ability of these PE methods, we conduct experiments on a few-shot cross-domain benchmark containing 160 diverse NLP tasks. Our experiment not only reveals the best priming strategy but also verifies that priming facilitates the adaptation to target tasks.
Authors: Mevan Ekanayake, Zhifeng Chen, Mehrtash Harandi, Gary Egan, Zhaolin Chen
Abstract: In Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), image acquisitions are often undersampled in the measurement domain to accelerate the scanning process, at the expense of image quality. However, image quality is a crucial factor that influences the accuracy of clinical diagnosis; hence, high-quality image reconstruction from undersampled measurements has been a key area of research. Recently, deep learning (DL) methods have emerged as the state-of-the-art for MRI reconstruction, typically involving deep neural networks to transform undersampled MRI images into high-quality MRI images through data-driven processes. Nevertheless, there is clear and significant room for improvement in undersampled DL MRI reconstruction to meet the high standards required for clinical diagnosis, in terms of eliminating aliasing artifacts and reducing image noise. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised pretraining procedure using contrastive learning to improve the accuracy of undersampled DL MRI reconstruction. We use contrastive learning to transform the MRI image representations into a latent space that maximizes mutual information among different undersampled representations and optimizes the information content at the input of the downstream DL reconstruction models. Our experiments demonstrate improved reconstruction accuracy across a range of acceleration factors and datasets, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, our extended experiments validate the proposed framework's robustness under adversarial conditions, such as measurement noise, different k-space sampling patterns, and pathological abnormalities, and also prove the transfer learning capabilities on MRI datasets with completely different anatomy. Additionally, we conducted experiments to visualize and analyze the properties of the proposed MRI contrastive learning latent space.
Authors: Meghyn Bienvenu, Camille Bourgaux
Abstract: This paper revisits the problem of repairing and querying inconsistent databases equipped with universal constraints. We adopt symmetric difference repairs, in which both deletions and additions of facts can be used to restore consistency, and suppose that preferred repair actions are specified via a binary priority relation over (negated) facts. Our first contribution is to show how existing notions of optimal repairs, defined for simpler denial constraints and repairs solely based on fact deletion, can be suitably extended to our richer setting. We next study the computational properties of the resulting repair notions, in particular, the data complexity of repair checking and inconsistency-tolerant query answering. Finally, we clarify the relationship between optimal repairs of prioritized databases and repair notions introduced in the framework of active integrity constraints. In particular, we show that Pareto-optimal repairs in our setting correspond to founded, grounded and justified repairs w.r.t. the active integrity constraints obtained by translating the prioritized database. Our study also yields useful insights into the behavior of active integrity constraints.
Authors: Xue Yang, Zifeng Liu, Xiaohu Tang, Rongxing Lu, Bo Liu
Abstract: With the emergence of privacy leaks in federated learning, secure aggregation protocols that mainly adopt either homomorphic encryption or threshold secret sharing have been widely developed for federated learning to protect the privacy of the local training data of each client. However, these existing protocols suffer from many shortcomings, such as the dependence on a trusted third party, the vulnerability to clients being corrupted, low efficiency, the trade-off between security and fault tolerance, etc. To solve these disadvantages, we propose an efficient and multi-private key secure aggregation scheme for federated learning. Specifically, we skillfully modify the variant ElGamal encryption technique to achieve homomorphic addition operation, which has two important advantages: 1) The server and each client can freely select public and private keys without introducing a trust third party and 2) Compared to the variant ElGamal encryption, the plaintext space is relatively large, which is more suitable for the deep model. Besides, for the high dimensional deep model parameter, we introduce a super-increasing sequence to compress multi-dimensional data into 1-D, which can greatly reduce encryption and decryption times as well as communication for ciphertext transmission. Detailed security analyses show that our proposed scheme achieves the semantic security of both individual local gradients and the aggregated result while achieving optimal robustness in tolerating both client collusion and dropped clients. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the accuracy of our scheme is almost the same as the non-private approach, while the efficiency of our scheme is much better than the state-of-the-art homomorphic encryption-based secure aggregation schemes. More importantly, the efficiency advantages of our scheme will become increasingly prominent as the number of model parameters increases.
Authors: Siqi Liang, Jintao Huang, Junyuan Hong, Dun Zeng, Jiayu Zhou, Zenglin Xu
Abstract: Federated learning has gained popularity for distributed learning without aggregating sensitive data from clients. But meanwhile, the distributed and isolated nature of data isolation may be complicated by data quality, making it more vulnerable to noisy labels. Many efforts exist to defend against the negative impacts of noisy labels in centralized or federated settings. However, there is a lack of a benchmark that comprehensively considers the impact of noisy labels in a wide variety of typical FL settings. In this work, we serve the first standardized benchmark that can help researchers fully explore potential federated noisy settings. Also, we conduct comprehensive experiments to explore the characteristics of these data settings and unravel challenging scenarios on the federated noisy label learning, which may guide method development in the future. We highlight the 20 basic settings for more than 5 datasets proposed in our benchmark and standardized simulation pipeline for federated noisy label learning. We hope this benchmark can facilitate idea verification in federated learning with noisy labels. \texttt{FedNoisy} is available at \codeword{https://github.com/SMILELab-FL/FedNoisy}.
Authors: Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Ammar Battah, Norbert Tihanyi, Ridhi Jain, Diana Maimut, Fatima Alwahedi, Thierry Lestable, Narinderjit Singh Thandi, Abdechakour Mechri, Merouane Debbah, Lucas C. Cordeiro
Abstract: Software vulnerabilities can cause numerous problems, including crashes, data loss, and security breaches. These issues greatly compromise quality and can negatively impact the market adoption of software applications and systems. Traditional bug-fixing methods, such as static analysis, often produce false positives. While bounded model checking, a form of Formal Verification (FV), can provide more accurate outcomes compared to static analyzers, it demands substantial resources and significantly hinders developer productivity. Can Machine Learning (ML) achieve accuracy comparable to FV methods and be used in popular instant code completion frameworks in near real-time? In this paper, we introduce SecureFalcon, an innovative model architecture with only 121 million parameters derived from the Falcon-40B model and explicitly tailored for classifying software vulnerabilities. To achieve the best performance, we trained our model using two datasets, namely the FormAI dataset and the FalconVulnDB. The FalconVulnDB is a combination of recent public datasets, namely the SySeVR framework, Draper VDISC, Bigvul, Diversevul, SARD Juliet, and ReVeal datasets. These datasets contain the top 25 most dangerous software weaknesses, such as CWE-119, CWE-120, CWE-476, CWE-122, CWE-190, CWE-121, CWE-78, CWE-787, CWE-20, and CWE-762. SecureFalcon achieves 94% accuracy in binary classification and up to 92% in multiclassification, with instant CPU inference times. It outperforms existing models such as BERT, RoBERTa, CodeBERT, and traditional ML algorithms, promising to push the boundaries of software vulnerability detection and instant code completion frameworks.
Authors: Thanh Vinh Vo, Young lee, Tze-Yun Leong
Abstract: Decentralized data sources are prevalent in real-world applications, posing a formidable challenge for causal inference. These sources cannot be consolidated into a single entity owing to privacy constraints. The presence of dissimilar data distributions and missing values within them can potentially introduce bias to the causal estimands. In this article, we propose a framework to estimate causal effects from decentralized data sources. The proposed framework avoid exchanging raw data among the sources, thus contributing towards privacy-preserving causal learning. Three instances of the proposed framework are introduced to estimate causal effects across a wide range of diverse scenarios within a federated setting. (1) FedCI: a Bayesian framework based on Gaussian processes for estimating causal effects from federated observational data sources. It estimates the posterior distributions of the causal effects to compute the higher-order statistics that capture the uncertainty. (2) CausalRFF: an adaptive transfer algorithm that learns the similarities among the data sources by utilizing Random Fourier Features to disentangle the loss function into multiple components, each of which is associated with a data source. It estimates the similarities among the sources through transfer coefficients, and hence requiring no prior information about the similarity measures. (3) CausalFI: a new approach for federated causal inference from incomplete data, enabling the estimation of causal effects from multiple decentralized and incomplete data sources. It accounts for the missing data under the missing at random assumption, while also estimating higher-order statistics of the causal estimands. The proposed federated framework and its instances are an important step towards a privacy-preserving causal learning model.
Authors: Jiaan Wang, Yunlong Liang, Zengkui Sun, Yuxuan Cao, Jiarong Xu, Fandong Meng
Abstract: Knowledge editing aims to change language models' performance on several special cases (i.e., editing scope) by infusing the corresponding expected knowledge into them. With the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), knowledge editing has been shown as a promising technique to adapt LLMs to new knowledge without retraining from scratch. However, most of the previous studies neglect the multi-lingual nature of some main-stream LLMs (e.g., LLaMA, ChatGPT and GPT-4), and typically focus on monolingual scenarios, where LLMs are edited and evaluated in the same language. As a result, it is still unknown the effect of source language editing on a different target language. In this paper, we aim to figure out this cross-lingual effect in knowledge editing. Specifically, we first collect a large-scale cross-lingual synthetic dataset by translating ZsRE from English to Chinese. Then, we conduct English editing on various knowledge editing methods covering different paradigms, and evaluate their performance in Chinese, and vice versa. To give deeper analyses of the cross-lingual effect, the evaluation includes four aspects, i.e., reliability, generality, locality and portability. Furthermore, we analyze the inconsistent behaviors of the edited models and discuss their specific challenges. Data and codes are available at https://github.com/krystalan/Bi_ZsRE
Authors: Cristiana Bolchini, Luca Cassano, Antonio Miele
Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) is currently being exploited in numerous applications being one of the most effective Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, used in diverse fields, such as vision, autonomous systems, and alike. The trend motivated a significant amount of contributions to the analysis and design of ML applications against faults affecting the underlying hardware. The authors investigate the existing body of knowledge on Deep Learning (among ML techniques) resilience against hardware faults systematically through a thoughtful review in which the strengths and weaknesses of this literature stream are presented clearly and then future avenues of research are set out. The review is based on 220 scientific articles published between January 2019 and March 2024. The authors adopt a classifying framework to interpret and highlight research similarities and peculiarities, based on several parameters, starting from the main scope of the work, the adopted fault and error models, to their reproducibility. This framework allows for a comparison of the different solutions and the identification of possible synergies. Furthermore, suggestions concerning the future direction of research are proposed in the form of open challenges to be addressed.
Authors: Daniele Condorelli, Massimiliano Furlan
Abstract: We simulate behaviour of two independent reinforcement learning algorithms playing the Crawford and Sobel (1982) game of strategic information transmission. We adopt memoryless algorithms to capture learning in a static game where a large population interacts anonymously. We show that sender and receiver converge to Nash equilibrium play. The level of informativeness of the sender's cheap talk decreases as the bias increases and, at intermediate level of the bias, it matches the level predicted by the Pareto optimal equilibrium or by the second best one. Conclusions are robust to alternative specifications of the learning hyperparameters and of the game.
Authors: Haoran Luo, Haihong E, Zichen Tang, Shiyao Peng, Yikai Guo, Wentai Zhang, Chenghao Ma, Guanting Dong, Meina Song, Wei Lin, Yifan Zhu, Luu Anh Tuan
Abstract: Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions over large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), which can be summarized into two crucial steps: knowledge retrieval and semantic parsing. However, three core challenges remain: inefficient knowledge retrieval, mistakes of retrieval adversely impacting semantic parsing, and the complexity of previous KBQA methods. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ChatKBQA, a novel and simple generate-then-retrieve KBQA framework, which proposes first generating the logical form with fine-tuned LLMs, then retrieving and replacing entities and relations with an unsupervised retrieval method, to improve both generation and retrieval more directly. Experimental results show that ChatKBQA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on standard KBQA datasets, WebQSP, and CWQ. This work can also be regarded as a new paradigm for combining LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) for interpretable and knowledge-required question answering. Our code is publicly available.
Authors: Shengyao Zhuang, Honglei Zhuang, Bevan Koopman, Guido Zuccon
Abstract: We propose a novel zero-shot document ranking approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs): the Setwise prompting approach. Our approach complements existing prompting approaches for LLM-based zero-shot ranking: Pointwise, Pairwise, and Listwise. Through the first-of-its-kind comparative evaluation within a consistent experimental framework and considering factors like model size, token consumption, latency, among others, we show that existing approaches are inherently characterised by trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency. We find that while Pointwise approaches score high on efficiency, they suffer from poor effectiveness. Conversely, Pairwise approaches demonstrate superior effectiveness but incur high computational overhead. Our Setwise approach, instead, reduces the number of LLM inferences and the amount of prompt token consumption during the ranking procedure, compared to previous methods. This significantly improves the efficiency of LLM-based zero-shot ranking, while also retaining high zero-shot ranking effectiveness. We make our code and results publicly available at \url{https://github.com/ielab/llm-rankers}.
Authors: Yupei Liu, Yuqi Jia, Runpeng Geng, Jinyuan Jia, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Abstract: A prompt injection attack aims to inject malicious instruction/data into the input of an LLM-Integrated Application such that it produces results as an attacker desires. Existing works are limited to case studies. As a result, the literature lacks a systematic understanding of prompt injection attacks and their defenses. We aim to bridge the gap in this work. In particular, we propose a framework to formalize prompt injection attacks. Existing attacks are special cases in our framework. Moreover, based on our framework, we design a new attack by combining existing ones. Using our framework, we conduct a systematic evaluation on 5 prompt injection attacks and 10 defenses with 10 LLMs and 7 tasks. Our work provides a common benchmark for quantitatively evaluating future prompt injection attacks and defenses. To facilitate research on this topic, we make our platform public at https://github.com/liu00222/Open-Prompt-Injection.
Authors: Weiye Zhao, Feihan Li, Yifan Sun, Rui Chen, Tianhao Wei, Changliu Liu
Abstract: In recent years, trust region on-policy reinforcement learning has achieved impressive results in addressing complex control tasks and gaming scenarios. However, contemporary state-of-the-art algorithms within this category primarily emphasize improvement in expected performance, lacking the ability to control over the worst-case performance outcomes. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel objective function, optimizing which leads to guaranteed monotonic improvement in the lower probability bound of performance with high confidence. Building upon this groundbreaking theoretical advancement, we further introduce a practical solution called Absolute Policy Optimization (APO). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across challenging continuous control benchmark tasks and extend its applicability to mastering Atari games. Our findings reveal that APO as well as its efficient variation Proximal Absolute Policy Optimization (PAPO) significantly outperforms state-of-the-art policy gradient algorithms, resulting in substantial improvements in worst-case performance, as well as expected performance.
Authors: Aodong Chen, Fei Xu, Li Han, Yuan Dong, Li Chen, Zhi Zhou, Fangming Liu
Abstract: GPUs have become the \emph{defacto} hardware devices for accelerating Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference workloads. However, the conventional \emph{sequential execution mode of DNN operators} in mainstream deep learning frameworks cannot fully utilize GPU resources, even with the operator fusion enabled, due to the increasing complexity of model structures and a greater diversity of operators. Moreover, the \emph{inadequate operator launch order} in parallelized execution scenarios can lead to GPU resource wastage and unexpected performance interference among operators. In this paper, we propose \emph{Opara}, a resource- and interference-aware DNN \underline{Op}erator \underline{para}llel scheduling framework to accelerate DNN inference on GPUs. Specifically, \emph{Opara} first employs \texttt{CUDA Streams} and \texttt{CUDA Graph} to \emph{parallelize} the execution of multiple operators automatically. To further expedite DNN inference, \emph{Opara} leverages the resource demands of operators to judiciously adjust the operator launch order on GPUs, overlapping the execution of compute-intensive and memory-intensive operators. We implement and open source a prototype of \emph{Opara} based on PyTorch in a \emph{non-intrusive} manner. Extensive prototype experiments with representative DNN and Transformer-based models demonstrate that \emph{Opara} outperforms the default sequential \texttt{CUDA Graph} in PyTorch and the state-of-the-art operator parallelism systems by up to $1.68\times$ and $1.29\times$, respectively, yet with acceptable runtime overhead.
Authors: Yao Zhao, Zhitian Xie, Chen Liang, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements across various tasks, such as question answering, translation, text summarization, and dialogue systems, the need for accuracy in information becomes crucial, especially for serious financial products serving billions of users like Alipay. However, for a real-world product serving millions of users, the inference speed of LLMs becomes a critical factor compared to a mere experimental model. Hence, this paper presents a generic framework for accelerating the inference process, resulting in a substantial increase in speed and cost reduction for our LLM-based scenarios, with lossless generation accuracy. In the traditional inference process, each token is generated sequentially by the LLM, leading to a time consumption proportional to the number of generated tokens. To enhance this process, our framework, named \textit{lookahead}, introduces a \textit{multi-branch} strategy. Instead of generating a single token at a time, we propose a Trie-based retrieval and verification mechanism to be able to accept several tokens at a forward step. Our strategy offers two distinct advantages: (1) it guarantees absolute correctness of the output, avoiding any approximation algorithms, and (2) the worst-case performance of our approach is equivalent to the conventional process. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the significant improvements achieved by applying our inference acceleration framework. Our framework is widely deployed in Alipay since April 2023, and obtain remarkable 2.66x to 6.26x speedup. Our code is available at https://github.com/alipay/PainlessInferenceAcceleration.
URLs: https://github.com/alipay/PainlessInferenceAcceleration.
Authors: Yang Lv, Brandon R. Zink, Robert P. Bloom, H\"usrev C{\i}lasun, Pravin Khanal, Salonik Resch, Zamshed Chowdhury, Ali Habiboglu, Weigang Wang, Sachin S. Sapatnekar, Ulya Karpuzcu, Jian-Ping Wang
Abstract: Conventional computing paradigm struggles to fulfill the rapidly growing demands from emerging applications, especially those for machine intelligence, because much of the power and energy is consumed by constant data transfers between logic and memory modules. A new paradigm, called "computational random-access memory (CRAM)" has emerged to address this fundamental limitation. CRAM performs logic operations directly using the memory cells themselves, without having the data ever leave the memory. The energy and performance benefits of CRAM for both conventional and emerging applications have been well established by prior numerical studies. However, there lacks an experimental demonstration and study of CRAM to evaluate its computation accuracy, which is a realistic and application-critical metrics for its technological feasibility and competitiveness. In this work, a CRAM array based on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) is experimentally demonstrated. First, basic memory operations as well as 2-, 3-, and 5-input logic operations are studied. Then, a 1-bit full adder with two different designs is demonstrated. Based on the experimental results, a suite of modeling has been developed to characterize the accuracy of CRAM computation. Scalar addition, multiplication, and matrix multiplication, which are essential building blocks for many conventional and machine intelligence applications, are evaluated and show promising accuracy performance. With the confirmation of MTJ-based CRAM's accuracy, there is a strong case that this technology will have a significant impact on power- and energy-demanding applications of machine intelligence.
Authors: Chenghao Fan, Wei Wei, Xiaoye Qu, Zhenyi Lu, Wenfeng Xie, Yu Cheng, Dangyang Chen
Abstract: Recently, prompt-tuning with pre-trained language models (PLMs) has demonstrated the significantly enhancing ability of relation extraction (RE) tasks. However, in low-resource scenarios, where the available training data is scarce, previous prompt-based methods may still perform poorly for prompt-based representation learning due to a superficial understanding of the relation. To this end, we highlight the importance of learning high-quality relation representation in low-resource scenarios for RE, and propose a novel prompt-based relation representation method, named MVRE (\underline{M}ulti-\underline{V}iew \underline{R}elation \underline{E}xtraction), to better leverage the capacity of PLMs to improve the performance of RE within the low-resource prompt-tuning paradigm. Specifically, MVRE decouples each relation into different perspectives to encompass multi-view relation representations for maximizing the likelihood during relation inference. Furthermore, we also design a Global-Local loss and a Dynamic-Initialization method for better alignment of the multi-view relation-representing virtual words, containing the semantics of relation labels during the optimization learning process and initialization. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in low-resource settings.
Authors: Asma Ghandeharioun, Avi Caciularu, Adam Pearce, Lucas Dixon, Mor Geva
Abstract: Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) can help explain models' behavior and verify their alignment with human values. Given the capabilities of LLMs in generating human-understandable text, we propose leveraging the model itself to explain its internal representations in natural language. We introduce a framework called Patchscopes and show how it can be used to answer a wide range of questions about an LLM's computation. We show that many prior interpretability methods based on projecting representations into the vocabulary space and intervening on the LLM computation can be viewed as instances of this framework. Moreover, several of their shortcomings such as failure in inspecting early layers or lack of expressivity can be mitigated by Patchscopes. Beyond unifying prior inspection techniques, Patchscopes also opens up new possibilities such as using a more capable model to explain the representations of a smaller model, and multihop reasoning error correction.
Authors: Qingyun Wang, Zixuan Zhang, Hongxiang Li, Xuan Liu, Jiawei Han, Huimin Zhao, Heng Ji
Abstract: Fine-grained few-shot entity extraction in the chemical domain faces two unique challenges. First, compared with entity extraction tasks in the general domain, sentences from chemical papers usually contain more entities. Moreover, entity extraction models usually have difficulty extracting entities of long-tailed types. In this paper, we propose Chem-FINESE, a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based few-shot entity extraction approach, to address these two challenges. Our Chem-FINESE has two components: a seq2seq entity extractor to extract named entities from the input sentence and a seq2seq self-validation module to reconstruct the original input sentence from extracted entities. Inspired by the fact that a good entity extraction system needs to extract entities faithfully, our new self-validation module leverages entity extraction results to reconstruct the original input sentence. Besides, we design a new contrastive loss to reduce excessive copying during the extraction process. Finally, we release ChemNER+, a new fine-grained chemical entity extraction dataset that is annotated by domain experts with the ChemNER schema. Experiments in few-shot settings with both ChemNER+ and CHEMET datasets show that our newly proposed framework has contributed up to 8.26% and 6.84% absolute F1-score gains respectively.
Authors: Qirui Jiao, Daoyuan Chen, Yilun Huang, Yaliang Li, Ying Shen
Abstract: Despite the impressive capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in integrating text and image modalities, challenges remain in accurately interpreting detailed visual elements. This paper presents an empirical study on enhancing MLLMs with state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models to improve fine-grained understanding and reduce hallucination in responses. We investigate the embedding-based infusion of textual detection information, the impact of such infusion on MLLMs' original abilities, and the interchangeability of detection models. We conduct systematic and extensive experiments with representative models such as LLaVA-1.5, DINO, PaddleOCRv2, and Grounding DINO, revealing that our simple yet general approach not only refines MLLMs' performance in fine-grained visual tasks but also maintains their original strengths. Notably, the enhanced LLaVA-1.5 outperforms its original 7B/13B models on all 10 benchmarks, achieving an improvement of up to 12.5% on the normalized average score. We release our codes to facilitate further exploration into the fine-grained multimodal capabilities of MLLMs.
Authors: Artur Back de Luca, Kimon Fountoulakis
Abstract: The execution of graph algorithms using neural networks has recently attracted significant interest due to promising empirical progress. This motivates further understanding of how neural networks can replicate reasoning steps with relational data. In this work, we study the ability of transformer networks to simulate algorithms on graphs from a theoretical perspective. The architecture we use is a looped transformer with extra attention heads that interact with the graph. We prove by construction that this architecture can simulate individual algorithms such as Dijkstra's shortest path, Breadth- and Depth-First Search, and Kosaraju's strongly connected components, as well as multiple algorithms simultaneously. The number of parameters in the networks does not increase with the input graph size, which implies that the networks can simulate the above algorithms for any graph. Despite this property, we show a limit to simulation in our solution due to finite precision. Finally, we show a Turing Completeness result with constant width when the extra attention heads are utilized.
Authors: Haochun Wang, Sendong Zhao, Zewen Qiang, Nuwa Xi, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
Abstract: In the field of natural language processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have precipitated a paradigm shift, markedly enhancing performance in natural language generation tasks. Despite these advancements, the comprehensive evaluation of LLMs remains an inevitable challenge for the community. Recently, the utilization of Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) as a benchmark for LLMs has gained considerable traction. This study first investigates the limitations of MCQA as an evaluation method for LLMs and then analyzes the fundamental reason for the limitations of MCQA, that while LLMs may select the correct answers, it is possible that they also recognize other wrong options as correct. Finally, we propose a dataset augmenting method for Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs), MCQA+, that can more accurately reflect the performance of the model, which underscores the need for more robust evaluation mechanisms in assessing the performance of LLMs.
Authors: Zhiyuan Hu, Chumin Liu, Xidong Feng, Yilun Zhao, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu, Junxian He, Pang Wei Koh, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: In the face of uncertainty, the ability to *seek information* is of fundamental importance. In many practical applications, such as medical diagnosis and troubleshooting, the information needed to solve the task is not initially given and has to be actively sought by asking follow-up questions (for example, a doctor asking a patient for more details about their symptoms). In this work, we introduce Uncertainty of Thoughts (UoT), an algorithm to augment large language models with the ability to actively seek information by asking effective questions. UoT combines 1) an *uncertainty-aware simulation approach* which enables the model to simulate possible future scenarios and how likely they are to occur, 2) *uncertainty-based rewards* motivated by information gain which incentivizes the model to seek information, and 3) a *reward propagation scheme* to select the optimal question to ask in a way that maximizes the expected reward. In experiments on medical diagnosis, troubleshooting, and the `20 Questions` game, UoT achieves an average performance improvement of 38.1% in the rate of successful task completion across multiple LLMs compared with direct prompting and also improves efficiency (i.e., the number of questions needed to complete the task). Our code has been released [here](https://github.com/zhiyuanhubj/UoT)
Authors: Yoad Tewel, Omri Kaduri, Rinon Gal, Yoni Kasten, Lior Wolf, Gal Chechik, Yuval Atzmon
Abstract: Text-to-image models offer a new level of creative flexibility by allowing users to guide the image generation process through natural language. However, using these models to consistently portray the same subject across diverse prompts remains challenging. Existing approaches fine-tune the model to teach it new words that describe specific user-provided subjects or add image conditioning to the model. These methods require lengthy per-subject optimization or large-scale pre-training. Moreover, they struggle to align generated images with text prompts and face difficulties in portraying multiple subjects. Here, we present ConsiStory, a training-free approach that enables consistent subject generation by sharing the internal activations of the pretrained model. We introduce a subject-driven shared attention block and correspondence-based feature injection to promote subject consistency between images. Additionally, we develop strategies to encourage layout diversity while maintaining subject consistency. We compare ConsiStory to a range of baselines, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on subject consistency and text alignment, without requiring a single optimization step. Finally, ConsiStory can naturally extend to multi-subject scenarios, and even enable training-free personalization for common objects.
Authors: Junhong Shen, Neil Tenenholtz, James Brian Hall, David Alvarez-Melis, Nicolo Fusi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating natural language. However, their capabilities wane in highly specialized domains underrepresented in the pretraining corpus, such as physical and biomedical sciences. This work explores how to repurpose general LLMs into effective task solvers for specialized domains. We introduce a novel, model-agnostic framework for learning custom input tags, which are parameterized as continuous vectors appended to the LLM's embedding layer, to condition the LLM. We design two types of input tags: domain tags are used to delimit specialized representations (e.g., chemical formulas) and provide domain-relevant context; function tags are used to represent specific functions (e.g., predicting molecular properties) and compress function-solving instructions. We develop a three-stage protocol to learn these tags using auxiliary data and domain knowledge. By explicitly disentangling task domains from task functions, our method enables zero-shot generalization to unseen problems through diverse combinations of the input tags. It also boosts LLM's performance in various specialized domains, such as predicting protein or chemical properties and modeling drug-target interactions, outperforming expert models tailored to these tasks.
Authors: Reijo Jaakkola, Tomi Janhunen, Antti Kuusisto, Masood Feyzbakhsh Rankooh, Miikka Vilander
Abstract: We introduce a method for computing immediately human interpretable yet accurate classifiers from tabular data. The classifiers obtained are short Boolean formulas, computed via first discretizing the original data and then using feature selection coupled with a very fast algorithm for producing the best possible Boolean classifier for the setting. We demonstrate the approach via 13 experiments, obtaining results with accuracies comparable to ones obtained via random forests, XGBoost, and existing results for the same datasets in the literature. In most cases, the accuracy of our method is in fact similar to that of the reference methods, even though the main objective of our study is the immediate interpretability of our classifiers. We also prove a new result on the probability that the classifier we obtain from real-life data corresponds to the ideally best classifier with respect to the background distribution the data comes from.
Authors: Jian Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Jiashuo Wang, Dongding Lin, Wenjie Li, Xiao-Yong Wei
Abstract: Tuning language models for dialogue generation has been a prevalent paradigm for building capable dialogue agents. Yet, traditional tuning narrowly views dialogue generation as resembling other language generation tasks, ignoring the role disparities between two speakers and the multi-round interactive process that dialogues ought to be. Such a manner often leads to unsatisfactory chat consistency for the built agent. In this work, we emphasize the interactive, communicative nature of dialogue and argue that it is more feasible to model the speaker roles of agent and user separately, enabling the agent to adhere to its role consistently. With this in mind, we propose an efficient Multi-round Interactive Dialogue Tuning (Midi-Tuning) framework. It models the agent and user individually with two adapters built upon large language models. The adapters make use of respective utterances round by round in alternating order and they are tuned via a round-level memory caching mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, our framework performs superior to traditional fine-tuning and harbors the tremendous potential for improving dialogue consistency.
Authors: Siddharth Karamcheti, Suraj Nair, Ashwin Balakrishna, Percy Liang, Thomas Kollar, Dorsa Sadigh
Abstract: Visually-conditioned language models (VLMs) have seen growing adoption in applications such as visual dialogue, scene understanding, and robotic task planning; adoption that has fueled a wealth of new models such as LLaVa, InstructBLIP, and PaLI-3. Despite the volume of new releases, key design decisions around image preprocessing, architecture, and optimization are under-explored, making it challenging to understand what factors account for model performance $-$ a challenge further complicated by the lack of objective, consistent evaluations. To address these gaps, we first compile a suite of standardized evaluations spanning visual question answering, object localization, and challenge sets that probe properties such as hallucination; evaluations that provide fine-grained insight VLM capabilities. Second, we rigorously investigate VLMs along key design axes, including pretrained visual representations and training from base vs. instruct-tuned language models, amongst others. We couple our analysis with three resource contributions: (1) a unified framework for evaluating VLMs, (2) optimized, flexible training code, and (3) checkpoints for all models, including a family of VLMs at the 7-13B scale that strictly outperform InstructBLIP and LLaVa v1.5, the state-of-the-art in open VLMs.
Authors: Zekun Li, Zhiyu Zoey Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Luna Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, Paul A. Crook
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. However, their effectiveness in task-oriented dialogues (TOD), which requires not only response generation but also effective dialogue state tracking (DST) within specific tasks and domains, remains less satisfying. In this work, we propose a novel approach FnCTOD for solving DST with LLMs through function calling. This method improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves exceptional performance with both modestly sized open-source and also proprietary LLMs: with in-context prompting it enables various 7B or 13B parameter models to surpass the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) achieved by ChatGPT, and improves ChatGPT's performance beating the SOTA by 5.6% average joint goal accuracy (JGA). Individual model results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are boosted by 4.8% and 14%, respectively. We also show that by fine-tuning on a small collection of diverse task-oriented dialogues, we can equip modestly sized models, specifically a 13B parameter LLaMA2-Chat model, with function-calling capabilities and DST performance comparable to ChatGPT while maintaining their chat capabilities. We have made the code publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/FnCTOD
Authors: Jiamu Bai, Daoyuan Chen, Bingchen Qian, Liuyi Yao, Yaliang Li
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has recently been applied to the parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). While promising, it raises significant challenges due to the heterogeneous resources and data distributions of clients. This study introduces FlexLoRA, a simple yet effective aggregation scheme for LLM fine-tuning, which mitigates the ``bucket effect'' in traditional FL that restricts the potential of clients with ample resources by tying them to the capabilities of the least-resourced participants. FlexLoRA allows for dynamic adjustment of local LoRA ranks, fostering the development of a global model imbued with broader, less task-specific knowledge. By synthesizing a full-size LoRA weight from individual client contributions and employing Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for weight redistribution, FlexLoRA fully leverages heterogeneous client resources. Involving thousands of clients performing heterogeneous NLP tasks and client resources, our experiments validate the efficacy of FlexLoRA, with the federated global model achieving consistently better improvement over SOTA FL methods in downstream NLP task performance across various heterogeneous distributions. FlexLoRA's practicality is further underscored by our theoretical analysis and its seamless integration with existing LoRA-based FL methods, offering a path toward cross-device, privacy-preserving federated tuning for LLMs.
Authors: Xudong Lu, Qi Liu, Yuhui Xu, Aojun Zhou, Siyuan Huang, Bo Zhang, Junchi Yan, Hongsheng Li
Abstract: A pivotal advancement in the progress of large language models (LLMs) is the emergence of the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs. Compared to traditional LLMs, MoE LLMs can achieve higher performance with fewer parameters, but it is still hard to deploy them due to their immense parameter sizes. Different from previous weight pruning methods that rely on specifically designed hardware, this paper mainly aims to enhance the deployment efficiency of MoE LLMs by introducing plug-and-play expert-level sparsification techniques. Specifically, we propose, for the first time to our best knowledge, post-training approaches for task-agnostic and task-specific expert pruning and skipping of MoE LLMs, tailored to improve deployment efficiency while maintaining model performance across a wide range of tasks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed methods can simultaneously reduce model sizes and increase the inference speed, while maintaining satisfactory performance. Data and code will be available at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/Expert_Sparsity.
Authors: Jin Yao, Eli Chien, Minxin Du, Xinyao Niu, Tianhao Wang, Zezhou Cheng, Xiang Yue
Abstract: This study investigates the concept of the `right to be forgotten' within the context of large language models (LLMs). We explore machine unlearning as a pivotal solution, with a focus on pre-trained models--a notably under-researched area. Our research delineates a comprehensive framework for machine unlearning in pre-trained LLMs, encompassing a critical analysis of seven diverse unlearning methods. Through rigorous evaluation using curated datasets from arXiv, books, and GitHub, we establish a robust benchmark for unlearning performance, demonstrating that these methods are over $10^5$ times more computationally efficient than retraining. Our results show that integrating gradient ascent with gradient descent on in-distribution data improves hyperparameter robustness. We also provide detailed guidelines for efficient hyperparameter tuning in the unlearning process. Our findings advance the discourse on ethical AI practices, offering substantive insights into the mechanics of machine unlearning for pre-trained LLMs and underscoring the potential for responsible AI development.
Authors: Jie Cheng, Gang Xiong, Xingyuan Dai, Qinghai Miao, Yisheng Lv, Fei-Yue Wang
Abstract: Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) circumvents the need for reward engineering by harnessing human preferences as the reward signal. However, current PbRL methods excessively depend on high-quality feedback from domain experts, which results in a lack of robustness. In this paper, we present RIME, a robust PbRL algorithm for effective reward learning from noisy preferences. Our method utilizes a sample selection-based discriminator to dynamically filter out noise and ensure robust training. To counteract the cumulative error stemming from incorrect selection, we suggest a warm start for the reward model, which additionally bridges the performance gap during the transition from pre-training to online training in PbRL. Our experiments on robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that RIME significantly enhances the robustness of the state-of-the-art PbRL method. Code is available at https://github.com/CJReinforce/RIME_ICML2024.
Authors: Shanghua Gao, Teddy Koker, Owen Queen, Thomas Hartvigsen, Theodoros Tsiligkaridis, Marinka Zitnik
Abstract: Advances in time series models are driving a shift from conventional deep learning methods to pre-trained foundational models. While pre-trained transformers and reprogrammed text-based LLMs report state-of-the-art results, the best-performing architectures vary significantly across tasks, and models often have limited scope, such as focusing only on time series forecasting. Models that unify predictive and generative time series tasks under a single framework remain challenging to achieve. We introduce UniTS, a multi-task time series model that uses task tokenization to express predictive and generative tasks within a single model. UniTS leverages a modified transformer block designed to obtain universal time series representations. This design induces transferability from a heterogeneous, multi-domain pre-training dataset-often with diverse dynamic patterns, sampling rates, and temporal scales-to many downstream datasets, which can also be diverse in task specifications and data domains. Across 38 datasets spanning human activity sensors, healthcare, engineering, and finance domains, UniTS model performs favorably against 12 forecasting models, 20 classification models, 18 anomaly detection models, and 16 imputation models, including repurposed text-based LLMs. UniTS demonstrates effective few-shot and prompt learning capabilities when evaluated on new data domains and tasks. In the conventional single-task setting, UniTS outperforms strong task-specialized time series models. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/mims-harvard/UniTS.
Authors: Eitam Sheetrit, Menachem Brief, Moshik Mishaeli, Oren Elisha
Abstract: Schema matching is a crucial task in data integration, involving the alignment of a source schema with a target schema to establish correspondence between their elements. This task is challenging due to textual and semantic heterogeneity, as well as differences in schema sizes. Although machine-learning-based solutions have been explored in numerous studies, they often suffer from low accuracy, require manual mapping of the schemas for model training, or need access to source schema data which might be unavailable due to privacy concerns. In this paper we present a novel method, named ReMatch, for matching schemas using retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Our method avoids the need for predefined mapping, any model training, or access to data in the source database. Our experimental results on large real-world schemas demonstrate that ReMatch is an effective matcher. By eliminating the requirement for training data, ReMatch becomes a viable solution for real-world scenarios.
Authors: Mehran Hosseini, Peyman Hosseini
Abstract: Scaled Dot Product Attention (SDPA) is the backbone of many modern deep-learning models. It is so versatile that it has been used in natural language, vision, and multi-modal domains with very little change compared to its original formulation. This paper discusses why the current formulation is inefficient by delving into the mathematical details of the attention mechanism. We propose three improvements to mitigate these inefficiencies, thereby, introducing three enhanced attention mechanisms: Optimised, Efficient, and Super Attention. Optimised and Efficient Attention have one and two matrix multiplications fewer per head, respectively, and 25% and 50% fewer parameters, respectively, than standard SDPA, but perform similarly to standard SDPA in both vision and natural language tasks. They can be used in all applications where SDPA is used while offering smaller model sizes and faster training and inference without noticeable loss in performance. Super Attention introduces a new linear transformation on the values, transforming them from the left. It outperforms standard SPDA on vision and natural language tasks by up to 17% while having one fewer matrix multiplication per head and 25% fewer parameters than standard SDPA. Consequently, it is also faster than standard SDPA. Super Attention is ideal in applications where the attention layer's context length is fixed, such as Vision Transformers. In addition to providing mathematical reasoning, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on several datasets including MNIST, CIFAR100, ImageNet, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets, as well as combined Europarl and Anki English-Spanish datasets for neural machine translation.
Authors: Luiza Pozzobon, Patrick Lewis, Sara Hooker, Beyza Ermis
Abstract: To date, toxicity mitigation in language models has almost entirely been focused on single-language settings. As language models embrace multilingual capabilities, it's crucial our safety measures keep pace. Recognizing this research gap, our approach expands the scope of conventional toxicity mitigation to address the complexities presented by multiple languages. In the absence of sufficient annotated datasets across languages, we employ translated data to evaluate and enhance our mitigation techniques. We also compare finetuning mitigation approaches against retrieval-augmented techniques under both static and continual toxicity mitigation scenarios. This allows us to examine the effects of translation quality and the cross-lingual transfer on toxicity mitigation. We also explore how model size and data quantity affect the success of these mitigation efforts. Covering nine languages, our study represents a broad array of linguistic families and levels of resource availability, ranging from high to mid-resource languages. Through comprehensive experiments, we provide insights into the complexities of multilingual toxicity mitigation, offering valuable insights and paving the way for future research in this increasingly important field. Code and data are available at https://github.com/for-ai/goodtriever.
Authors: Thomas M. Sutter, Yang Meng, Andrea Agostini, Daphn\'e Chopard, Norbert Fortin, Julia E. Vogt, Bahbak Shahbaba, Stephan Mandt
Abstract: Variational Autoencoders for multimodal data hold promise for many tasks in data analysis, such as representation learning, conditional generation, and imputation. Current architectures either share the encoder output, decoder input, or both across modalities to learn a shared representation. Such architectures impose hard constraints on the model. In this work, we show that a better latent representation can be obtained by replacing these hard constraints with a soft constraint. We propose a new mixture-of-experts prior, softly guiding each modality's latent representation towards a shared aggregate posterior. This approach results in a superior latent representation and allows each encoding to preserve information better from its uncompressed original features. In extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and two challenging real-world datasets, we show improved learned latent representations and imputation of missing data modalities compared to existing methods.
Authors: Yunpeng Qing, Shunyu liu, Jingyuan Cong, Kaixuan Chen, Yihe Zhou, Mingli Song
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning endeavors to leverage offline datasets to craft effective agent policy without online interaction, which imposes proper conservative constraints with the support of behavior policies to tackle the out-of-distribution problem. However, existing works often suffer from the constraint conflict issue when offline datasets are collected from multiple behavior policies, i.e., different behavior policies may exhibit inconsistent actions with distinct returns across the state space. To remedy this issue, recent advantage-weighted methods prioritize samples with high advantage values for agent training while inevitably ignoring the diversity of behavior policy. In this paper, we introduce a novel Advantage-Aware Policy Optimization (A2PO) method to explicitly construct advantage-aware policy constraints for offline learning under mixed-quality datasets. Specifically, A2PO employs a conditional variational auto-encoder to disentangle the action distributions of intertwined behavior policies by modeling the advantage values of all training data as conditional variables. Then the agent can follow such disentangled action distribution constraints to optimize the advantage-aware policy towards high advantage values. Extensive experiments conducted on both the single-quality and mixed-quality datasets of the D4RL benchmark demonstrate that A2PO yields results superior to the counterparts. Our code will be made publicly available.
Authors: Alina Petukhova, Jo\~ao P. Matos-Carvalho, Nuno Fachada
Abstract: Text clustering is an important approach for organising the growing amount of digital content, helping to structure and find hidden patterns in uncategorised data. However, the effectiveness of text clustering heavily relies on the choice of textual embeddings and clustering algorithms. We argue that recent advances in large language models (LLMs) can potentially improve this task. In this research, we investigated how different textual embeddings -- particularly those used in LLMs -- and clustering algorithms affect how text datasets are clustered. A series of experiments were conducted to assess how embeddings influence clustering results, the role played by dimensionality reduction through summarisation, and model size adjustment. Findings reveal that LLM embeddings excel at capturing subtleties in structured language, while BERT leads the lightweight options in performance. In addition, we observe that increasing model dimensionality and employing summarization techniques do not consistently lead to improvements in clustering efficiency, suggesting that these strategies require careful analysis to use in real-life models. These results highlight a complex balance between the need for refined text representation and computational feasibility in text clustering applications. This study extends traditional text clustering frameworks by incorporating embeddings from LLMs, providing a path for improved methodologies, while informing new avenues for future research in various types of textual analysis.
Authors: Zhijun Guo, Alvina Lai, Johan Hilge Thygesen, Joseph Farrington, Thomas Keen, Kezhi Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for potential applications in digital health, while their application in mental health is subject to ongoing debate. This systematic review aims to evaluate the usage of LLMs in mental health, focusing on their strengths and limitations in early screening, digital interventions, and clinical applications. Adhering to PRISMA guidelines, we searched PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and the JMIR using keywords: 'mental health OR mental illness OR mental disorder OR psychiatry' AND 'large language models'. We included articles published between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2023, excluding non-English articles. 30 articles were evaluated, which included research on mental illness and suicidal ideation detection through text (n=12), usage of LLMs for mental health conversational agents (CAs) (n=5), and other applications and evaluations of LLMs in mental health (n=13). LLMs exhibit substantial effectiveness in detecting mental health issues and providing accessible, de-stigmatized eHealth services. However, the current risks associated with the clinical use might surpass their benefits. The study identifies several significant issues: the lack of multilingual datasets annotated by experts, concerns about the accuracy and reliability of the content generated, challenges in interpretability due to the 'black box' nature of LLMs, and persistent ethical dilemmas. These include the lack of a clear ethical framework, concerns about data privacy, and the potential for over-reliance on LLMs by both therapists and patients, which could compromise traditional medical practice. Despite these issues, the rapid development of LLMs underscores their potential as new clinical aids, emphasizing the need for continued research and development in this area.
Authors: Lingdong Shen, Fangxin Shang, Xiaoshuang Huang, Yehui Yang, Haifeng Huang, Shiming Xiang
Abstract: In the field of medical image segmentation, tackling Out-of-Distribution (OOD) segmentation tasks in a cost-effective manner remains a significant challenge. Universal segmentation models is a solution, which aim to generalize across the diverse modality of medical images, yet their effectiveness often diminishes when applied to OOD data modalities and tasks, requiring intricate fine-tuning of model for optimal performance. Few-shot learning segmentation methods are typically designed for specific modalities of data and cannot be directly transferred for use with another modality. Therefore, we introduce SegICL, a novel approach leveraging In-Context Learning (ICL) for image segmentation. Unlike existing methods, SegICL has the capability to employ text-guided segmentation and conduct in-context learning with a small set of image-mask pairs, eliminating the need for training the model from scratch or fine-tuning for OOD tasks (including OOD modality and dataset). Extensive experimental demonstrates a positive correlation between the number of shots and segmentation performance on OOD tasks. The performance of segmentation when provided thre-shots is approximately 1.5 times better than the performance in a zero-shot setting. This indicates that SegICL effectively address new segmentation tasks based on contextual information. Additionally, SegICL also exhibits comparable performance to mainstream models on OOD and in-distribution tasks. Our code will be released after paper review.
Authors: Mubashara Akhtar, Omar Benjelloun, Costanza Conforti, Pieter Gijsbers, Joan Giner-Miguelez, Nitisha Jain, Michael Kuchnik, Quentin Lhoest, Pierre Marcenac, Manil Maskey, Peter Mattson, Luis Oala, Pierre Ruyssen, Rajat Shinde, Elena Simperl, Goeffry Thomas, Slava Tykhonov, Joaquin Vanschoren, Jos van der Velde, Steffen Vogler, Carole-Jean Wu
Abstract: Data is a critical resource for Machine Learning (ML), yet working with data remains a key friction point. This paper introduces Croissant, a metadata format for datasets that simplifies how data is used by ML tools and frameworks. Croissant makes datasets more discoverable, portable and interoperable, thereby addressing significant challenges in ML data management and responsible AI. Croissant is already supported by several popular dataset repositories, spanning hundreds of thousands of datasets, ready to be loaded into the most popular ML frameworks.
Authors: Jinwei Yao, Kaiqi Chen, Kexun Zhang, Jiaxuan You, Binhang Yuan, Zeke Wang, Tao Lin
Abstract: Given the increasing demand for tree-structured interactions with LLMs, we introduce DeFT (Decoding with Flash Tree-Attention), an IO-aware tree attention algorithm tailored for tree-structured inference. Unlike traditional sequence-based decoding, tree-structured decoding better accommodates modern task requirements, including self-consistency, few-shot prompting, multi-step reasoning, and multi-model/head coordination. However, existing sequence-based inference systems are ill-suited for tree-structured decoding, resulting in redundancy in computation, memory footprints, and memory access, thereby undermining inference efficiency. To address this challenge, DeFT maintains memory-efficient attention calculation with low memory footprints through two key stages: (1) QKV Preparation: We propose a KV-Guided Grouping Strategy with Tree Split to intelligently group QKV, optimizing GPU resource utilization while minimizing memory reads/writes for KV cache between GPU global memory and on-chip shared memory; (2)Attention Calculation: We compute partial attention of each QKV group in a fused kernel and employ a Tree-topology-aware Global Reduction strategy to obtain final attention. By reducing 73-99% KV cache IO and nearly 100% IO for partial results during attention calculation (e.g., Softmax), DeFT achieves up to 2.52/3.82x speedup in the end-to-end/attention latency across three practical tree-based workloads: namely, few-shot prompting, multi-step reasoning, and speculative decoding, over state-of-the-art attention algorithms.
Authors: Patrick Levi, Christoph P. Neumann
Abstract: The fast advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving an increasing number of applications. Together with the growing number of users, we also see an increasing number of attackers who try to outsmart these systems. They want the model to reveal confidential information, specific false information, or offensive behavior. To this end, they manipulate their instructions for the LLM by inserting separators or rephrasing them systematically until they reach their goal. Our approach is different. It inserts words from the model vocabulary. We find these words using an optimization procedure and embeddings from another LLM (attacker LLM). We prove our approach by goal hijacking two popular open-source LLMs from the Llama2 and the Flan-T5 families, respectively. We present two main findings. First, our approach creates inconspicuous instructions and therefore it is hard to detect. For many attack cases, we find that even a single word insertion is sufficient. Second, we demonstrate that we can conduct our attack using a different model than the target model to conduct our attack with.
Authors: Alan A. Lahoud, Erik Schaffernicht, Johannes A. Stork
Abstract: Learning latent costs of transitions on graphs from trajectories demonstrations under various contextual features is challenging but useful for path planning. Yet, existing methods either oversimplify cost assumptions or scale poorly with the number of observed trajectories. This paper introduces DataSP, a differentiable all-to-all shortest path algorithm to facilitate learning latent costs from trajectories. It allows to learn from a large number of trajectories in each learning step without additional computation. Complex latent cost functions from contextual features can be represented in the algorithm through a neural network approximation. We further propose a method to sample paths from DataSP in order to reconstruct/mimic observed paths' distributions. We prove that the inferred distribution follows the maximum entropy principle. We show that DataSP outperforms state-of-the-art differentiable combinatorial solver and classical machine learning approaches in predicting paths on graphs.
Authors: Ruixiang Sun, Hongyu Zang, Xin Li, Riashat Islam
Abstract: Visual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) promises to encapsulate agent's knowledge about the underlying dynamics of the environment, enabling learning a world model as a useful planner. However, top MBRL agents such as Dreamer often struggle with visual pixel-based inputs in the presence of exogenous or irrelevant noise in the observation space, due to failure to capture task-specific features while filtering out irrelevant spatio-temporal details. To tackle this problem, we apply a spatio-temporal masking strategy, a bisimulation principle, combined with latent reconstruction, to capture endogenous task-specific aspects of the environment for world models, effectively eliminating non-essential information. Joint training of representations, dynamics, and policy often leads to instabilities. To further address this issue, we develop a Hybrid Recurrent State-Space Model (HRSSM) structure, enhancing state representation robustness for effective policy learning. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates significant performance improvements over existing methods in a range of visually complex control tasks such as Maniskill \cite{gu2023maniskill2} with exogenous distractors from the Matterport environment. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/bit1029public/HRSSM.
Authors: Bandhav Veluri, Malek Itani, Tuochao Chen, Takuya Yoshioka, Shyamnath Gollakota
Abstract: In crowded settings, the human brain can focus on speech from a target speaker, given prior knowledge of how they sound. We introduce a novel intelligent hearable system that achieves this capability, enabling target speech hearing to ignore all interfering speech and noise, but the target speaker. A naive approach is to require a clean speech example to enroll the target speaker. This is however not well aligned with the hearable application domain since obtaining a clean example is challenging in real world scenarios, creating a unique user interface problem. We present the first enrollment interface where the wearer looks at the target speaker for a few seconds to capture a single, short, highly noisy, binaural example of the target speaker. This noisy example is used for enrollment and subsequent speech extraction in the presence of interfering speakers and noise. Our system achieves a signal quality improvement of 7.01 dB using less than 5 seconds of noisy enrollment audio and can process 8 ms of audio chunks in 6.24 ms on an embedded CPU. Our user studies demonstrate generalization to real-world static and mobile speakers in previously unseen indoor and outdoor multipath environments. Finally, our enrollment interface for noisy examples does not cause performance degradation compared to clean examples, while being convenient and user-friendly. Taking a step back, this paper takes an important step towards enhancing the human auditory perception with artificial intelligence. We provide code and data at: https://github.com/vb000/LookOnceToHear.
Authors: Wanting Xu, Yang Liu, Langping He, Xucheng Huang, Ling Jiang
Abstract: We introduce Xmodel-VLM, a cutting-edge multimodal vision language model. It is designed for efficient deployment on consumer GPU servers. Our work directly confronts a pivotal industry issue by grappling with the prohibitive service costs that hinder the broad adoption of large-scale multimodal systems. Through rigorous training, we have developed a 1B-scale language model from the ground up, employing the LLaVA paradigm for modal alignment. The result, which we call Xmodel-VLM, is a lightweight yet powerful multimodal vision language model. Extensive testing across numerous classic multimodal benchmarks has revealed that despite its smaller size and faster execution, Xmodel-VLM delivers performance comparable to that of larger models. Our model checkpoints and code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/XmodelVLM.
Authors: Yu Cheng, Qin Yang, Liyang Wang, Ao Xiang, Jingyu Zhang
Abstract: In the realm of globalized financial markets, commercial banks are confronted with an escalating magnitude of credit risk, thereby imposing heightened requisites upon the security of bank assets and financial stability. This study harnesses advanced neural network techniques, notably the Backpropagation (BP) neural network, to pioneer a novel model for preempting credit risk in commercial banks. The discourse initially scrutinizes conventional financial risk preemptive models, such as ARMA, ARCH, and Logistic regression models, critically analyzing their real-world applications. Subsequently, the exposition elaborates on the construction process of the BP neural network model, encompassing network architecture design, activation function selection, parameter initialization, and objective function construction. Through comparative analysis, the superiority of neural network models in preempting credit risk in commercial banks is elucidated. The experimental segment selects specific bank data, validating the model's predictive accuracy and practicality. Research findings evince that this model efficaciously enhances the foresight and precision of credit risk management.
Authors: Bowen Chen, Namgi Han, Yusuke Miyao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on massive corpora with billions of parameters, show unprecedented performance in various fields. Though surprised by their excellent performances, researchers also noticed some special behaviors of those LLMs. One of those behaviors is memorization, in which LLMs can generate the same content used to train them. Though previous research has discussed memorization, the memorization of LLMs still lacks explanation, especially the cause of memorization and the dynamics of generating them. In this research, we comprehensively discussed memorization from various perspectives and extended the discussion scope to not only just the memorized content but also less and unmemorized content. Through various studies, we found that: (1) Through experiments, we revealed the relation of memorization between model size, continuation size, and context size. Further, we showed how unmemorized sentences transition to memorized sentences. (2) Through embedding analysis, we showed the distribution and decoding dynamics across model size in embedding space for sentences with different memorization scores. The n-gram statistics analysis presents d (3) An analysis over n-gram and entropy decoding dynamics discovered a boundary effect when the model starts to generate memorized sentences or unmemorized sentences. (4)We trained a Transformer model to predict the memorization of different models, showing that it is possible to predict memorizations by context.
Authors: Zoey Chen, Aaron Walsman, Marius Memmel, Kaichun Mo, Alex Fang, Karthikeya Vemuri, Alan Wu, Dieter Fox, Abhishek Gupta
Abstract: Constructing simulation scenes that are both visually and physically realistic is a problem of practical interest in domains ranging from robotics to computer vision. This problem has become even more relevant as researchers wielding large data-hungry learning methods seek new sources of training data for physical decision-making systems. However, building simulation models is often still done by hand. A graphic designer and a simulation engineer work with predefined assets to construct rich scenes with realistic dynamic and kinematic properties. While this may scale to small numbers of scenes, to achieve the generalization properties that are required for data-driven robotic control, we require a pipeline that is able to synthesize large numbers of realistic scenes, complete with 'natural' kinematic and dynamic structures. To attack this problem, we develop models for inferring structure and generating simulation scenes from natural images, allowing for scalable scene generation from web-scale datasets. To train these image-to-simulation models, we show how controllable text-to-image generative models can be used in generating paired training data that allows for modeling of the inverse problem, mapping from realistic images back to complete scene models. We show how this paradigm allows us to build large datasets of scenes in simulation with semantic and physical realism. We present an integrated end-to-end pipeline that generates simulation scenes complete with articulated kinematic and dynamic structures from real-world images and use these for training robotic control policies. We then robustly deploy in the real world for tasks like articulated object manipulation. In doing so, our work provides both a pipeline for large-scale generation of simulation environments and an integrated system for training robust robotic control policies in the resulting environments.
Authors: Cong Lu, Shengran Hu, Jeff Clune
Abstract: Go-Explore is a powerful family of algorithms designed to solve hard-exploration problems, built on the principle of archiving discovered states, and iteratively returning to and exploring from the most promising states. This approach has led to superhuman performance across a wide variety of challenging problems including Atari games and robotic control, but requires manually designing heuristics to guide exploration, which is time-consuming and infeasible in general. To resolve this, we propose Intelligent Go-Explore (IGE) which greatly extends the scope of the original Go-Explore by replacing these heuristics with the intelligence and internalized human notions of interestingness captured by giant foundation models (FMs). This provides IGE with a human-like ability to instinctively identify how interesting or promising any new state is (e.g. discovering new objects, locations, or behaviors), even in complex environments where heuristics are hard to define. Moreover, IGE offers the exciting and previously impossible opportunity to recognize and capitalize on serendipitous discoveries that cannot be predicted ahead of time. We evaluate IGE on a range of language-based tasks that require search and exploration. In Game of 24, a multistep mathematical reasoning problem, IGE reaches 100% success rate 70.8% faster than the best classic graph search baseline. Next, in BabyAI-Text, a challenging partially observable gridworld, IGE exceeds the previous SOTA with orders of magnitude fewer online samples. Finally, in TextWorld, we show the unique ability of IGE to succeed in settings requiring long-horizon exploration where prior SOTA FM agents like Reflexion completely fail. Overall, IGE combines the tremendous strengths of FMs and the powerful Go-Explore algorithm, opening up a new frontier of research into creating more generally capable agents with impressive exploration capabilities.
Authors: Xiyao Wang, Jiuhai Chen, Zhaoyang Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Yiyang Zhou, Huaxiu Yao, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, Parminder Bhatia, Furong Huang, Cao Xiao
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive results in various visual question-answering and reasoning tasks through vision instruction tuning on specific datasets. However, there is still significant room for improvement in the alignment between visual and language modalities. Previous methods to enhance this alignment typically require external models or data, heavily depending on their capabilities and quality, which inevitably sets an upper bound on performance. In this paper, we propose SIMA, a framework that enhances visual and language modality alignment through self-improvement, eliminating the needs for external models or data. SIMA leverages prompts from existing vision instruction tuning datasets to self-generate responses and employs an in-context self-critic mechanism to select response pairs for preference tuning. The key innovation is the introduction of three vision metrics during the in-context self-critic process, which can guide the LVLM in selecting responses that enhance image comprehension. Through experiments across 14 hallucination and comprehensive benchmarks, we demonstrate that SIMA not only improves model performance across all benchmarks but also achieves superior modality alignment, outperforming previous approaches.
Authors: Tong Ye, Yangkai Du, Tengfei Ma, Lingfei Wu, Xuhong Zhang, Shouling Ji, Wenhai Wang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency in generating code. However, the misuse of LLM-generated (Synthetic) code has prompted concerns within both educational and industrial domains, highlighting the imperative need for the development of synthetic code detectors. Existing methods for detecting LLM-generated content are primarily tailored for general text and often struggle with code content due to the distinct grammatical structure of programming languages and massive "low-entropy" tokens. Building upon this, our work proposes a novel zero-shot synthetic code detector based on the similarity between the code and its rewritten variants. Our method relies on the intuition that the differences between the LLM-rewritten and original codes tend to be smaller when the original code is synthetic. We utilize self-supervised contrastive learning to train a code similarity model and assess our approach on two synthetic code detection benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a notable enhancement over existing synthetic content detectors designed for general texts, with an improvement of 20.5% in the APPS benchmark and 29.1% in the MBPP benchmark.
Authors: Yiming Li, Zehong Wang, Yue Wang, Zhiding Yu, Zan Gojcic, Marco Pavone, Chen Feng, Jose M. Alvarez
Abstract: Humans naturally retain memories of permanent elements, while ephemeral moments often slip through the cracks of memory. This selective retention is crucial for robotic perception, localization, and mapping. To endow robots with this capability, we introduce 3D Gaussian Mapping (3DGM), a self-supervised, camera-only offline mapping framework grounded in 3D Gaussian Splatting. 3DGM converts multitraverse RGB videos from the same region into a Gaussian-based environmental map while concurrently performing 2D ephemeral object segmentation. Our key observation is that the environment remains consistent across traversals, while objects frequently change. This allows us to exploit self-supervision from repeated traversals to achieve environment-object decomposition. More specifically, 3DGM formulates multitraverse environmental mapping as a robust differentiable rendering problem, treating pixels of the environment and objects as inliers and outliers, respectively. Using robust feature distillation, feature residuals mining, and robust optimization, 3DGM jointly performs 2D segmentation and 3D mapping without human intervention. We build the Mapverse benchmark, sourced from the Ithaca365 and nuPlan datasets, to evaluate our method in unsupervised 2D segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and neural rendering. Extensive results verify the effectiveness and potential of our method for self-driving and robotics.
Authors: Chenhao Lu, Ruizhe Shi, Yuyao Liu, Kaizhe Hu, Simon S. Du, Huazhe Xu
Abstract: Sequential decision-making algorithms such as reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world scenarios inevitably face environments with partial observability. This paper scrutinizes the effectiveness of a popular architecture, namely Transformers, in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) and reveals its theoretical limitations. We establish that regular languages, which Transformers struggle to model, are reducible to POMDPs. This poses a significant challenge for Transformers in learning POMDP-specific inductive biases, due to their lack of inherent recurrence found in other models like RNNs. This paper casts doubt on the prevalent belief in Transformers as sequence models for RL and proposes to introduce a point-wise recurrent structure. The Deep Linear Recurrent Unit (LRU) emerges as a well-suited alternative for Partially Observable RL, with empirical results highlighting the sub-optimal performance of the Transformer and considerable strength of LRU.
Authors: Sheng Yue, Jiani Liu, Xingyuan Hua, Ju Ren, Sen Lin, Junshan Zhang, Yaoxue Zhang
Abstract: Offline Imitation Learning (IL) with imperfect demonstrations has garnered increasing attention owing to the scarcity of expert data in many real-world domains. A fundamental problem in this scenario is how to extract positive behaviors from noisy data. In general, current approaches to the problem select data building on state-action similarity to given expert demonstrations, neglecting precious information in (potentially abundant) $\textit{diverse}$ state-actions that deviate from expert ones. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective data selection method that identifies positive behaviors based on their resultant states -- a more informative criterion enabling explicit utilization of dynamics information and effective extraction of both expert and beneficial diverse behaviors. Further, we devise a lightweight behavior cloning algorithm capable of leveraging the expert and selected data correctly. In the experiments, we evaluate our method on a suite of complex and high-dimensional offline IL benchmarks, including continuous-control and vision-based tasks. The results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods on $\textbf{20/21}$ benchmarks, typically by $\textbf{2-5x}$, while maintaining a comparable runtime to Behavior Cloning ($\texttt{BC}$).
Authors: Sheng Yue, Xingyuan Hua, Ju Ren, Sen Lin, Junshan Zhang, Yaoxue Zhang
Abstract: In this paper, we study offline-to-online Imitation Learning (IL) that pretrains an imitation policy from static demonstration data, followed by fast finetuning with minimal environmental interaction. We find the na\"ive combination of existing offline IL and online IL methods tends to behave poorly in this context, because the initial discriminator (often used in online IL) operates randomly and discordantly against the policy initialization, leading to misguided policy optimization and $\textit{unlearning}$ of pretraining knowledge. To overcome this challenge, we propose a principled offline-to-online IL method, named $\texttt{OLLIE}$, that simultaneously learns a near-expert policy initialization along with an $\textit{aligned discriminator initialization}$, which can be seamlessly integrated into online IL, achieving smooth and fast finetuning. Empirically, $\texttt{OLLIE}$ consistently and significantly outperforms the baseline methods in $\textbf{20}$ challenging tasks, from continuous control to vision-based domains, in terms of performance, demonstration efficiency, and convergence speed. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pretraining and finetuning in the context of IL.
Authors: Hao Tang, Keya Hu, Jin Peng Zhou, Sicheng Zhong, Wei-Long Zheng, Xujie Si, Kevin Ellis
Abstract: Iteratively improving and repairing source code with large language models (LLMs), known as refinement, has emerged as a popular way of generating programs that would be too complex to construct in one shot. Given a bank of test cases, together with a candidate program, an LLM can improve that program by being prompted with failed test cases. But it remains an open question how to best iteratively refine code, with prior work employing simple greedy or breadth-first strategies. We show here that refinement exposes an explore-exploit tradeoff: exploit by refining the program that passes the most test cases, or explore by refining a lesser considered program. We frame this as an arm-acquiring bandit problem, which we solve with Thompson Sampling. The resulting LLM-based program synthesis algorithm is broadly applicable: Across loop invariant synthesis, visual reasoning puzzles, and competition programming problems, we find that our new method can solve more problems using fewer language model calls.
Authors: Zhengyang Tang, Chenyu Huang, Xin Zheng, Shixi Hu, Zizhuo Wang, Dongdong Ge, Benyou Wang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for tackling complex Operations Research (OR) problem by providing the capacity in automating optimization modeling. However, current methodologies heavily rely on prompt engineering (e.g., multi-agent cooperation) with proprietary LLMs, raising data privacy concerns that could be prohibitive in industry applications. To tackle this issue, we propose training open-source LLMs for optimization modeling. We identify four critical requirements for the training dataset of OR LLMs, design and implement OR-Instruct, a semi-automated process for creating synthetic data tailored to specific requirements. We also introduce the IndustryOR benchmark, the first industrial benchmark for testing LLMs on solving real-world OR problems. We apply the data from OR-Instruct to various open-source LLMs of 7b size (termed as ORLMs), resulting in a significantly improved capability for optimization modeling. Our best-performing ORLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on the NL4OPT, MAMO, and IndustryOR benchmarks. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/Cardinal-Operations/ORLM}.
Authors: Seokil Ham, Sangmin Woo, Jin-Young Kim, Hyojun Go, Byeongjun Park, Changick Kim
Abstract: We present Diffusion Model Patching (DMP), a simple method to boost the performance of pre-trained diffusion models that have already reached convergence, with a negligible increase in parameters. DMP inserts a small, learnable set of prompts into the model's input space while keeping the original model frozen. The effectiveness of DMP is not merely due to the addition of parameters but stems from its dynamic gating mechanism, which selects and combines a subset of learnable prompts at every step of the generative process (e.g., reverse denoising steps). This strategy, which we term "mixture-of-prompts", enables the model to draw on the distinct expertise of each prompt, essentially "patching" the model's functionality at every step with minimal yet specialized parameters. Uniquely, DMP enhances the model by further training on the same dataset on which it was originally trained, even in a scenario where significant improvements are typically not expected due to model convergence. Experiments show that DMP significantly enhances the converged FID of DiT-L/2 on FFHQ 256x256 by 10.38%, achieved with only a 1.43% parameter increase and 50K additional training iterations.
Authors: Tianchen Zhao, Xuefei Ning, Tongcheng Fang, Enshu Liu, Guyue Huang, Zinan Lin, Shengen Yan, Guohao Dai, Yu Wang
Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved significant visual generation quality. However, their significant computational and memory costs pose challenge for their application on resource-constrained mobile devices or even desktop GPUs. Recent few-step diffusion models reduces the inference time by reducing the denoising steps. However, their memory consumptions are still excessive. The Post Training Quantization (PTQ) replaces high bit-width FP representation with low-bit integer values (INT4/8) , which is an effective and efficient technique to reduce the memory cost. However, when applying to few-step diffusion models, existing quantization methods face challenges in preserving both the image quality and text alignment. To address this issue, we propose an mixed-precision quantization framework - MixDQ. Firstly, We design specialized BOS-aware quantization method for highly sensitive text embedding quantization. Then, we conduct metric-decoupled sensitivity analysis to measure the sensitivity of each layer. Finally, we develop an integer-programming-based method to conduct bit-width allocation. While existing quantization methods fall short at W8A8, MixDQ could achieve W8A8 without performance loss, and W4A8 with negligible visual degradation. Compared with FP16, we achieve 3-4x reduction in model size and memory cost, and 1.45x latency speedup.
Authors: Changle Qu, Sunhao Dai, Xiaochi Wei, Hengyi Cai, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jun Xu, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract: Recently, tool learning with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for augmenting the capabilities of LLMs to tackle highly complex problems. Despite growing attention and rapid advancements in this field, the existing literature remains fragmented and lacks systematic organization, posing barriers to entry for newcomers. This gap motivates us to conduct a comprehensive survey of existing works on tool learning with LLMs. In this survey, we focus on reviewing existing literature from the two primary aspects (1) why tool learning is beneficial and (2) how tool learning is implemented, enabling a comprehensive understanding of tool learning with LLMs. We first explore the "why" by reviewing both the benefits of tool integration and the inherent benefits of the tool learning paradigm from six specific aspects. In terms of "how", we systematically review the literature according to a taxonomy of four key stages in the tool learning workflow: task planning, tool selection, tool calling, and response generation. Additionally, we provide a detailed summary of existing benchmarks and evaluation methods, categorizing them according to their relevance to different stages. Finally, we discuss current challenges and outline potential future directions, aiming to inspire both researchers and industrial developers to further explore this emerging and promising area. We also maintain a GitHub repository to continually keep track of the relevant papers and resources in this rising area at \url{https://github.com/quchangle1/LLM-Tool-Survey}.
Authors: Antonio A. Chaves, Mauricio G. C. Resende, Ricardo M. A. Silva
Abstract: This paper proposes a problem-independent GRASP metaheuristic using the random-key optimizer (RKO) paradigm. GRASP (greedy randomized adaptive search procedure) is a metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization that repeatedly applies a semi-greedy construction procedure followed by a local search procedure. The best solution found over all iterations is returned as the solution of the GRASP. Continuous GRASP (C-GRASP) is an extension of GRASP for continuous optimization in the unit hypercube. A random-key optimizer (RKO) uses a vector of random keys to encode a solution to a combinatorial optimization problem. It uses a decoder to evaluate a solution encoded by the vector of random keys. A random-key GRASP is a C-GRASP where points in the unit hypercube are evaluated employing a decoder. We describe random key GRASP consisting of a problem-independent component and a problem-dependent decoder. As a proof of concept, the random-key GRASP is tested on five NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems: traveling salesman problem, tree of hubs location problem, Steiner triple covering problem, node capacitated graph partitioning problem, and job sequencing and tool switching problem.
Authors: Olga Golovneva, Tianlu Wang, Jason Weston, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Abstract: The attention mechanism is a critical component of Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows tokens in a sequence to interact with each other, but is order-invariant. Incorporating position encoding (PE) makes it possible to address by position, such as attending to the i-th token. However, current PE methods use token counts to derive position, and thus cannot generalize to higher levels of abstraction, such as attending to the i-th sentence. In this paper, we propose a new position encoding method, Contextual Position Encoding (CoPE), that allows positions to be conditioned on context by incrementing position only on certain tokens determined by the model. This allows more general position addressing such as attending to the $i$-th particular word, noun, or sentence. We show that CoPE can solve the selective copy, counting and Flip-Flop tasks where popular position embeddings fail, and improves perplexity on language modeling and coding tasks.
Authors: Jordi Armengol-Estap\'e, Vincent Michalski, Ramnath Kumar, Pierre-Luc St-Charles, Doina Precup, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Abstract: Few-shot learning aims to learn representations that can tackle novel tasks given a small number of examples. Recent studies show that cross-modal learning can improve representations for few-shot classification. More specifically, language is a rich modality that can be used to guide visual learning. In this work, we experiment with a multi-modal architecture for few-shot learning that consists of three components: a classifier, an auxiliary network, and a bridge network. While the classifier performs the main classification task, the auxiliary network learns to predict language representations from the same input, and the bridge network transforms high-level features of the auxiliary network into modulation parameters for layers of the few-shot classifier using conditional batch normalization. The bridge should encourage a form of lightweight semantic alignment between language and vision which could be useful for the classifier. However, after evaluating the proposed approach on two popular few-shot classification benchmarks we find that a) the improvements do not reproduce across benchmarks, and b) when they do, the improvements are due to the additional compute and parameters introduced by the bridge network. We contribute insights and recommendations for future work in multi-modal meta-learning, especially when using language representations.
Authors: Jiyoon Myung, Jihyeon Park
Abstract: This paper examines the limitations of advanced text-to-image models in accurately rendering unconventional concepts which are scarcely represented or absent in their training datasets. We identify how these limitations not only confine the creative potential of these models but also pose risks of reinforcing stereotypes. To address these challenges, we introduce the Inpaint Biases framework, which employs user-defined masks and inpainting techniques to enhance the accuracy of image generation, particularly for novel or inaccurately rendered objects. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate how this framework significantly improves the fidelity of generated images to the user's intent, thereby expanding the models' creative capabilities and mitigating the risk of perpetuating biases. Our study contributes to the advancement of text-to-image models as unbiased, versatile tools for creative expression.
Authors: Michael Potter, Shuo Tang, Paul Ghanem, Milica Stojanovic, Pau Closas, Murat Akcakaya, Ben Wright, Marius Necsoiu, Deniz Erdogmus, Michael Everett, Tales Imbiriba
Abstract: Continuously optimizing sensor placement is essential for precise target localization in various military and civilian applications. While information theory has shown promise in optimizing sensor placement, many studies oversimplify sensor measurement models or neglect dynamic constraints of mobile sensors. To address these challenges, we employ a range measurement model that incorporates radar parameters and radar-target distance, coupled with Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control to manage complex environmental obstacles and dynamic constraints. We compare the proposed approach against stationary radars or simplified range measurement models based on the root mean squared error (RMSE) of the Cubature Kalman Filter (CKF) estimator for the targets' state. Additionally, we visualize the evolving geometry of radars and targets over time, highlighting areas of highest measurement information gain, demonstrating the strengths of the approach. The proposed strategy outperforms stationary radars and simplified range measurement models in target localization, achieving a 38-74% reduction in mean RMSE and a 33-79% reduction in the upper tail of the 90% Highest Density Interval (HDI) over 500 Monte Carl (MC) trials across all time steps. Code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Authors: Xintong Jiang, Yaxiong Wang, Mengjian Li, Yujiao Wu, Bingwen Hu, Xueming Qian
Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves searching for target images based on an image-text pair query. While current methods treat this as a query-target matching problem, we argue that CIR triplets contain additional associations beyond this primary relation. In our paper, we identify two new relations within triplets, treating each triplet as a graph node. Firstly, we introduce the concept of text-bridged image alignment, where the query text serves as a bridge between the query image and the target image. We propose a hinge-based cross-attention mechanism to incorporate this relation into network learning. Secondly, we explore complementary text reasoning, considering CIR as a form of cross-modal retrieval where two images compose to reason about complementary text. To integrate these perspectives effectively, we design a twin attention-based compositor. By combining these complementary associations with the explicit query pair-target image relation, we establish a comprehensive set of constraints for CIR. Our framework, CaLa (Complementary Association Learning for Augmenting Composed Image Retrieval), leverages these insights. We evaluate CaLa on CIRR and FashionIQ benchmarks with multiple backbones, demonstrating its superiority in composed image retrieval.
Authors: Ge Zhang, Scott Qu, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Chou Leuang Yu, Danny Pan, Esther Cheng, Jie Liu, Qunshu Lin, Raven Yuan, Tuney Zheng, Wei Pang, Xinrun Du, Yiming Liang, Yinghao Ma, Yizhi Li, Ziyang Ma, Bill Lin, Emmanouil Benetos, Huan Yang, Junting Zhou, Kaijing Ma, Minghao Liu, Morry Niu, Noah Wang, Quehry Que, Ruibo Liu, Sine Liu, Shawn Guo, Soren Gao, Wangchunshu Zhou, Xinyue Zhang, Yizhi Zhou, Yubo Wang, Yuelin Bai, Yuhan Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Zenith Wang, Zhenzhu Yang, Zijian Zhao, Jiajun Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made great strides in recent years to achieve unprecedented performance across different tasks. However, due to commercial interest, the most competitive models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude have been gated behind proprietary interfaces without disclosing the training details. Recently, many institutions have open-sourced several strong LLMs like LLaMA-3, comparable to existing closed-source LLMs. However, only the model's weights are provided with most details (e.g., intermediate checkpoints, pre-training corpus, and training code, etc.) being undisclosed. To improve the transparency of LLMs, the research community has formed to open-source truly open LLMs (e.g., Pythia, Amber, OLMo), where more details (e.g., pre-training corpus and training code) are being provided. These models have greatly advanced the scientific study of these large models including their strengths, weaknesses, biases and risks. However, we observe that the existing truly open LLMs on reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks are still inferior to existing state-of-the-art LLMs with similar model sizes. To this end, we open-source MAP-Neo, a highly capable and transparent bilingual language model with 7B parameters trained from scratch on 4.5T high-quality tokens. Our MAP-Neo is the first fully open-sourced bilingual LLM with comparable performance compared to existing state-of-the-art LLMs. Moreover, we open-source all details to reproduce our MAP-Neo, where the cleaned pre-training corpus, data cleaning pipeline, checkpoints, and well-optimized training/evaluation framework are provided. Finally, we hope our MAP-Neo will enhance and strengthen the open research community and inspire more innovations and creativities to facilitate the further improvements of LLMs.