Authors: Jos\'e E. Gallardo, Carlos Cotta
Abstract: The FAR FROM MOST STRING PROBLEM (FFMSP) is a string selection problem. The objective is to find a string whose distance to other strings in a certain input set is above a given threshold for as many of those strings as possible. This problem has links with some tasks in computational biology and its resolution has been shown to be very hard. We propose a memetic algorithm (MA) to tackle the FFMSP. This MA exploits a heuristic objective function for the problem and features initialization of the population via a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) metaheuristic, intensive recombination via path relinking and local improvement via hill climbing. An extensive empirical evaluation using problem instances of both random and biological origin is done to assess parameter sensitivity and draw performance comparisons with other state-of-the-art techniques. The MA is shown to perform better than these latter techniques with statistical significance.
Authors: Hari Srikanth
Abstract: Structure fires are responsible for the majority of fire-related deaths nationwide. In order to assist with the rapid evacuation of trapped people, this paper proposes the use of a system that determines optimal search paths for firefighters and exit paths for civilians in real time based on environmental measurements. Through the use of a LiDAR mapping system evaluated and verified by a trust range derived from sonar and smoke concentration data, a proposed solution to low visibility mapping is tested. These independent point clouds are then used to create distinct maps, which are merged through the use of a RANSAC based alignment methodology and simplified into a visibility graph. Temperature and humidity data are then used to label each node with a danger score, creating an environment tensor. After demonstrating how a Linear Function Approximation based Natural Policy Gradient RL methodology outperforms more complex competitors with respect to robustness and speed, this paper outlines two systems (savior and refugee) that process the environment tensor to create safe rescue and escape routes, respectively.
Authors: Tao Song, Yuwei Fan, Chenlong Feng, Keyu Song, Chao Liu, Dongxiang Jiang
Abstract: This study explores the application of large language models (LLMs) with callable tools in energy and power engineering domain, focusing on gas path analysis of gas turbines. We developed a dual-agent tool-calling process to integrate expert knowledge, predefined tools, and LLM reasoning. We evaluated various LLMs, including LLama3, Qwen1.5 and GPT. Smaller models struggled with tool usage and parameter extraction, while larger models demonstrated favorable capabilities. All models faced challenges with complex, multi-component problems. Based on the test results, we infer that LLMs with nearly 100 billion parameters could meet professional scenario requirements with fine-tuning and advanced prompt design. Continued development are likely to enhance their accuracy and effectiveness, paving the way for more robust AI-driven solutions.
Authors: Deddy Jobson, Yilin Li
Abstract: The inaugural ACM International Conference on AI-powered Software introduced the AIware Challenge, prompting researchers to explore AI-driven tools for optimizing conference programs through constrained optimization. We investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for program scheduling, focusing on zero-shot learning and integer programming to measure paper similarity. Our study reveals that LLMs, even under zero-shot settings, create reasonably good first drafts of conference schedules. When clustering papers, using only titles as LLM inputs produces results closer to human categorization than using titles and abstracts with TFIDF. The code has been made publicly available.
Authors: Toby St Clere Smithe
Abstract: We introduce structured active inference, a large generalization and formalization of active inference using the tools of categorical systems theory. We cast generative models formally as systems "on an interface", with the latter being a compositional abstraction of the usual notion of Markov blanket; agents are then 'controllers' for their generative models, formally dual to them. This opens the active inference landscape to new horizons, such as: agents with structured interfaces (e.g. with 'mode-dependence', or that interact with computer APIs); agents that can manage other agents; and 'meta-agents', that use active inference to change their (internal or external) structure. With structured interfaces, we also gain structured ('typed') policies, which are amenable to formal verification, an important step towards safe artificial agents. Moreover, we can make use of categorical logic to describe express agents' goals as formal predicates, whose satisfaction may be dependent on the interaction context. This points towards powerful compositional tools to constrain and control self-organizing ensembles of agents.
Authors: Tianyang Xue, Lin Lu, Yang Liu, Mingdong Wu, Hao Dong, Yanbin Zhang, Renmin Han, Baoquan Chen
Abstract: 2D irregular packing is a classic combinatorial optimization problem with various applications, such as material utilization and texture atlas generation. This NP-hard problem requires efficient algorithms to optimize space utilization. Conventional numerical methods suffer from slow convergence and high computational cost. Existing learning-based methods, such as the score-based diffusion model, also have limitations, such as no rotation support, frequent collisions, and poor adaptability to arbitrary boundaries, and slow inferring. The difficulty of learning from teacher packing is to capture the complex geometric relationships among packing examples, which include the spatial (position, orientation) relationships of objects, their geometric features, and container boundary conditions. Representing these relationships in latent space is challenging. We propose GFPack++, an attention-based gradient field learning approach that addresses this challenge. It consists of two pivotal strategies: \emph{attention-based geometry encoding} for effective feature encoding and \emph{attention-based relation encoding} for learning complex relationships. We investigate the utilization distribution between the teacher and inference data and design a weighting function to prioritize tighter teacher data during training, enhancing learning effectiveness. Our diffusion model supports continuous rotation and outperforms existing methods on various datasets. We achieve higher space utilization over several widely used baselines, one-order faster than the previous diffusion-based method, and promising generalization for arbitrary boundaries. We plan to release our source code and datasets to support further research in this direction.
Authors: Delfina Sol Martinez Pandiani, Valentina Presutti
Abstract: In the contemporary world of AI and data-driven applications, supervised machines often derive their understanding, which they mimic and reproduce, through annotations--typically conveyed in the form of words or labels. However, such annotations are often divorced from or lack contextual information, and as such hold the potential to inadvertently introduce biases when subsequently used for training. This paper introduces SituAnnotate, a novel ontology explicitly crafted for 'situated grounding,' aiming to anchor the ground truth data employed in training AI systems within the contextual and culturally-bound situations from which those ground truths emerge. SituAnnotate offers an ontology-based approach to structured and context-aware data annotation, addressing potential bias issues associated with isolated annotations. Its representational power encompasses situational context, including annotator details, timing, location, remuneration schemes, annotation roles, and more, ensuring semantic richness. Aligned with the foundational Dolce Ultralight ontology, it provides a robust and consistent framework for knowledge representation. As a method to create, query, and compare label-based datasets, SituAnnotate empowers downstream AI systems to undergo training with explicit consideration of context and cultural bias, laying the groundwork for enhanced system interpretability and adaptability, and enabling AI models to align with a multitude of cultural contexts and viewpoints.
Authors: Mahault Albarracin, Ines Hipolito, Maria Raffa, Paul Kinghorn
Abstract: Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we present a computational model of an agent learning sustainable resource management strategies in both static and dynamic environments. The agent's behavior emerges from optimizing its own well-being, represented by prior preferences, subject to beliefs about environmental dynamics. In a static environment, the agent learns to consistently consume resources to satisfy its needs. In a dynamic environment where resources deplete and replenish based on the agent's actions, the agent adapts its behavior to balance immediate needs with long-term resource availability. This demonstrates how active inference can give rise to sustainable and resilient behaviors in the face of changing environmental conditions. We discuss the implications of our model, its limitations, and suggest future directions for integrating more complex agent-environment interactions. Our work highlights active inference's potential for understanding and shaping sustainable behaviors.
Authors: Jesmin Jahan Tithi, Fabio Checconi, Fabrizio Petrini
Abstract: Multi-hop reasoning (MHR) is a process in artificial intelligence and natural language processing where a system needs to make multiple inferential steps to arrive at a conclusion or answer. In the context of knowledge graphs or databases, it involves traversing multiple linked entities and relationships to understand complex queries or perform tasks requiring a deeper understanding. Multi-hop reasoning is a critical function in various applications, including question answering, knowledge base completion, and link prediction. It has garnered significant interest in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and graph analytics. This paper focuses on optimizing MHR for time efficiency on large-scale graphs, diverging from the traditional emphasis on accuracy which is an orthogonal goal. We introduce a novel parallel algorithm that harnesses domain-specific learned embeddings to efficiently identify the top K paths between vertices in a knowledge graph to find the best answers to a three-hop query. Our contributions are: (1) We present a new parallel algorithm to enhance MHR performance, scalability and efficiency. (2) We demonstrate the algorithm's superior performance on leading-edge Intel and AMD architectures through empirical results. We showcase the algorithm's practicality through a case study on identifying academic affiliations of potential Turing Award laureates in Deep Learning, highlighting its capability to handle intricate entity relationships. This demonstrates the potential of our approach to enabling high-performance MHR, useful to navigate the growing complexity of modern knowledge graphs.
Authors: Shahin Amiriparian, Lukas Christ, Alexander Kathan, Maurice Gerczuk, Niklas M\"uller, Steffen Klug, Lukas Stappen, Andreas K\"onig, Erik Cambria, Bj\"orn Schuller, Simone Eulitz
Abstract: The Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) 2024 addresses two contemporary multimodal affect and sentiment analysis problems: In the Social Perception Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Perception), participants will predict 16 different social attributes of individuals such as assertiveness, dominance, likability, and sincerity based on the provided audio-visual data. The Cross-Cultural Humor Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humor) dataset expands upon the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset, focusing on the detection of spontaneous humor in a cross-lingual and cross-cultural setting. The main objective of MuSe 2024 is to unite a broad audience from various research domains, including multimodal sentiment analysis, audio-visual affective computing, continuous signal processing, and natural language processing. By fostering collaboration and exchange among experts in these fields, the MuSe 2024 endeavors to advance the understanding and application of sentiment analysis and affective computing across multiple modalities. This baseline paper provides details on each sub-challenge and its corresponding dataset, extracted features from each data modality, and discusses challenge baselines. For our baseline system, we make use of a range of Transformers and expert-designed features and train Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models on them, resulting in a competitive baseline system. On the unseen test datasets of the respective sub-challenges, it achieves a mean Pearson's Correlation Coefficient ($\rho$) of 0.3573 for MuSe-Perception and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) value of 0.8682 for MuSe-Humor.
Authors: Saffron Huang, Divya Siddarth, Liane Lovitt, Thomas I. Liao, Esin Durmus, Alex Tamkin, Deep Ganguli
Abstract: There is growing consensus that language model (LM) developers should not be the sole deciders of LM behavior, creating a need for methods that enable the broader public to collectively shape the behavior of LM systems that affect them. To address this need, we present Collective Constitutional AI (CCAI): a multi-stage process for sourcing and integrating public input into LMs-from identifying a target population to sourcing principles to training and evaluating a model. We demonstrate the real-world practicality of this approach by creating what is, to our knowledge, the first LM fine-tuned with collectively sourced public input and evaluating this model against a baseline model trained with established principles from a LM developer. Our quantitative evaluations demonstrate several benefits of our approach: the CCAI-trained model shows lower bias across nine social dimensions compared to the baseline model, while maintaining equivalent performance on language, math, and helpful-harmless evaluations. Qualitative comparisons of the models suggest that the models differ on the basis of their respective constitutions, e.g., when prompted with contentious topics, the CCAI-trained model tends to generate responses that reframe the matter positively instead of a refusal. These results demonstrate a promising, tractable pathway toward publicly informed development of language models.
Authors: Zhenglong Luo, Zhiyong Chen, James Welsh
Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become a significant research topic due to its ability to facilitate learning in complex environments. In multi-agent tasks, the state-action value, commonly referred to as the Q-value, can vary among agents because of their individual rewards, resulting in a Q-vector. Determining an optimal policy is challenging, as it involves more than just maximizing a single Q-value. Various optimal policies, such as a Nash equilibrium, have been studied in this context. Algorithms like Nash Q-learning and Nash Actor-Critic have shown effectiveness in these scenarios. This paper extends this research by proposing a deep Q-networks (DQN) algorithm capable of learning various Q-vectors using Max, Nash, and Maximin strategies. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated in an environment where dual robotic arms collaborate to lift a pot.
Authors: Luis Miguel Vieira da Silva, Aljosha K\"ocher, Felix Gehlhoff, Alexander Fay
Abstract: To achieve a flexible and adaptable system, capability ontologies are increasingly leveraged to describe functions in a machine-interpretable way. However, modeling such complex ontological descriptions is still a manual and error-prone task that requires a significant amount of effort and ontology expertise. This contribution presents an innovative method to automate capability ontology modeling using Large Language Models (LLMs), which have proven to be well suited for such tasks. Our approach requires only a natural language description of a capability, which is then automatically inserted into a predefined prompt using a few-shot prompting technique. After prompting an LLM, the resulting capability ontology is automatically verified through various steps in a loop with the LLM to check the overall correctness of the capability ontology. First, a syntax check is performed, then a check for contradictions, and finally a check for hallucinations and missing ontology elements. Our method greatly reduces manual effort, as only the initial natural language description and a final human review and possible correction are necessary, thereby streamlining the capability ontology generation process.
Authors: Yizhe Huang, Anji Liu, Fanqi Kong, Yaodong Yang, Song-Chun Zhu, Xue Feng
Abstract: Despite the recent successes of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, efficiently adapting to co-players in mixed-motive environments remains a significant challenge. One feasible approach is to hierarchically model co-players' behavior based on inferring their characteristics. However, these methods often encounter difficulties in efficient reasoning and utilization of inferred information. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Opponent modeling and Planning (HOP), a novel multi-agent decision-making algorithm that enables few-shot adaptation to unseen policies in mixed-motive environments. HOP is hierarchically composed of two modules: an opponent modeling module that infers others' goals and learns corresponding goal-conditioned policies, and a planning module that employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to identify the best response. Our approach improves efficiency by updating beliefs about others' goals both across and within episodes and by using information from the opponent modeling module to guide planning. Experimental results demonstrate that in mixed-motive environments, HOP exhibits superior few-shot adaptation capabilities when interacting with various unseen agents, and excels in self-play scenarios. Furthermore, the emergence of social intelligence during our experiments underscores the potential of our approach in complex multi-agent environments.
Authors: Paolo Pareti
Abstract: Recent studies on the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), a W3C specification for validating RDF graphs, rely on translating the language into first-order logic in order to provide formally-grounded solutions to the validation, containment and satisfiability decision problems. Continuing on this line of research, we introduce SHACL2FOL, the first automatic tool that (i) translates SHACL documents into FOL sentences and (ii) computes the answer to the two static analysis problems of satisfiability and containment; it also allow to test the validity of a graph with respect to a set of constraints. By integrating with existing theorem provers, such as E and Vampire, the tool computes the answer to the aforementioned decision problems and outputs the corresponding first-order logic theories in the standard TPTP format. We believe this tool can contribute to further theoretical studies of SHACL, by providing an automatic first-order logic interpretation of its semantics, while also benefiting SHACL practitioners, by supplying static analysis capabilities to help the creation and management of SHACL constraints.
Authors: Herman Cappelen, Josh Dever
Abstract: Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? 'Making AI Intelligible' shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they illustrate ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (for example, creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants). If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. This ground-breaking study offers insight into how to take some first steps towards achieving Interpretable AI.
Authors: Luyuan Wang, Yongyu Deng, Yiwei Zha, Guodong Mao, Qinmin Wang, Tianchen Min, Wei Chen, Shoufa Chen
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based mobile agents are increasingly popular due to their capability to interact directly with mobile phone Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) and their potential to autonomously manage daily tasks. Despite their promising prospects in both academic and industrial sectors, little research has focused on benchmarking the performance of existing mobile agents, due to the inexhaustible states of apps and the vague definition of feasible action sequences. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient and user-friendly benchmark, MobileAgentBench, designed to alleviate the burden of extensive manual testing. We initially define 100 tasks across 10 open-source apps, categorized by multiple levels of difficulty. Subsequently, we evaluate several existing mobile agents, including AppAgent and MobileAgent, to thoroughly and systematically compare their performance. All materials are accessible on our project webpage: https://MobileAgentBench.github.io, contributing to the advancement of both academic and industrial fields.
Authors: Hanieh Khorashadizadeh, Fatima Zahra Amara, Morteza Ezzabady, Fr\'ed\'eric Ieng, Sanju Tiwari, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Jinghua Groppe, Soror Sahri, Farah Benamara, Sven Groppe
Abstract: This survey investigates the synergistic relationship between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which is crucial for advancing AI's capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and language processing. It aims to address gaps in current research by exploring areas such as KG Question Answering, ontology generation, KG validation, and the enhancement of KG accuracy and consistency through LLMs. The paper further examines the roles of LLMs in generating descriptive texts and natural language queries for KGs. Through a structured analysis that includes categorizing LLM-KG interactions, examining methodologies, and investigating collaborative uses and potential biases, this study seeks to provide new insights into the combined potential of LLMs and KGs. It highlights the importance of their interaction for improving AI applications and outlines future research directions.
Authors: Luca Marzari, Changliu Liu, Priya L. Donti, Enrico Marchesini
Abstract: We present $\varepsilon$-retrain, an exploration strategy designed to encourage a behavioral preference while optimizing policies with monotonic improvement guarantees. To this end, we introduce an iterative procedure for collecting retrain areas -- parts of the state space where an agent did not follow the behavioral preference. Our method then switches between the typical uniform restart state distribution and the retrain areas using a decaying factor $\varepsilon$, allowing agents to retrain on situations where they violated the preference. Experiments over hundreds of seeds across locomotion, navigation, and power network tasks show that our method yields agents that exhibit significant performance and sample efficiency improvements. Moreover, we employ formal verification of neural networks to provably quantify the degree to which agents adhere to behavioral preferences.
Authors: Imran Khan, Robert Lowe
Abstract: Allostasis proposes that long-term viability of a living system is achieved through anticipatory adjustments of its physiology and behaviour: emphasising physiological and affective stress as an adaptive state of adaptation that minimizes long-term prediction errors. More recently, the active inference framework (AIF) has also sought to explain action and long-term adaptation through the minimization of future errors (free energy), through the learning of statistical contingencies of the world, offering a formalism for allostatic regulation. We suggest that framing prediction errors through the lens of biological hormonal dynamics proposed by allostasis offers a way to integrate these two models together in a biologically-plausible manner. In this paper, we describe our initial work in developing a model that grounds prediction errors (surprisal) into the secretion of a physiological stress hormone (cortisol) acting as an adaptive, allostatic mediator on a homeostatically-controlled physiology. We evaluate this using a computational model in simulations using an active inference agent endowed with an artificial physiology, regulated through homeostatic and allostatic control in a stochastic environment. Our results find that allostatic functions of cortisol (stress), secreted as a function of prediction errors, provide adaptive advantages to the agent's long-term physiological regulation. We argue that the coupling of information-theoretic prediction errors to low-level, biological hormonal dynamics of stress can provide a computationally efficient model to long-term regulation for embodied intelligent systems.
Authors: Bin Huang, Changchen Zhao, Zimeng Liu, Shenda Hong, Baochang Zhang, Wenjin Wang, Hui Liu
Abstract: The widespread outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has sounded a warning about the globalization challenges in public health. In this context, the establishment of large-scale public health datasets, of medical models, and of decision-making systems with a human-centric approach holds strategic significance. Recently, groundbreaking advancements have emerged in AI methods for physiological signal monitoring and disease diagnosis based on camera sensors. These approaches, requiring no specialized medical equipment, offer convenient manners of collecting large-scale medical data in response to public health events. Not only do these methods facilitate the acquisition of unbiased datasets, but also enable the development of fair large medical models (LMMs). Therefore, we outline a prospective framework and heuristic vision for a public health large medical model (PHLMM) utilizing visual-based physiological monitoring (VBPM) technology. The PHLMM can be considered as a "convenient and universal" framework for public health, advancing the United Nations' "Sustainable Development Goals 2030", particularly in its promotion of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore, this paper provides an outlook on the crucial application prospects of PHLMM in response to public health challenges and its significant role in the field of AI for medicine (AI4medicine). In summary, PHLMM serves as a solution for constructing a large-scale medical database and LMM, eliminating the issue of dataset bias and unfairness in AI models. The outcomes will contribute to the establishment of an LMM framework for public health, acting as a crucial bridge for advancing AI4medicine.
Authors: Leroy Jacob Valencia
Abstract: In the vast domain of cybersecurity, the transition from reactive defense to offensive has become critical in protecting digital infrastructures. This paper explores the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into offensive cybersecurity, particularly through the development of an autonomous AI agent, ReaperAI, designed to simulate and execute cyberattacks. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, ReaperAI demonstrates the potential to identify, exploit, and analyze security vulnerabilities autonomously. This research outlines the core methodologies that can be utilized to increase consistency and performance, including task-driven penetration testing frameworks, AI-driven command generation, and advanced prompting techniques. The AI agent operates within a structured environment using Python, enhanced by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for contextual understanding and memory retention. ReaperAI was tested on platforms including, Hack The Box, where it successfully exploited known vulnerabilities, demonstrating its potential power. However, the deployment of AI in offensive security presents significant ethical and operational challenges. The agent's development process revealed complexities in command execution, error handling, and maintaining ethical constraints, highlighting areas for future enhancement. This study contributes to the discussion on AI's role in cybersecurity by showcasing how AI can augment offensive security strategies. It also proposes future research directions, including the refinement of AI interactions with cybersecurity tools, enhancement of learning mechanisms, and the discussion of ethical guidelines for AI in offensive roles. The findings advocate for a unique approach to AI implementation in cybersecurity, emphasizing innovation.
Authors: Kahraman Kostas, Mike Just, Michael A. Lones
Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly used for intrusion detection in IoT networks. This paper explores the effectiveness of using individual packet features (IPF), which are attributes extracted from a single network packet, such as timing, size, and source-destination information. Through literature review and experiments, we identify the limitations of IPF, showing they can produce misleadingly high detection rates. Our findings emphasize the need for approaches that consider packet interactions for robust intrusion detection. Additionally, we demonstrate that models based on IPF often fail to generalize across datasets, compromising their reliability in diverse IoT environments.
Authors: Wanaiu Huang
Abstract: Semantic information is vital for human interaction, and decoding it from brain activity enables non-invasive clinical augmentative and alternative communication. While there has been significant progress in reconstructing visual images, few studies have focused on the language aspect. To address this gap, leveraging the powerful capabilities of the decoder-based vision-language pretrained model CoCa, this paper proposes BrainChat, a simple yet effective generative framework aimed at rapidly accomplishing semantic information decoding tasks from brain activity, including fMRI question answering and fMRI captioning. BrainChat employs the self-supervised approach of Masked Brain Modeling to encode sparse fMRI data, obtaining a more compact embedding representation in the latent space. Subsequently, BrainChat bridges the gap between modalities by applying contrastive loss, resulting in aligned representations of fMRI, image, and text embeddings. Furthermore, the fMRI embeddings are mapped to the generative Brain Decoder via cross-attention layers, where they guide the generation of textual content about fMRI in a regressive manner by minimizing caption loss. Empirically, BrainChat exceeds the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods in the fMRI captioning task and, for the first time, implements fMRI question answering. Additionally, BrainChat is highly flexible and can achieve high performance without image data, making it better suited for real-world scenarios with limited data.
Authors: Tomasz Zi\k{e}tkiewicz
Abstract: This paper presents a new approach to the problem of correcting speech recognition errors by means of post-editing. It consists of using a neural sequence tagger that learns how to correct an ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) hypothesis word by word and a corrector module that applies corrections returned by the tagger. The proposed solution is applicable to any ASR system, regardless of its architecture, and provides high-precision control over errors being corrected. This is especially crucial in production environments, where avoiding the introduction of new mistakes by the error correction model may be more important than the net gain in overall results. The results show that the performance of the proposed error correction models is comparable with previous approaches while requiring much smaller resources to train, which makes it suitable for industrial applications, where both inference latency and training times are critical factors that limit the use of other techniques.
Authors: Tongjun Shi, Shuhao Zhang
Abstract: Stream Learning (SL) requires models to rapidly adapt to continuous data streams, setting it apart from traditional Continual Learning (CL). Recent SL methods emphasize efficiency by selecting data subsets for training, but they often struggle due to their reliance on static, rule-based selection algorithms that cannot effectively adapt to the changing importance of data. In this work, we introduce StreamPrompt, a method that enhances data selection through dynamic, learnable prompts. These dynamic prompts serve two purposes beyond guiding model inference: 1) optimizing data selection, and 2) guiding updates to the rehearsal buffer. This approach addresses the challenges of adaptability and computational efficiency in processing continuous data streams. Moreover, StreamPrompt introduces Prompt Attunement,a mechanism that enhances the efficiency of prompt learning. By leveraging attention layers from vision transformers and softly combining their outputs with a gate unit, Prompt Attunementrefines prompts with minimal computational resources. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate StreamPrompts superior performance over state-of-the-art, with significant improvements in accuracy and reductions in training time. These results underscore the efficacy and efficiency of StreamPrompt, establishing its potential as a scalable and effective solution for the evolving demands of SL. Our code is available at https://github.com/intellistream/Efficient-Stream-Learning.
URLs: https://github.com/intellistream/Efficient-Stream-Learning.
Authors: Farnoush Rezaei Jafari, Gr\'egoire Montavon, Klaus-Robert M\"uller, Oliver Eberle
Abstract: Recent sequence modeling approaches using Selective State Space Sequence Models, referred to as Mamba models, have seen a surge of interest. These models allow efficient processing of long sequences in linear time and are rapidly being adopted in a wide range of applications such as language modeling, demonstrating promising performance. To foster their reliable use in real-world scenarios, it is crucial to augment their transparency. Our work bridges this critical gap by bringing explainability, particularly Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), to the Mamba architecture. Guided by the axiom of relevance conservation, we identify specific components in the Mamba architecture, which cause unfaithful explanations. To remedy this issue, we propose MambaLRP, a novel algorithm within the LRP framework, which ensures a more stable and reliable relevance propagation through these components. Our proposed method is theoretically sound and excels in achieving state-of-the-art explanation performance across a diverse range of models and datasets. Moreover, MambaLRP facilitates a deeper inspection of Mamba architectures, uncovering various biases and evaluating their significance. It also enables the analysis of previous speculations regarding the long-range capabilities of Mamba models.
Authors: Tianle Gu, Zeyang Zhou, Kexin Huang, Dandan Liang, Yixu Wang, Haiquan Zhao, Yuanqi Yao, Xingge Qiao, Keqing Wang, Yujiu Yang, Yan Teng, Yu Qiao, Yingchun Wang
Abstract: Powered by remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in manifold tasks. However, the practical application scenarios of MLLMs are intricate, exposing them to potential malicious instructions and thereby posing safety risks. While current benchmarks do incorporate certain safety considerations, they often lack comprehensive coverage and fail to exhibit the necessary rigor and robustness. For instance, the common practice of employing GPT-4V as both the evaluator and a model to be evaluated lacks credibility, as it tends to exhibit a bias toward its own responses. In this paper, we present MLLMGuard, a multidimensional safety evaluation suite for MLLMs, including a bilingual image-text evaluation dataset, inference utilities, and a lightweight evaluator. MLLMGuard's assessment comprehensively covers two languages (English and Chinese) and five important safety dimensions (Privacy, Bias, Toxicity, Truthfulness, and Legality), each with corresponding rich subtasks. Focusing on these dimensions, our evaluation dataset is primarily sourced from platforms such as social media, and it integrates text-based and image-based red teaming techniques with meticulous annotation by human experts. This can prevent inaccurate evaluation caused by data leakage when using open-source datasets and ensures the quality and challenging nature of our benchmark. Additionally, a fully automated lightweight evaluator termed GuardRank is developed, which achieves significantly higher evaluation accuracy than GPT-4. Our evaluation results across 13 advanced models indicate that MLLMs still have a substantial journey ahead before they can be considered safe and responsible.
Authors: Yu Liu, Mingxin Yang, Yu Xie, Ping Chen, Xiaojin Zhang, Wei Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have training corpora containing large amounts of program code, greatly improving the model's code comprehension and generation capabilities. However, sound comprehensive research on detecting program vulnerabilities, a more specific task related to code, and evaluating the performance of LLMs in this more specialized scenario is still lacking. To address common challenges in vulnerability analysis, our study introduces a new benchmark, VulDetectBench, specifically designed to assess the vulnerability detection capabilities of LLMs. The benchmark comprehensively evaluates LLM's ability to identify, classify, and locate vulnerabilities through five tasks of increasing difficulty. We evaluate the performance of 17 models (both open- and closed-source) and find that while existing models can achieve over 80% accuracy on tasks related to vulnerability identification and classification, they still fall short on specific, more detailed vulnerability analysis tasks, with less than 30% accuracy, making it difficult to provide valuable auxiliary information for professional vulnerability mining. Our benchmark effectively evaluates the capabilities of various LLMs at different levels in the specific task of vulnerability detection, providing a foundation for future research and improvements in this critical area of code security. VulDetectBench is publicly available at https://github.com/Sweetaroo/VulDetectBench.
Authors: Md Tanvirul Alam, Dipkamal Bhushl, Le Nguyen, Nidhi Rastogi
Abstract: Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is crucial in today's cybersecurity landscape, providing essential insights to understand and mitigate the ever-evolving cyber threats. The recent rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in this domain, but concerns about their reliability, accuracy, and hallucinations persist. While existing benchmarks provide general evaluations of LLMs, there are no benchmarks that address the practical and applied aspects of CTI-specific tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce CTIBench, a benchmark designed to assess LLMs' performance in CTI applications. CTIBench includes multiple datasets focused on evaluating knowledge acquired by LLMs in the cyber-threat landscape. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art models on these tasks provides insights into their strengths and weaknesses in CTI contexts, contributing to a better understanding of LLM capabilities in CTI.
Authors: Maxime Darrin, Philippe Formont, Ismail Ben Ayed, Jackie CK Cheung, Pablo Piantanida
Abstract: Embedders play a central role in machine learning, projecting any object into numerical representations that can, in turn, be leveraged to perform various downstream tasks. The evaluation of embedding models typically depends on domain-specific empirical approaches utilizing downstream tasks, primarily because of the lack of a standardized framework for comparison. However, acquiring adequately large and representative datasets for conducting these assessments is not always viable and can prove to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a unified approach to evaluate embedders. First, we establish theoretical foundations for comparing embedding models, drawing upon the concepts of sufficiency and informativeness. We then leverage these concepts to devise a tractable comparison criterion (information sufficiency), leading to a task-agnostic and self-supervised ranking procedure. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach aligns closely with the capability of embedding models to facilitate various downstream tasks in both natural language processing and molecular biology. This effectively offers practitioners a valuable tool for prioritizing model trials.
Authors: Yiyuan Yang, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham
Abstract: Speech enhancement significantly improves the clarity and intelligibility of speech in noisy environments, improving communication and listening experiences. In this paper, we introduce a novel pretraining feature-guided diffusion model tailored for efficient speech enhancement, addressing the limitations of existing discriminative and generative models. By integrating spectral features into a variational autoencoder (VAE) and leveraging pre-trained features for guidance during the reverse process, coupled with the utilization of the deterministic discrete integration method (DDIM) to streamline sampling steps, our model improves efficiency and speech enhancement quality. Demonstrating state-of-the-art results on two public datasets with different SNRs, our model outshines other baselines in efficiency and robustness. The proposed method not only optimizes performance but also enhances practical deployment capabilities, without increasing computational demands.
Authors: Michel Adamic (McGill University), Wellington Avelino (McGill University), Anna Brandenberger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Bryan Chiang (Stanford University), Hunter Davis (McGill University), Stephen Fay (McGill University), Andrew Gregory (McGill University), Aayush Gupta (McGill University), Raphael Hotter (McGill University), Grace Jiang (McGill University), Fiona Leng (McGill University), Stephen Polcyn (McGill University), Thomas Ribeiro (McGill University), Paul Scotti (Princeton University), Michelle Wang (McGill University), Marley Xiong (University of Waterloo), Jonathan Xu (University of Waterloo)
Abstract: We demonstrate the possibility of reconstructing images from fNIRS brain activity and start building a prototype to match the required specs. By training an image reconstruction model on downsampled fMRI data, we discovered that cm-scale spatial resolution is sufficient for image generation. We obtained 71% retrieval accuracy with 1-cm resolution, compared to 93% on the full-resolution fMRI, and 20% with 2-cm resolution. With simulations and high-density tomography, we found that time-domain fNIRS can achieve 1-cm resolution, compared to 2-cm resolution for continuous-wave fNIRS. Lastly, we share designs for a prototype time-domain fNIRS device, consisting of a laser driver, a single photon detector, and a time-to-digital converter system.
Authors: Swarup Ranjan Behera, Abhishek Dhiman, Karthik Gowda, Aalekhya Satya Narayani
Abstract: Audio classification models, particularly the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST), play a crucial role in efficient audio analysis. However, optimizing their efficiency without compromising accuracy remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce FastAST, a framework that integrates Token Merging (ToMe) into the AST framework. FastAST enhances inference speed without requiring extensive retraining by merging similar tokens in audio spectrograms. Furthermore, during training, FastAST brings about significant speed improvements. The experiments indicate that FastAST can increase audio classification throughput with minimal impact on accuracy. To mitigate the accuracy impact, we integrate Cross-Model Knowledge Distillation (CMKD) into the FastAST framework. Integrating ToMe and CMKD into AST results in improved accuracy compared to AST while maintaining faster inference speeds. FastAST represents a step towards real-time, resource-efficient audio analysis.
Authors: Lena Chretien, Nikolas Albarran
Abstract: To understand the impacts of AI-driven coding tools on engineers' workflow and work environment, we utilize the Jellyfish platform to analyze indicators of change. Key indicators are derived from Allocations, Coding Fraction vs. PR Fraction, Lifecycle Phases, Cycle Time, Jira ticket size, PR pickup time, PR comments, PR comment count, interactions, and coding languages. Significant changes were observed in coding time fractions among Copilot users, with an average decrease of 3% with individual decreases as large as 15%. Ticket sizes decreased by an average of 16% across four companies, accompanied by an 8% decrease in cycle times, whereas the control group showed no change. Additionally, the PR process evolved with Copilot usage, featuring longer and more comprehensive comments, despite the weekly number of PRs reviewed remaining constant. Not all hypothesized changes were observed across all participating companies. However, some companies experienced a decrease in PR pickup times by up to 33%, indicating reduced workflow bottlenecks, and one company experienced a shift of up to 17% of effort from maintenance and support work towards product growth initiatives. This study is the first to utilize data from more than one company and goes beyond simple productivity and satisfaction measures, considering real-world engineering settings instead. By doing so, we highlight that some companies seem to benefit more than others from the use of Copilot and that changes can be subtle when investigating aggregates rather than specific aspects of engineering work and workflows - something that will be further investigated in the future.
Authors: Leonardo Cotta, Chris J. Maddison
Abstract: Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed for high-stakes decision-making. On the other hand, these models are still consistently making predictions that contradict users' or society's expectations, e.g., hallucinating, or discriminating. Thus, it is important that we develop test-time strategies to improve their trustworthiness. Inspired by prior work, we leverage causality as a tool to formally encode two aspects of trustworthiness in LLMs: fairness and robustness. Under this perspective, existing test-time solutions explicitly instructing the model to be fair or robust implicitly depend on the LLM's causal reasoning capabilities. In this work, we explore the opposite approach. Instead of explicitly asking the LLM for trustworthiness, we design prompts to encode the underlying causal inference algorithm that will, by construction, result in more trustworthy predictions. Concretely, we propose out-of-context prompting as a test-time solution to encourage fairness and robustness in LLMs. Out-of-context prompting leverages the user's prior knowledge of the task's causal model to apply (random) counterfactual transformations and improve the model's trustworthiness. Empirically, we show that out-of-context prompting consistently improves the fairness and robustness of frontier LLMs across five different benchmark datasets without requiring additional data, finetuning or pre-training.
Authors: Ayman Al-Kababji, Faycal Bensaali, Sarada Prasad Dakua, Yassine Himeur
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a pervasive research topic, permeating various sectors and applications. In this study, we harness the power of AI, specifically convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), for segmenting liver tissues. It also focuses on developing a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) tool, "AI Radiologist", enabling clinicians to effectively delineate different liver tissues (parenchyma, tumors, and vessels), thereby saving lives. This endeavor bridges the gap between academic research and practical, industrial applications. The GUI is a single-page application and is designed using the PyQt5 Python framework. The offline-available AI Radiologist resorts to three ConvNet models trained to segment all liver tissues. With respect to the Dice metric, the best liver ConvNet scores 98.16%, the best tumor ConvNet scores 65.95%, and the best vessel ConvNet scores 51.94%. It outputs 2D slices of the liver, tumors, and vessels, along with 3D interpolations in .obj and .mtl formats, which can be visualized/printed using any 3D-compatible software. Thus, the AI Radiologist offers a convenient tool for clinicians to perform liver tissue segmentation and 3D interpolation employing state-of-the-art models for tissues segmentation. With the provided capacity to select the volumes and pre-trained models, the clinicians can leave the rest to the AI Radiologist.
Authors: Nirmalya Thakur, Vanessa Su, Mingchen Shao, Kesha A. Patel, Hongseok Jeong, Victoria Knieling, Andrew Brian
Abstract: The work of this paper presents a dataset that contains the data of 4011 videos about the ongoing outbreak of measles published on 264 websites on the internet between January 1, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The dataset is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/40s8-xf63. These websites primarily include YouTube and TikTok, which account for 48.6% and 15.2% of the videos, respectively. The remainder of the websites include Instagram and Facebook as well as the websites of various global and local news organizations. For each of these videos, the URL of the video, title of the post, description of the post, and the date of publication of the video are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis (using VADER), subjectivity analysis (using TextBlob), and fine-grain sentiment analysis (using DistilRoBERTa-base) of the video titles and video descriptions were performed. This included classifying each video title and video description into (i) one of the sentiment classes i.e. positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) one of the subjectivity classes i.e. highly opinionated, neutral opinionated, or least opinionated, and (iii) one of the fine-grain sentiment classes i.e. fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for performing sentiment analysis or subjectivity analysis in this field as well as for other applications. Finally, this paper also presents a list of open research questions that may be investigated using this dataset.
Authors: Yayan Zhao, Mingwei Li, Matthew Berger
Abstract: We present CUPID: a visualization method for the contextual understanding of prompt-conditioned image distributions. CUPID targets the visual analysis of distributions produced by modern text-to-image generative models, wherein a user can specify a scene via natural language, and the model generates a set of images, each intended to satisfy the user's description. CUPID is designed to help understand the resulting distribution, using contextual cues to facilitate analysis: objects mentioned in the prompt, novel, synthesized objects not explicitly mentioned, and their potential relationships. Central to CUPID is a novel method for visualizing high-dimensional distributions, wherein contextualized embeddings of objects, those found within images, are mapped to a low-dimensional space via density-based embeddings. We show how such embeddings allows one to discover salient styles of objects within a distribution, as well as identify anomalous, or rare, object styles. Moreover, we introduce conditional density embeddings, whereby conditioning on a given object allows one to compare object dependencies within the distribution. We employ CUPID for analyzing image distributions produced by large-scale diffusion models, where our experimental results offer insights on language misunderstanding from such models and biases in object composition, while also providing an interface for discovery of typical, or rare, synthesized scenes.
Authors: Hongxiang Zhang, Yuyang Rong, Yifeng He, Hao Chen
Abstract: Greybox fuzzing has achieved success in revealing bugs and vulnerabilities in programs. However, randomized mutation strategies have limited the fuzzer's performance on structured data. Specialized fuzzers can handle complex structured data, but require additional efforts in grammar and suffer from low throughput. In this paper, we explore the potential of utilizing the Large Language Model to enhance greybox fuzzing for structured data. We utilize the pre-trained knowledge of LLM about data conversion and format to generate new valid inputs. We further fine-tuned it with paired mutation seeds to learn structured format and mutation strategies effectively. Our LLM-based fuzzer, LLAMAFUZZ, integrates the power of LLM to understand and mutate structured data to fuzzing. We conduct experiments on the standard bug-based benchmark Magma and a wide variety of real-world programs. LLAMAFUZZ outperforms our top competitor by 41 bugs on average. We also identified 47 unique bugs across all trials. Moreover, LLAMAFUZZ demonstrated consistent performance on both bug trigger and bug reached. Compared to AFL++, LLAMAFUZZ achieved 27.19% more branches in real-world program sets on average. We also demonstrate a case study to explain how LLMs enhance the fuzzing process in terms of code coverage.
Authors: Valerio Terragni, Partha Roop, Kelly Blincoe
Abstract: A paradigm shift is underway in Software Engineering, with AI systems such as LLMs gaining increasing importance for improving software development productivity. This trend is anticipated to persist. In the next five years, we will likely see an increasing symbiotic partnership between human developers and AI. The Software Engineering research community cannot afford to overlook this trend; we must address the key research challenges posed by the integration of AI into the software development process. In this paper, we present our vision of the future of software development in an AI-Driven world and explore the key challenges that our research community should address to realize this vision.
Authors: Agnia Sergeyuk, Yaroslav Golubev, Timofey Bryksin, Iftekhar Ahmed
Abstract: The last several years saw the emergence of AI assistants for code -- multi-purpose AI-based helpers in software engineering. Their quick development makes it necessary to better understand how specifically developers are using them, why they are not using them in certain parts of their development workflow, and what needs to be improved. In this work, we carried out a large-scale survey aimed at how AI assistants are used, focusing on specific software development activities and stages. We collected opinions of 481 programmers on five broad activities: (a) implementing new features, (b) writing tests, (c) bug triaging, (d) refactoring, and (e) writing natural-language artifacts, as well as their individual stages. Our results show that usage of AI assistants varies depending on activity and stage. For instance, developers find writing tests and natural-language artifacts to be the least enjoyable activities and want to delegate them the most, currently using AI assistants to generate tests and test data, as well as generating comments and docstrings most of all. This can be a good focus for features aimed to help developers right now. As for why developers do not use assistants, in addition to general things like trust and company policies, there are fixable issues that can serve as a guide for further research, e.g., the lack of project-size context, and lack of awareness about assistants. We believe that our comprehensive and specific results are especially needed now to steer active research toward where users actually need AI assistants.
Authors: Meng Liu, Saee Gopal Paliwal
Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinities is crucial for drug development. Recent advances in machine learning show promising results on this task. However, these methods typically rely heavily on labeled data, which can be scarce or unreliable, or they rely on assumptions like Boltzmann-distributed data that may not hold true in practice. Here, we present DualBind, a novel framework that integrates supervised mean squared error (MSE) with unsupervised denoising score matching (DSM) to accurately learn the binding energy function. DualBind not only addresses the limitations of DSM-only models by providing more accurate absolute affinity predictions but also improves generalizability and reduces reliance on labeled data compared to MSE-only models. Our experimental results demonstrate that DualBind excels in predicting binding affinities and can effectively utilize both labeled and unlabeled data to enhance performance.
Authors: Jayaram Raghuram, George Kesidis, David J. Miller
Abstract: A Trojan in a language model can be inserted when the model is refined for a particular application such as determining the sentiment of product reviews. In this paper, we clarify and empirically explore variations of the data-poisoning threat model. We then empirically assess two simple defenses each for a different defense scenario. Finally, we provide a brief survey of related attacks and defenses.
Authors: W. A. Z\'u\~niga-Galindo, B. A. Zambrano-Luna, Baboucarr Dibba
Abstract: The first goal of this article is to introduce a new type of p-adic reaction-diffusion cellular neural network with delay. We study the stability of these networks and provide numerical simulations of their responses. The second goal is to provide a quick review of the state of the art of p-adic cellular neural networks and their applications to image processing.
Authors: Lin Shi, Weicheng Ma, Soroush Vosoughi
Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge offers a promising alternative to human judges across various tasks, yet inherent biases, particularly position bias - a systematic preference for answers based on their position in the prompt - compromise its effectiveness. Our study investigates this issue by developing a framework to systematically study and quantify position bias using metrics such as repetitional consistency, positional consistency, and positional fairness. We conduct experiments with 9 judge models across 22 tasks from the MTBench and DevBench benchmarks and nearly 40 answer-generating models, generating approximately 80,000 evaluation instances. This comprehensive assessment reveals significant variations in bias across judges and tasks. Although GPT-4 often excels in positional consistency and fairness, some more cost-effective models perform comparably or even better in specific tasks, highlighting essential trade-offs between consistency, fairness, and cost. Our results also demonstrate high consistency of judgment across repetitions, confirming that position bias is not due to random variations. This research significantly contributes to the field by introducing new concepts for understanding position bias and providing a multi-dimensional framework for evaluation. These insights guide the selection of optimal judge models, enhance benchmark design, and lay the foundation for future research into effective debiasing strategies, ultimately enhancing the reliability of LLM evaluators.
Authors: Amogh Mannekote, Jinseok Nam, Ziming Li, Jian Gao, Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Bonnie J. Dorr
Abstract: Existing benchmark corpora of task-oriented dialogue are collected either using a "machines talking to machines" approach or by giving template-based goal descriptions to crowdworkers. These methods, however, often produce utterances that are markedly different from natural human conversations in which people often convey their preferences in indirect ways, such as through small talk. We term such utterances as Indirect User Requests (IURs). Understanding such utterances demands considerable world knowledge and reasoning capabilities on the listener's part. Our study introduces an LLM-based pipeline to automatically generate realistic, high-quality IURs for a given domain, with the ultimate goal of supporting research in natural language understanding (NLU) and dialogue state tracking (DST) for task-oriented dialogue systems. Our findings show that while large LLMs such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 generate high-quality IURs, achieving similar quality with smaller models is more challenging. We release IndirectRequests, a dataset of IURs that advances beyond the initial Schema-Guided Dialog (SGD) dataset in that it provides a challenging testbed for testing the "in the wild" performance of NLU and DST models.
Authors: Maung Thway, Jose Recatala-Gomez, Fun Siong Lim, Kedar Hippalgaonkar, Leonard W. T. Ng
Abstract: The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for enhancing human learning. This study introduces Professor Leodar, a custom-built, Singlish-speaking Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot designed to enhance educational support for undergraduate engineering students. Deployed at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Professor Leodar offers a glimpse into the future of AI-assisted learning, offering personalized guidance, 24/7 availability, and contextually relevant information. Through a mixed-methods approach, we uncover the impact of Professor Leodar on student learning, engagement, and exam preparedness, with 97.1% of participants reporting positive experiences. These findings help define possible roles of AI in education and highlight the potential of custom GenAI chatbots. Our combination of chatbot development, in-class deployment and study of learning outcomes offers a benchmark for GenAI educational tools and serves as stepping stone for redefining the interplay between AI and human learning.
Authors: Deok-Hyeon Cho, Hyung-Seok Oh, Seung-Bin Kim, Sang-Hoon Lee, Seong-Whan Lee
Abstract: Despite rapid advances in the field of emotional text-to-speech (TTS), recent studies primarily focus on mimicking the average style of a particular emotion. As a result, the ability to manipulate speech emotion remains constrained to several predefined labels, compromising the ability to reflect the nuanced variations of emotion. In this paper, we propose EmoSphere-TTS, which synthesizes expressive emotional speech by using a spherical emotion vector to control the emotional style and intensity of the synthetic speech. Without any human annotation, we use the arousal, valence, and dominance pseudo-labels to model the complex nature of emotion via a Cartesian-spherical transformation. Furthermore, we propose a dual conditional adversarial network to improve the quality of generated speech by reflecting the multi-aspect characteristics. The experimental results demonstrate the model ability to control emotional style and intensity with high-quality expressive speech.
Authors: Ryan Zhou, Jaume Bacardit, Alexander Brownlee, Stefano Cagnoni, Martin Fyvie, Giovanni Iacca, John McCall, Niki van Stein, David Walker, Ting Hu
Abstract: AI methods are finding an increasing number of applications, but their often black-box nature has raised concerns about accountability and trust. The field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has emerged in response to the need for human understanding of AI models. Evolutionary computation (EC), as a family of powerful optimization and learning tools, has significant potential to contribute to XAI. In this paper, we provide an introduction to XAI and review various techniques in current use for explaining machine learning (ML) models. We then focus on how EC can be used in XAI, and review some XAI approaches which incorporate EC techniques. Additionally, we discuss the application of XAI principles within EC itself, examining how these principles can shed some light on the behavior and outcomes of EC algorithms in general, on the (automatic) configuration of these algorithms, and on the underlying problem landscapes that these algorithms optimize. Finally, we discuss some open challenges in XAI and opportunities for future research in this field using EC. Our aim is to demonstrate that EC is well-suited for addressing current problems in explainability and to encourage further exploration of these methods to contribute to the development of more transparent and trustworthy ML models and EC algorithms.
Authors: Yiran Wang, Masao Utiyama
Abstract: Recently, binary representation has been proposed as a novel representation that lies between continuous and discrete representations. It exhibits considerable information-preserving capability when being used to replace continuous input vectors. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of further introducing it to the output side, aiming to allow models to output binary labels instead. To preserve the structural information on the output side along with label information, we extend the previous contrastive hashing method as structured contrastive hashing. More specifically, we upgrade CKY from label-level to bit-level, define a new similarity function with span marginal probabilities, and introduce a novel contrastive loss function with a carefully designed instance selection strategy. Our model achieves competitive performance on various structured prediction tasks, and demonstrates that binary representation can be considered a novel representation that further bridges the gap between the continuous nature of deep learning and the discrete intrinsic property of natural languages.
Authors: Yizhang Zhu, Shiyin Du, Boyan Li, Yuyu Luo, Nan Tang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of scientific tasks including mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Despite their successes, the effectiveness of LLMs in handling complex statistical tasks remains systematically under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce StatQA, a new benchmark designed for statistical analysis tasks. StatQA comprises 11,623 examples tailored to evaluate LLMs' proficiency in specialized statistical tasks and their applicability assessment capabilities, particularly for hypothesis testing methods. We systematically experiment with representative LLMs using various prompting strategies and show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o achieve a best performance of only 64.83%, indicating significant room for improvement. Notably, while open-source LLMs (e.g. LLaMA-3) show limited capability, those fine-tuned ones exhibit marked improvements, outperforming all in-context learning-based methods (e.g. GPT-4o). Moreover, our comparative human experiments highlight a striking contrast in error types between LLMs and humans: LLMs primarily make applicability errors, whereas humans mostly make statistical task confusion errors. This divergence highlights distinct areas of proficiency and deficiency, suggesting that combining LLM and human expertise could lead to complementary strengths, inviting further investigation into their collaborative potential.
Authors: Giseung Park, Woohyeon Byeon, Seongmin Kim, Elad Havakuk, Amir Leshem, Youngchul Sung
Abstract: In this paper, we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning, which arises in many real-world problems with multiple optimization goals. We approach the problem with a max-min framework focusing on fairness among the multiple goals and develop a relevant theory and a practical model-free algorithm under the max-min framework. The developed theory provides a theoretical advance in multi-objective reinforcement learning, and the proposed algorithm demonstrates a notable performance improvement over existing baseline methods.
Authors: Sina Tayebati, Theja Tulabandhula, Amit R. Trivedi
Abstract: In this work, we propose a disruptively frugal LiDAR perception dataflow that generates rather than senses parts of the environment that are either predictable based on the extensive training of the environment or have limited consequence to the overall prediction accuracy. Therefore, the proposed methodology trades off sensing energy with training data for low-power robotics and autonomous navigation to operate frugally with sensors, extending their lifetime on a single battery charge. Our proposed generative pre-training strategy for this purpose, called as radially masked autoencoding (R-MAE), can also be readily implemented in a typical LiDAR system by selectively activating and controlling the laser power for randomly generated angular regions during on-field operations. Our extensive evaluations show that pre-training with R-MAE enables focusing on the radial segments of the data, thereby capturing spatial relationships and distances between objects more effectively than conventional procedures. Therefore, the proposed methodology not only reduces sensing energy but also improves prediction accuracy. For example, our extensive evaluations on Waymo, nuScenes, and KITTI datasets show that the approach achieves over a 5% average precision improvement in detection tasks across datasets and over a 4% accuracy improvement in transferring domains from Waymo and nuScenes to KITTI. In 3D object detection, it enhances small object detection by up to 4.37% in AP at moderate difficulty levels in the KITTI dataset. Even with 90% radial masking, it surpasses baseline models by up to 5.59% in mAP/mAPH across all object classes in the Waymo dataset. Additionally, our method achieves up to 3.17% and 2.31% improvements in mAP and NDS, respectively, on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness with both single and fused LiDAR-camera modalities. https://github.com/sinatayebati/Radial_MAE.
Authors: David Wadden, Kejian Shi, Jacob Morrison, Aakanksha Naik, Shruti Singh, Nitzan Barzilay, Kyle Lo, Tom Hope, Luca Soldaini, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Doug Downey, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Arman Cohan
Abstract: We present SciRIFF (Scientific Resource for Instruction-Following and Finetuning), a dataset of 137K instruction-following demonstrations for 54 tasks covering five essential scientific literature understanding capabilities: information extraction, summarization, question answering, claim verification, and classification. SciRIFF demonstrations are notable for their long input contexts, detailed task specifications, and complex structured outputs. While instruction-following resources are available in specific domains such as clinical medicine and chemistry, SciRIFF is the first dataset focused on extracting and synthesizing information from research literature across a wide range of scientific fields. To demonstrate the utility of SciRIFF, we develop a sample-efficient strategy to adapt a general instruction-following model for science by performing additional finetuning on a mix of general-domain and SciRIFF demonstrations. In evaluations on nine held-out scientific tasks, our model -- called SciTulu -- improves over a strong LLM baseline by 28.1% and 6.5% at the 7B and 70B scales respectively, while maintaining general instruction-following performance within 2% of the baseline. We are optimistic that SciRIFF will facilitate the development and evaluation of LLMs to help researchers navigate the ever-growing body of scientific literature. We release our dataset, model checkpoints, and data processing and evaluation code to enable further research.
Authors: Xinyu Zhang, Yuhan Liu, Haonan Chang, Abdeslam Boularias
Abstract: Learning general-purpose models from diverse datasets has achieved great success in machine learning. In robotics, however, existing methods in multi-task learning are typically constrained to a single robot and workspace, while recent work such as RT-X requires a non-trivial action normalization procedure to manually bridge the gap between different action spaces in diverse environments. In this paper, we propose the visual kinematics chain as a precise and universal representation of quasi-static actions for robot learning over diverse environments, which requires no manual adjustment since the visual kinematic chains can be automatically obtained from the robot's model and camera parameters. We propose the Visual Kinematics Transformer (VKT), a convolution-free architecture that supports an arbitrary number of camera viewpoints, and that is trained with a single objective of forecasting kinematic structures through optimal point-set matching. We demonstrate the superior performance of VKT over BC transformers as a general agent on Calvin, RLBench, Open-X, and real robot manipulation tasks. Video demonstrations can be found at https://mlzxy.github.io/visual-kinetic-chain.
Authors: Yiwei Li, Fei Mi, Yitong Li, Yasheng Wang, Bin Sun, Shaoxiong Feng, Kan Li
Abstract: Stochastic sampling strategies such as top-k and top-p have been widely used in dialogue generation task. However, as an open-domain chatting system, there will be two different conversation scenarios, i.e. chit-chat and knowledge-based question answering. In the former situation, responses diversity is essential due to the one-to-many nature in dialogue. The latter, on the other hand, requires less randomness given that stochastic decoding strategy entails the risk of generating incorrect information. As a result, an adaptive and flexible decoding strategy is needed to cope with these two scenarios simultaneously. To this end, we propose the dynamic decoding strategy (DDS), which can adjust the decoding space w.r.t. different contexts. In DDS, both sequence-level and token-level adaptive search can be achieved to adjust the decoding process in a unified framework. Besides, our adaptive algorithm can not only be used during model inference, but it can also be applied during the model training stage to further enhance the performance. Comprehensive experiments indicate that the proposed decoding strategy can consistently improve the performance of pre-trained dialogue models when coupled with four well-used stochastic decoding algorithms.
Authors: Rahul Kumar, Amar Raja Dibbu, Shrutendra Harsola, Vignesh Subrahmaniam, Ashutosh Modi
Abstract: Several large-scale datasets (e.g., WikiSQL, Spider) for developing natural language interfaces to databases have recently been proposed. These datasets cover a wide breadth of domains but fall short on some essential domains, such as finance and accounting. Given that accounting databases are used worldwide, particularly by non-technical people, there is an imminent need to develop models that could help extract information from accounting databases via natural language queries. In this resource paper, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a new large-scale Text-to-SQL dataset for the accounting and financial domain: BookSQL. The dataset consists of 100k natural language queries-SQL pairs, and accounting databases of 1 million records. We experiment with and analyze existing state-of-the-art models (including GPT-4) for the Text-to-SQL task on BookSQL. We find significant performance gaps, thus pointing towards developing more focused models for this domain.
Authors: Lin Zuo, Yongqi Ding, Mengmeng Jing, Kunshan Yang, Yunqian Yu
Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have attracted considerable attention for their event-driven, low-power characteristics and high biological interpretability. Inspired by knowledge distillation (KD), recent research has improved the performance of the SNN model with a pre-trained teacher model. However, additional teacher models require significant computational resources, and it is tedious to manually define the appropriate teacher network architecture. In this paper, we explore cost-effective self-distillation learning of SNNs to circumvent these concerns. Without an explicit defined teacher, the SNN generates pseudo-labels and learns consistency during training. On the one hand, we extend the timestep of the SNN during training to create an implicit temporal ``teacher" that guides the learning of the original ``student", i.e., the temporal self-distillation. On the other hand, we guide the output of the weak classifier at the intermediate stage by the final output of the SNN, i.e., the spatial self-distillation. Our temporal-spatial self-distillation (TSSD) learning method does not introduce any inference overhead and has excellent generalization ability. Extensive experiments on the static image datasets CIFAR10/100 and ImageNet as well as the neuromorphic datasets CIFAR10-DVS and DVS-Gesture validate the superior performance of the TSSD method. This paper presents a novel manner of fusing SNNs with KD, providing insights into high-performance SNN learning methods.
Authors: Rupayan Mallick, Amr Abdalla, Sarah Adel Bargal
Abstract: We present FaithFill, a diffusion-based inpainting object completion approach for realistic generation of missing object parts. Typically, multiple reference images are needed to achieve such realistic generation, otherwise the generation would not faithfully preserve shape, texture, color, and background. In this work, we propose a pipeline that utilizes only a single input reference image -having varying lighting, background, object pose, and/or viewpoint. The singular reference image is used to generate multiple views of the object to be inpainted. We demonstrate that FaithFill produces faithful generation of the object's missing parts, together with background/scene preservation, from a single reference image. This is demonstrated through standard similarity metrics, human judgement, and GPT evaluation. Our results are presented on the DreamBooth dataset, and a novel proposed dataset.
Authors: Se Jin Park, Chae Won Kim, Hyeongseop Rha, Minsu Kim, Joanna Hong, Jeong Hun Yeo, Yong Man Ro
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel Face-to-Face spoken dialogue model. It processes audio-visual speech from user input and generates audio-visual speech as the response, marking the initial step towards creating an avatar chatbot system without relying on intermediate text. To this end, we newly introduce MultiDialog, the first large-scale multimodal (i.e., audio and visual) spoken dialogue corpus containing 340 hours of approximately 9,000 dialogues, recorded based on the open domain dialogue dataset, TopicalChat. The MultiDialog contains parallel audio-visual recordings of conversation partners acting according to the given script with emotion annotations, which we expect to open up research opportunities in multimodal synthesis. Our Face-to-Face spoken dialogue model incorporates a textually pretrained large language model and adapts it into the audio-visual spoken dialogue domain by incorporating speech-text joint pretraining. Through extensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our model in facilitating a face-to-face conversation. Demo and data are available at https://multidialog.github.io and https://huggingface.co/datasets/IVLLab/MultiDialog, respectively.
URLs: https://multidialog.github.io, https://huggingface.co/datasets/IVLLab/MultiDialog,
Authors: Seyd Teymoor Seydi
Abstract: Hyperspectral image classification is a crucial but challenging task due to the high dimensionality and complex spatial-spectral correlations inherent in hyperspectral data. This paper employs Wavelet-based Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (wav-kan) architecture tailored for efficient modeling of these intricate dependencies. Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, Wav-KAN incorporates wavelet functions as learnable activation functions, enabling non-linear mapping of the input spectral signatures. The wavelet-based activation allows Wav-KAN to effectively capture multi-scale spatial and spectral patterns through dilations and translations. Experimental evaluation on three benchmark hyperspectral datasets (Salinas, Pavia, Indian Pines) demonstrates the superior performance of Wav-KAN compared to traditional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and the recently proposed Spline-based KAN (Spline-KAN) model. In this work we are: (1) conducting more experiments on additional hyperspectral datasets (Pavia University, WHU-Hi, and Urban Hyperspectral Image) to further validate the generalizability of Wav-KAN; (2) developing a multiresolution Wav-KAN architecture to capture scale-invariant features; (3) analyzing the effect of dimensional reduction techniques on classification performance; (4) exploring optimization methods for tuning the hyperparameters of KAN models; and (5) comparing Wav-KAN with other state-of-the-art models in hyperspectral image classification.
Authors: Han Wang, Wenhao Li, Hongyuan Zha, Baoxiang Wang
Abstract: A carbon market is a market-based tool that incentivizes economic agents to align individual profits with the global utility, i.e., reducing carbon emissions to tackle climate change. \textit{Cap and trade} stands as a critical principle based on allocating and trading carbon allowances (carbon emission credit), enabling economic agents to follow planned emissions and penalizing excess emissions. A central authority is responsible for introducing and allocating those allowances in cap and trade. However, the complexity of carbon market dynamics makes accurate simulation intractable, which in turn hinders the design of effective allocation strategies. To address this, we propose an adaptive mechanism design framework, simulating the market using hierarchical, model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Government agents allocate carbon credits, while enterprises engage in economic activities and carbon trading. This framework illustrates agents' behavior comprehensively. Numerical results show MARL enables government agents to balance productivity, equality, and carbon emissions. Our project is available at \url{https://github.com/xwanghan/Carbon-Simulator}.
Authors: He Liu, Yikai Wang, Huaping Liu, Fuchun Sun, Anbang Yao
Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation is able to utilize the knowledge learned by a large teacher network to augment the training of a smaller student network without accessing the original training data, avoiding privacy, security, and proprietary risks in real applications. In this line of research, existing methods typically follow an inversion-and-distillation paradigm in which a generative adversarial network on-the-fly trained with the guidance of the pre-trained teacher network is used to synthesize a large-scale sample set for knowledge distillation. In this paper, we reexamine this common data-free knowledge distillation paradigm, showing that there is considerable room to improve the overall training efficiency through a lens of ``small-scale inverted data for knowledge distillation". In light of three empirical observations indicating the importance of how to balance class distributions in terms of synthetic sample diversity and difficulty during both data inversion and distillation processes, we propose Small Scale Data-free Knowledge Distillation SSD-KD. In formulation, SSD-KD introduces a modulating function to balance synthetic samples and a priority sampling function to select proper samples, facilitated by a dynamic replay buffer and a reinforcement learning strategy. As a result, SSD-KD can perform distillation training conditioned on an extremely small scale of synthetic samples (e.g., 10X less than the original training data scale), making the overall training efficiency one or two orders of magnitude faster than many mainstream methods while retaining superior or competitive model performance, as demonstrated on popular image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/OSVAI/SSD-KD.
Authors: Qizhen Wu, Kexin Liu, Lei Chen, Jinhu Lv
Abstract: In swarm robotics, confrontation including the pursuit-evasion game is a key scenario. High uncertainty caused by unknown opponents' strategies and dynamic obstacles complicates the action space into a hybrid decision process. Although the deep reinforcement learning method is significant for swarm confrontation since it can handle various sizes, as an end-to-end implementation, it cannot deal with the hybrid process. Here, we propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning approach consisting of a target allocation layer, a path planning layer, and the underlying dynamic interaction mechanism between the two layers, which indicates the quantified uncertainty. It decouples the hybrid process into discrete allocation and continuous planning layers, with a probabilistic ensemble model to quantify the uncertainty and regulate the interaction frequency adaptively. Furthermore, to overcome the unstable training process introduced by the two layers, we design an integration training method including pre-training and cross-training, which enhances the training efficiency and stability. Experiment results in both comparison and ablation studies validate the effectiveness and generalization performance of our proposed approach.
Authors: Chao Li, Anbang Yao
Abstract: Dynamic convolution learns a linear mixture of n static kernels weighted with their input-dependent attentions, demonstrating superior performance than normal convolution. However, it increases the number of convolutional parameters by n times, and thus is not parameter efficient. This leads to no research progress that can allow researchers to explore the setting n>100 (an order of magnitude larger than the typical setting n<10) for pushing forward the performance boundary of dynamic convolution while enjoying parameter efficiency. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose KernelWarehouse, a more general form of dynamic convolution, which redefines the basic concepts of ``kernels", ``assembling kernels" and ``attention function" through the lens of exploiting convolutional parameter dependencies within the same layer and across neighboring layers of a ConvNet. We testify the effectiveness of KernelWarehouse on ImageNet and MS-COCO datasets using various ConvNet architectures. Intriguingly, KernelWarehouse is also applicable to Vision Transformers, and it can even reduce the model size of a backbone while improving the model accuracy. For instance, KernelWarehouse (n=4) achieves 5.61%|3.90%|4.38% absolute top-1 accuracy gain on the ResNet18|MobileNetV2|DeiT-Tiny backbone, and KernelWarehouse (n=1/4) with 65.10% model size reduction still achieves 2.29% gain on the ResNet18 backbone. The code and models are available at https://github.com/OSVAI/KernelWarehouse.
Authors: Yida Chen, Aoyu Wu, Trevor DePodesta, Catherine Yeh, Kenneth Li, Nicholas Castillo Marin, Oam Patel, Jan Riecke, Shivam Raval, Olivia Seow, Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Vi\'egas
Abstract: Conversational LLMs function as black box systems, leaving users guessing about why they see the output they do. This lack of transparency is potentially problematic, especially given concerns around bias and truthfulness. To address this issue, we present an end-to-end prototype-connecting interpretability techniques with user experience design-that seeks to make chatbots more transparent. We begin by showing evidence that a prominent open-source LLM has a "user model": examining the internal state of the system, we can extract data related to a user's age, gender, educational level, and socioeconomic status. Next, we describe the design of a dashboard that accompanies the chatbot interface, displaying this user model in real time. The dashboard can also be used to control the user model and the system's behavior. Finally, we discuss a study in which users conversed with the instrumented system. Our results suggest that users appreciate seeing internal states, which helped them expose biased behavior and increased their sense of control. Participants also made valuable suggestions that point to future directions for both design and machine learning research. The project page and video demo of our TalkTuner system are available at https://bit.ly/talktuner-project-page
Authors: Deri Siswara, Agus M. Soleh, Aji Hamim Wigena
Abstract: This research aims to evaluate the performance of several Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures including Simple RNN, Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), compared to classic algorithms such as Random Forest and XGBoost in building classification models for early crash detection in ASEAN-5 stock markets. The study is examined using imbalanced data, which is common due to the rarity of market crashes. The study analyzes daily data from 2010 to 2023 across the major stock markets of the ASEAN-5 countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Philippines. Market crash is identified as the target variable when the major stock price indices fall below the Value at Risk (VaR) thresholds of 5%, 2.5% and 1%. predictors involving technical indicators of major local and global markets as well as commodity markets. This study includes 213 predictors with their respective lags (5, 10, 15, 22, 50, 200) and uses a time step of 7, expanding the total number of predictors to 1491. The challenge of data imbalance is addressed with SMOTE-ENN. The results show that all RNN-Based architectures outperform Random Forest and XGBoost. Among the various RNN architectures, Simple RNN stands out as the most superior, mainly due to the data characteristics that are not overly complex and focus more on short-term information. This study enhances and extends the range of phenomena observed in previous studies by incorporating variables like different geographical zones and time periods, as well as methodological adjustments.
Authors: Tejaram Sangadi, L. A. Prashanth, Krishna Jagannathan
Abstract: Motivated by risk-sensitive reinforcement learning scenarios, we consider the problem of policy evaluation for variance in a discounted reward Markov decision process (MDP). For this problem, a temporal difference (TD) type learning algorithm with linear function approximation (LFA) exists in the literature, though only asymptotic guarantees are available for this algorithm. We derive finite sample bounds that hold (i) in the mean-squared sense; and (ii) with high probability, when tail iterate averaging is employed with/without regularization. Our bounds exhibit exponential decay for the initial error, while the overall bound is $O(1/t)$, where $t$ is the number of update iterations of the TD algorithm. Further, the bound for the regularized TD variant is for a universal step size. Our bounds open avenues for analysis of actor-critic algorithms for mean-variance optimization in a discounted MDP.
Authors: Zhening Li, Gabriel Poesia, Armando Solar-Lezama
Abstract: Skills are temporal abstractions that are intended to improve reinforcement learning (RL) performance through hierarchical RL. Despite our intuition about the properties of an environment that make skills useful, a precise characterization has been absent. We provide the first such characterization, focusing on the utility of deterministic skills in deterministic sparse-reward environments with finite action spaces. We show theoretically and empirically that RL performance gain from skills is worse in environments where solutions to states are less compressible. Additional theoretical results suggest that skills benefit exploration more than they benefit learning from existing experience, and that using unexpressive skills such as macroactions may worsen RL performance. We hope our findings can guide research on automatic skill discovery and help RL practitioners better decide when and how to use skills.
Authors: Bulat Khaertdinov, Pedro Jeuris, Annanda Sousa, Enrique Hortal
Abstract: Recent advancements in Deep and Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) have led to substantial improvements in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) performance, reaching unprecedented levels. However, obtaining sufficient amounts of accurately labeled data for training or fine-tuning the models remains a costly and challenging task. In this paper, we propose a multi-view SSL pre-training technique that can be applied to various representations of speech, including the ones generated by large speech models, to improve SER performance in scenarios where annotations are limited. Our experiments, based on wav2vec 2.0, spectral and paralinguistic features, demonstrate that the proposed framework boosts the SER performance, by up to 10% in Unweighted Average Recall, in settings with extremely sparse data annotations.
Authors: Zheng Dai, David K Gifford
Abstract: Diffusion models are a class of generative models that generate high-quality samples, but at present it is difficult to characterize how they depend upon their training data. This difficulty raises scientific and regulatory questions, and is a consequence of the complexity of diffusion models and their sampling process. To analyze this dependence, we introduce Ablation Based Counterfactuals (ABC), a method of performing counterfactual analysis that relies on model ablation rather than model retraining. In our approach, we train independent components of a model on different but overlapping splits of a training set. These components are then combined into a single model, from which the causal influence of any training sample can be removed by ablating a combination of model components. We demonstrate how we can construct a model like this using an ensemble of diffusion models. We then use this model to study the limits of training data attribution by enumerating full counterfactual landscapes, and show that single source attributability diminishes with increasing training data size. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of unattributable samples.
Authors: Peizhi Niu, Chao Pan, Siheng Chen, Olgica Milenkovic
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become instrumental in diverse real-world applications, offering powerful graph learning capabilities for tasks such as social networks and medical data analysis. Despite their successes, GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, including membership inference attacks (MIA), which threaten privacy by identifying whether a record was part of the model's training data. While existing research has explored MIA in GNNs under graph inductive learning settings, the more common and challenging graph transductive learning setting remains understudied in this context. This paper addresses this gap and proposes an effective two-stage defense, Graph Transductive Defense (GTD), tailored to graph transductive learning characteristics. The gist of our approach is a combination of a train-test alternate training schedule and flattening strategy, which successfully reduces the difference between the training and testing loss distributions. Extensive empirical results demonstrate the superior performance of our method (a decrease in attack AUROC by $9.42\%$ and an increase in utility performance by $18.08\%$ on average compared to LBP), highlighting its potential for seamless integration into various classification models with minimal overhead.
Authors: Fan Chen, Constantinos Daskalakis, Noah Golowich, Alexander Rakhlin
Abstract: We study computational and statistical aspects of learning Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs). In this model, the learner interacts with an MDP drawn at the beginning of each epoch from an unknown mixture of MDPs. To sidestep known impossibility results, we consider several notions of separation of the constituent MDPs. The main thrust of this paper is in establishing a nearly-sharp *statistical threshold* for the horizon length necessary for efficient learning. On the computational side, we show that under a weaker assumption of separability under the optimal policy, there is a quasi-polynomial algorithm with time complexity scaling in terms of the statistical threshold. We further show a near-matching time complexity lower bound under the exponential time hypothesis.
Authors: Sichen Jin, Youngmoon Jung, Seungjin Lee, Jaeyoung Roh, Changwoo Han, Hoonyoung Cho
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel approach for streaming openvocabulary keyword spotting (KWS) with text-based keyword enrollment. For every input frame, the proposed method finds the optimal alignment ending at the frame using connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and aggregates the frame-level acoustic embedding (AE) to obtain higher-level (i.e., character, word, or phrase) AE that aligns with the text embedding (TE) of the target keyword text. After that, we calculate the similarity of the aggregated AE and the TE. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to dynamically align the audio and the keyword text on-the-fly to attain the joint audio-text embedding for KWS. Despite operating in a streaming fashion, our approach achieves competitive performance on the LibriPhrase dataset compared to the non-streaming methods with a mere 155K model parameters and a decoding algorithm with time complexity O(U), where U is the length of the target keyword at inference time.
Authors: Xiaohui Zhang, Yanbo Wang, Xiyuan Wang, Muhan Zhang
Abstract: Temporal graphs are ubiquitous in real-world scenarios, such as social network, trade and transportation. Predicting dynamic links between nodes in a temporal graph is of vital importance. Traditional methods usually leverage the temporal neighborhood of interaction history to generate node embeddings first and then aggregate the source and target node embeddings to predict the link. However, such methods focus on learning individual node representations, but overlook the pairwise representation learning nature of link prediction and fail to capture the important pairwise features of links such as common neighbors (CN). Motivated by the success of Neural Common Neighbor (NCN) for static graph link prediction, we propose TNCN, a temporal version of NCN for link prediction in temporal graphs. TNCN dynamically updates a temporal neighbor dictionary for each node, and utilizes multi-hop common neighbors between the source and target node to learn a more effective pairwise representation. We validate our model on five large-scale real-world datasets from the Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB), and find that it achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three of them. Additionally, TNCN demonstrates excellent scalability on large datasets, outperforming popular GNN baselines by up to 6.4 times in speed. Our code is available at https: //github.com/GraphPKU/TNCN.
Authors: Yao Lu, Yutao Zhu, Yuqi Li, Dongwei Xu, Yun Lin, Qi Xuan, Xiaoniu Yang
Abstract: With the successful application of deep learning in communications systems, deep neural networks are becoming the preferred method for signal classification. Although these models yield impressive results, they often come with high computational complexity and large model sizes, which hinders their practical deployment in communication systems. To address this challenge, we propose a novel layer pruning method. Specifically, we decompose the model into several consecutive blocks, each containing consecutive layers with similar semantics. Then, we identify layers that need to be preserved within each block based on their contribution. Finally, we reassemble the pruned blocks and fine-tune the compact model. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method over a variety of state-of-the-art baselines, including layer pruning and channel pruning methods.
Authors: Chris Yuhao Liu, Yaxuan Wang, Jeffrey Flanigan, Yang Liu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced to encompass extensive knowledge across diverse domains. Yet controlling what a large language model should not know is important for ensuring alignment and thus safe use. However, accurately and efficiently unlearning knowledge from an LLM remains challenging due to the potential collateral damage caused by the fuzzy boundary between retention and forgetting, and the large computational requirements for optimization across state-of-the-art models with hundreds of billions of parameters. In this work, we present Embedding-COrrupted (ECO) Prompts, a lightweight unlearning framework for large language models to address both the challenges of knowledge entanglement and unlearning efficiency. Instead of relying on the LLM itself to unlearn, we enforce an unlearned state during inference by employing a prompt classifier to identify and safeguard prompts to forget. We learn corruptions added to prompt embeddings via zeroth order optimization toward the unlearning objective offline and corrupt prompts flagged by the classifier during inference. We find that these embedding-corrupted prompts not only lead to desirable outputs that satisfy the unlearning objective but also closely approximate the output from a model that has never been trained on the data intended for forgetting. Through extensive experiments on unlearning, we demonstrate the superiority of our method in achieving promising unlearning at nearly zero side effects in general domains and domains closely related to the unlearned ones. Additionally, we highlight the scalability of our method to 100 LLMs, ranging from 0.5B to 236B parameters, incurring no additional cost as the number of parameters increases.
Authors: Meiziniu Li, Dongze Li, Jianmeng Liu, Jialun Cao, Yongqiang Tian, Shing-Chi Cheung
Abstract: Testing is a major approach to ensuring the quality of deep learning (DL) libraries. Existing testing techniques commonly adopt differential testing to relieve the need for test oracle construction. However, these techniques are limited in finding implementations that offer the same functionality and generating diverse test inputs for differential testing. This paper introduces DLLens, a novel differential testing technique for DL library testing. Our insight is that APIs in different DL libraries are commonly designed to accomplish various computations for the same set of published DL algorithms. Although the mapping of these APIs is not often one-to-one, we observe that their computations can be mutually simulated after proper composition and adaptation. The use of these simulation counterparts facilitates differential testing for the detection of functional DL library bugs. Leveraging the insight, we propose DLLens as a novel mechanism that utilizes a large language model (LLM) to synthesize valid counterparts of DL library APIs. To generate diverse test inputs, DLLens incorporates a static analysis method aided by LLM to extract path constraints from all execution paths in each API and its counterpart's implementations. These path constraints are then used to guide the generation of diverse test inputs. We evaluate DLLens on two popular DL libraries, TensorFlow and PyTorch. Our evaluation shows that DLLens can synthesize counterparts for more than twice as many APIs found by state-of-the-art techniques on these libraries. Moreover, DLLens can extract 26.7% more constraints and detect 2.5 times as many bugs as state-of-the-art techniques. DLLens has successfully found 56 bugs in recent TensorFlow and PyTorch libraries. Among them, 41 are previously unknown, 39 of which have been confirmed by developers after reporting, and 19 of those confirmed bugs have been fixed by developers.
Authors: Guopeng Lin, Weili Han, Wenqiang Ruan, Ruisheng Zhou, Lushan Song, Bingshuai Li, Yunfeng Shao
Abstract: Multi-party training frameworks for decision trees based on secure multi-party computation enable multiple parties to train high-performance models on distributed private data with privacy preservation. The training process essentially involves frequent dataset splitting according to the splitting criterion (e.g. Gini impurity). However, existing multi-party training frameworks for decision trees demonstrate communication inefficiency due to the following issues: (1) They suffer from huge communication overhead in securely splitting a dataset with continuous attributes. (2) They suffer from huge communication overhead due to performing almost all the computations on a large ring to accommodate the secure computations for the splitting criterion. In this paper, we are motivated to present an efficient three-party training framework, namely Ents, for decision trees by communication optimization. For the first issue, we present a series of training protocols based on the secure radix sort protocols to efficiently and securely split a dataset with continuous attributes. For the second issue, we propose an efficient share conversion protocol to convert shares between a small ring and a large ring to reduce the communication overhead incurred by performing almost all the computations on a large ring. Experimental results from eight widely used datasets show that Ents outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks by $5.5\times \sim 9.3\times$ in communication sizes and $3.9\times \sim 5.3\times$ in communication rounds. In terms of training time, Ents yields an improvement of $3.5\times \sim 6.7\times$. To demonstrate its practicality, Ents requires less than three hours to securely train a decision tree on a widely used real-world dataset (Skin Segmentation) with more than 245,000 samples in the WAN setting.
Authors: Edoardo Debenedetti, Javier Rando, Daniel Paleka, Silaghi Fineas Florin, Dragos Albastroiu, Niv Cohen, Yuval Lemberg, Reshmi Ghosh, Rui Wen, Ahmed Salem, Giovanni Cherubin, Santiago Zanella-Beguelin, Robin Schmid, Victor Klemm, Takahiro Miki, Chenhao Li, Stefan Kraft, Mario Fritz, Florian Tram\`er, Sahar Abdelnabi, Lea Sch\"onherr
Abstract: Large language model systems face important security risks from maliciously crafted messages that aim to overwrite the system's original instructions or leak private data. To study this problem, we organized a capture-the-flag competition at IEEE SaTML 2024, where the flag is a secret string in the LLM system prompt. The competition was organized in two phases. In the first phase, teams developed defenses to prevent the model from leaking the secret. During the second phase, teams were challenged to extract the secrets hidden for defenses proposed by the other teams. This report summarizes the main insights from the competition. Notably, we found that all defenses were bypassed at least once, highlighting the difficulty of designing a successful defense and the necessity for additional research to protect LLM systems. To foster future research in this direction, we compiled a dataset with over 137k multi-turn attack chats and open-sourced the platform.
Authors: Ruitao Xie, Jingbang Chen, Limai Jiang, Rui Xiao, Yi Pan, Yunpeng Cai
Abstract: Image classification is a primary task in data analysis where explainable models are crucially demanded in various applications. Although amounts of methods have been proposed to obtain explainable knowledge from the black-box classifiers, these approaches lack the efficiency of extracting global knowledge regarding the classification task, thus is vulnerable to local traps and often leads to poor accuracy. In this study, we propose a generative explanation model that combines the advantages of global and local knowledge for explaining image classifiers. We develop a representation learning method called class association embedding (CAE), which encodes each sample into a pair of separated class-associated and individual codes. Recombining the individual code of a given sample with altered class-associated code leads to a synthetic real-looking sample with preserved individual characters but modified class-associated features and possibly flipped class assignments. A building-block coherency feature extraction algorithm is proposed that efficiently separates class-associated features from individual ones. The extracted feature space forms a low-dimensional manifold that visualizes the classification decision patterns. Explanation on each individual sample can be then achieved in a counter-factual generation manner which continuously modifies the sample in one direction, by shifting its class-associated code along a guided path, until its classification outcome is changed. We compare our method with state-of-the-art ones on explaining image classification tasks in the form of saliency maps, demonstrating that our method achieves higher accuracies. The code is available at https://github.com/xrt11/XAI-CODE.
Authors: Taiming Lu, Lingfeng Shen, Xinyu Yang, Weiting Tan, Beidi Chen, Huaxiu Yao
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) involves training policy models (PMs) and reward models (RMs) to align language models with human preferences. Instead of focusing solely on PMs and RMs independently, we propose to examine their interactions during fine-tuning, introducing the concept of seamlessness. Our study starts with observing the saturation phenomenon, where continual improvements in RM and PM do not translate into RLHF progress. Our analysis shows that RMs fail to assign proper scores to PM responses, resulting in a 35% mismatch rate with human preferences, highlighting a significant discrepancy between PM and RM. To measure seamlessness between PM and RM without human effort, we propose an automatic metric, SEAM. SEAM quantifies the discrepancies between PM and RM judgments induced by data samples. We validate the effectiveness of SEAM in data selection and model augmentation. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) using SEAM-filtered data for RL training improves RLHF performance by 4.5%, and (2) SEAM-guided model augmentation results in a 4% performance improvement over standard augmentation methods.
Authors: Thomas Roland Barillot, Alex De Castro
Abstract: This works reports evidence for the topological signatures of ambiguity in sentence embeddings that could be leveraged for ranking and/or explanation purposes in the context of vector search and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. We proposed a working definition of ambiguity and designed an experiment where we have broken down a proprietary dataset into collections of chunks of varying size - 3, 5, and 10 lines and used the different collections successively as queries and answers sets. It allowed us to test the signatures of ambiguity with removal of confounding factors. Our results show that proxy ambiguous queries (size 10 queries against size 3 documents) display different distributions of homologies 0 and 1 based features than proxy clear queries (size 5 queries against size 10 documents). We then discuss those results in terms increased manifold complexity and/or approximately discontinuous embedding submanifolds. Finally we propose a strategy to leverage those findings as a new scoring strategy of semantic similarities.
Authors: Yinan Deng, Jiahui Wang, Jingyu Zhao, Jianyu Dou, Yi Yang, Yufeng Yue
Abstract: In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in open-vocabulary 3D scene reconstruction facilitated by visual language models (VLMs), which showcase remarkable capabilities in open-set retrieval. However, existing methods face some limitations: they either focus on learning point-wise features, resulting in blurry semantic understanding, or solely tackle object-level reconstruction, thereby overlooking the intricate details of the object's interior. To address these challenges, we introduce OpenObj, an innovative approach to build open-vocabulary object-level Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) with fine-grained understanding. In essence, OpenObj establishes a robust framework for efficient and watertight scene modeling and comprehension at the object-level. Moreover, we incorporate part-level features into the neural fields, enabling a nuanced representation of object interiors. This approach captures object-level instances while maintaining a fine-grained understanding. The results on multiple datasets demonstrate that OpenObj achieves superior performance in zero-shot semantic segmentation and retrieval tasks. Additionally, OpenObj supports real-world robotics tasks at multiple scales, including global movement and local manipulation.
Authors: Shimin Chen, Yitian Yuan, Shaoxiang Chen, Zequn Jie, Lin Ma
Abstract: Amidst the advancements in image-based Large Vision-Language Models (image-LVLM), the transition to video-based models (video-LVLM) is hindered by the limited availability of quality video data. This paper addresses the challenge by leveraging the visual commonalities between images and videos to efficiently evolve image-LVLMs into video-LVLMs. We present a cost-effective video-LVLM that enhances model architecture, introduces innovative training strategies, and identifies the most effective types of video instruction data. Our innovative weighted token sampler significantly compresses the visual token numbers of each video frame, effectively cutting computational expenses. We also find that judiciously using just 10% of the video data, compared to prior video-LVLMs, yields impressive results during various training phases. Moreover, we delve into the influence of video instruction data in limited-resource settings, highlighting the significance of incorporating video training data that emphasizes temporal understanding to enhance model performance. The resulting Fewer Tokens and Fewer Videos LVLM (FTFV-LVLM) exhibits exceptional performance across video and image benchmarks, validating our model's design and training approaches.
Authors: Weihan Wang, Zehai He, Wenyi Hong, Yean Cheng, Xiaohan Zhang, Ji Qi, Shiyu Huang, Bin Xu, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding, Jie Tang
Abstract: Recent progress in multimodal large language models has markedly enhanced the understanding of short videos (typically under one minute), and several evaluation datasets have emerged accordingly. However, these advancements fall short of meeting the demands of real-world applications such as embodied intelligence for long-term decision-making, in-depth movie reviews and discussions, and live sports commentary, all of which require comprehension of long videos spanning several hours. To address this gap, we introduce LVBench, a benchmark specifically designed for long video understanding. Our dataset comprises publicly sourced videos and encompasses a diverse set of tasks aimed at long video comprehension and information extraction. LVBench is designed to challenge multimodal models to demonstrate long-term memory and extended comprehension capabilities. Our extensive evaluations reveal that current multimodal models still underperform on these demanding long video understanding tasks. Through LVBench, we aim to spur the development of more advanced models capable of tackling the complexities of long video comprehension. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://lvbench.github.io.
Authors: Max Weltevrede, Felix Kaubek, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Wendelin B\"ohmer
Abstract: One of the remaining challenges in reinforcement learning is to develop agents that can generalise to novel scenarios they might encounter once deployed. This challenge is often framed in a multi-task setting where agents train on a fixed set of tasks and have to generalise to new tasks. Recent work has shown that in this setting increased exploration during training can be leveraged to increase the generalisation performance of the agent. This makes sense when the states encountered during testing can actually be explored during training. In this paper, we provide intuition why exploration can also benefit generalisation to states that cannot be explicitly encountered during training. Additionally, we propose a novel method Explore-Go that exploits this intuition by increasing the number of states on which the agent trains. Explore-Go effectively increases the starting state distribution of the agent and as a result can be used in conjunction with most existing on-policy or off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms. We show empirically that our method can increase generalisation performance in an illustrative environment and on the Procgen benchmark.
Authors: Hyungjin Chung, Jeongsol Kim, Geon Yeong Park, Hyelin Nam, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a fundamental tool in modern diffusion models for text-guided generation. Although effective, CFG has notable drawbacks. For instance, DDIM with CFG lacks invertibility, complicating image editing; furthermore, high guidance scales, essential for high-quality outputs, frequently result in issues like mode collapse. Contrary to the widespread belief that these are inherent limitations of diffusion models, this paper reveals that the problems actually stem from the off-manifold phenomenon associated with CFG, rather than the diffusion models themselves. More specifically, inspired by the recent advancements of diffusion model-based inverse problem solvers (DIS), we reformulate text-guidance as an inverse problem with a text-conditioned score matching loss, and develop CFG++, a novel approach that tackles the off-manifold challenges inherent in traditional CFG. CFG++ features a surprisingly simple fix to CFG, yet it offers significant improvements, including better sample quality for text-to-image generation, invertibility, smaller guidance scales, reduced mode collapse, etc. Furthermore, CFG++ enables seamless interpolation between unconditional and conditional sampling at lower guidance scales, consistently outperforming traditional CFG at all scales. Experimental results confirm that our method significantly enhances performance in text-to-image generation, DDIM inversion, editing, and solving inverse problems, suggesting a wide-ranging impact and potential applications in various fields that utilize text guidance. Project Page: https://cfgpp-diffusion.github.io/.
Authors: Jayneel Parekh, Pegah Khayatan, Mustafa Shukor, Alasdair Newson, Matthieu Cord
Abstract: Large multimodal models (LMMs) combine unimodal encoders and large language models (LLMs) to perform multimodal tasks. Despite recent advancements towards the interpretability of these models, understanding internal representations of LMMs remains largely a mystery. In this paper, we present a novel framework for the interpretation of LMMs. We propose a dictionary learning based approach, applied to the representation of tokens. The elements of the learned dictionary correspond to our proposed concepts. We show that these concepts are well semantically grounded in both vision and text. Thus we refer to these as "multi-modal concepts". We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the results of the learnt concepts. We show that the extracted multimodal concepts are useful to interpret representations of test samples. Finally, we evaluate the disentanglement between different concepts and the quality of grounding concepts visually and textually. We will publicly release our code.
Authors: Pia Pachinger, Janis Goldzycher, Anna Maria Planitzer, Wojciech Kusa, Allan Hanbury, Julia Neidhardt
Abstract: Model interpretability in toxicity detection greatly profits from token-level annotations. However, currently such annotations are only available in English. We introduce a dataset annotated for offensive language detection sourced from a news forum, notable for its incorporation of the Austrian German dialect, comprising 4,562 user comments. In addition to binary offensiveness classification, we identify spans within each comment constituting vulgar language or representing targets of offensive statements. We evaluate fine-tuned language models as well as large language models in a zero- and few-shot fashion. The results indicate that while fine-tuned models excel in detecting linguistic peculiarities such as vulgar dialect, large language models demonstrate superior performance in detecting offensiveness in AustroTox. We publish the data and code.
Authors: Konstantinos Paraschakis, Andrea Castellani, Giorgos Borboudakis, Ioannis Tsamardinos
Abstract: Any supervised machine learning analysis is required to provide an estimate of the out-of-sample predictive performance. However, it is imperative to also provide a quantification of the uncertainty of this performance in the form of a confidence or credible interval (CI) and not just a point estimate. In an AutoML setting, estimating the CI is challenging due to the ``winner's curse", i.e., the bias of estimation due to cross-validating several machine learning pipelines and selecting the winning one. In this work, we perform a comparative evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art methods and variants in CI estimation in an AutoML setting on a corpus of real and simulated datasets. The methods are compared in terms of inclusion percentage (does a 95\% CI include the true performance at least 95\% of the time), CI tightness (tighter CIs are preferable as being more informative), and execution time. The evaluation is the first one that covers most, if not all, such methods and extends previous work to imbalanced and small-sample tasks. In addition, we present a variant, called BBC-F, of an existing method (the Bootstrap Bias Correction, or BBC) that maintains the statistical properties of the BBC but is more computationally efficient. The results support that BBC-F and BBC dominate the other methods in all metrics measured.
Authors: Mingyu Zheng, Xinwei Feng, Qingyi Si, Qiaoqiao She, Zheng Lin, Wenbin Jiang, Weiping Wang
Abstract: Although great progress has been made by previous table understanding methods including recent approaches based on large language models (LLMs), they rely heavily on the premise that given tables must be converted into a certain text sequence (such as Markdown or HTML) to serve as model input. However, it is difficult to access such high-quality textual table representations in some real-world scenarios, and table images are much more accessible. Therefore, how to directly understand tables using intuitive visual information is a crucial and urgent challenge for developing more practical applications. In this paper, we propose a new problem, multimodal table understanding, where the model needs to generate correct responses to various table-related requests based on the given table image. To facilitate both the model training and evaluation, we construct a large-scale dataset named MMTab, which covers a wide spectrum of table images, instructions and tasks. On this basis, we develop Table-LLaVA, a generalist tabular multimodal large language model (MLLM), which significantly outperforms recent open-source MLLM baselines on 23 benchmarks under held-in and held-out settings. The code and data is available at this https://github.com/SpursGoZmy/Table-LLaVA
Authors: Niall McGuire, Dr Yashar Moshfeghi
Abstract: One of the foundational goals of Information Retrieval (IR) is to satisfy searchers' Information Needs (IN). Understanding how INs physically manifest has long been a complex and elusive process. However, recent studies utilising Electroencephalography (EEG) data have provided real-time insights into the neural processes associated with INs. Unfortunately, they have yet to demonstrate how this insight can practically benefit the search experience. As such, within this study, we explore the ability to predict the realisation of IN within EEG data across 14 subjects whilst partaking in a Question-Answering (Q/A) task. Furthermore, we investigate the combinations of EEG features that yield optimal predictive performance, as well as identify regions within the Q/A queries where a subject's realisation of IN is more pronounced. The findings from this work demonstrate that EEG data is sufficient for the real-time prediction of the realisation of an IN across all subjects with an accuracy of 73.5\% (SD 2.6\%) and on a per-subject basis with an accuracy of 90.1\% (SD 22.1\%). This work helps to close the gap by bridging theoretical neuroscientific advancements with tangible improvements in information retrieval practices, paving the way for real-time prediction of the realisation of IN.
Authors: Yi Lu, Yuankun Xie, Ruibo Fu, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao, Zhiyong Wang, Xin Qi, Xuefei Liu, Yongwei Li, Yukun Liu, Xiaopeng Wang, Shuchen Shi
Abstract: With the proliferation of Large Language Model (LLM) based deepfake audio, there is an urgent need for effective detection methods. Previous deepfake audio generation methods typically involve a multi-step generation process, with the final step using a vocoder to predict the waveform from handcrafted features. However, LLM-based audio is directly generated from discrete neural codecs in an end-to-end generation process, skipping the final step of vocoder processing. This poses a significant challenge for current audio deepfake detection (ADD) models based on vocoder artifacts. To effectively detect LLM-based deepfake audio, we focus on the core of the generation process, the conversion from neural codec to waveform. We propose Codecfake dataset, which is generated by seven representative neural codec methods. Experiment results show that codec-trained ADD models exhibit a 41.406% reduction in average equal error rate compared to vocoder-trained ADD models on the Codecfake test set.
Authors: Feng Liang, Zhen Zhang, Haifeng Lu, Chengming Li, Victor C. M. Leung, Yanyi Guo, Xiping Hu
Abstract: With rapidly increasing distributed deep learning workloads in large-scale data centers, efficient distributed deep learning framework strategies for resource allocation and workload scheduling have become the key to high-performance deep learning. The large-scale environment with large volumes of datasets, models, and computational and communication resources raises various unique challenges for resource allocation and workload scheduling in distributed deep learning, such as scheduling complexity, resource and workload heterogeneity, and fault tolerance. To uncover these challenges and corresponding solutions, this survey reviews the literature, mainly from 2019 to 2024, on efficient resource allocation and workload scheduling strategies for large-scale distributed DL. We explore these strategies by focusing on various resource types, scheduling granularity levels, and performance goals during distributed training and inference processes. We highlight critical challenges for each topic and discuss key insights of existing technologies. To illustrate practical large-scale resource allocation and workload scheduling in real distributed deep learning scenarios, we use a case study of training large language models. This survey aims to encourage computer science, artificial intelligence, and communications researchers to understand recent advances and explore future research directions for efficient framework strategies for large-scale distributed deep learning.
Authors: Zile Qiao, Wei Ye, Yong Jiang, Tong Mo, Pengjun Xie, Weiping Li, Fei Huang, Shikun Zhang
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) have recently shown great potential in mitigating the limitations of implicit knowledge in LLMs, such as untimely updating of the latest expertise and unreliable retention of long-tail knowledge. However, since the external knowledge base, as well as the retriever, can not guarantee reliability, potentially leading to the knowledge retrieved not being helpful or even misleading for LLM generation. In this paper, we introduce Supportiveness-based Knowledge Rewriting (SKR), a robust and pluggable knowledge rewriter inherently optimized for LLM generation. Specifically, we introduce the novel concept of "supportiveness"--which represents how effectively a knowledge piece facilitates downstream tasks--by considering the perplexity impact of augmented knowledge on the response text of a white-box LLM. Based on knowledge supportiveness, we first design a training data curation strategy for our rewriter model, effectively identifying and filtering out poor or irrelevant rewrites (e.g., with low supportiveness scores) to improve data efficacy. We then introduce the direct preference optimization (DPO) algorithm to align the generated rewrites to optimal supportiveness, guiding the rewriter model to summarize augmented content that better improves the final response. Comprehensive evaluations across six popular knowledge-intensive tasks and four LLMs have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of SKR. With only 7B parameters, SKR has shown better knowledge rewriting capability over GPT-4, the current state-of-the-art general-purpose LLM.
Authors: Duanyu Feng, Bowen Qin, Chen Huang, Youcheng Huang, Zheng Zhang, Wenqiang Lei
Abstract: The success of the reward model in distinguishing between responses with subtle safety differences depends critically on the high-quality preference dataset, which should capture the fine-grained nuances of harmful and harmless responses. This motivates the need to develop a dataset involving preference margins, which accurately quantify how harmless one response is compared to another. In this paper, we take the first step to propose an effective and cost-efficient framework to promote the margin-enhanced preference dataset development. Our framework, Legend, Leverages representation engineering to annotate preference datasets. It constructs the specific direction within the LLM's embedding space that represents safety. By leveraging this safety direction, Legend can then leverage the semantic distances of paired responses along this direction to annotate margins automatically. We experimentally demonstrate our effectiveness in both reward modeling and harmless alignment for LLMs. Legend also stands out for its efficiency, requiring only the inference time rather than additional training. This efficiency allows for easier implementation and scalability, making Legend particularly valuable for practical applications in aligning LLMs with safe conversations.
Authors: Shuyu Yin, Fei Wen, Peilin Liu, Tao Luo
Abstract: Semi-gradient Q-learning is applied in many fields, but due to the absence of an explicit loss function, studying its dynamics and implicit bias in the parameter space is challenging. This paper introduces the Fokker--Planck equation and employs partial data obtained through sampling to construct and visualize the effective loss landscape within a two-dimensional parameter space. This visualization reveals how the global minima in the loss landscape can transform into saddle points in the effective loss landscape, as well as the implicit bias of the semi-gradient method. Additionally, we demonstrate that saddle points, originating from the global minima in loss landscape, still exist in the effective loss landscape under high-dimensional parameter spaces and neural network settings. This paper develop a novel approach for probing implicit bias in semi-gradient Q-learning.
Authors: Pingzhi Li, Xiaolong Jin, Yu Cheng, Tianlong Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models~(LLMs) have become foundational in the realm of natural language processing, demonstrating performance improvements as model sizes increase. The Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) approach offers a promising way to scale LLMs more efficiently by using fewer computational FLOPs through sparse activation. However, it suffers from significant memory overheads, necessitating model compression techniques. Post-training quantization, a popular method for model compression, proves less effective when directly applied to MoE models due to MoE's overlooked inherent sparsity. This paper explores several MoE structure-aware quantization heuristics, ranging from coarse to fine granularity, from MoE block to individual linear weight. Our investigations reveal critical principles: different MoE structures (i.e., blocks, experts, linear layers) require varying numbers of weight bits for effective and efficient quantization. Conclusions are supported by extensive benchmarking across two representative MoE models and six tasks. We further introduce novel enhancements to more accurately identify the most critical weights in MoE quantization that necessitate higher bit allocations, including the linear weight outlier scorer and MoE block scorer. Additionally, subsequent experiments validate our findings in the context of both weight and activation quantization.
Authors: Francesco Tassone, Luca Maiano, Irene Amerini
Abstract: Generative techniques continue to evolve at an impressively high rate, driven by the hype about these technologies. This rapid advancement severely limits the application of deepfake detectors, which, despite numerous efforts by the scientific community, struggle to achieve sufficiently robust performance against the ever-changing content. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose an analysis of two continuous learning techniques on a Short and a Long sequence of fake media. Both sequences include a complex and heterogeneous range of deepfakes generated from GANs, computer graphics techniques, and unknown sources. Our study shows that continual learning could be important in mitigating the need for generalizability. In fact, we show that, although with some limitations, continual learning methods help to maintain good performance across the entire training sequence. For these techniques to work in a sufficiently robust way, however, it is necessary that the tasks in the sequence share similarities. In fact, according to our experiments, the order and similarity of the tasks can affect the performance of the models over time. To address this problem, we show that it is possible to group tasks based on their similarity. This small measure allows for a significant improvement even in longer sequences. This result suggests that continual techniques can be combined with the most promising detection methods, allowing them to catch up with the latest generative techniques. In addition to this, we propose an overview of how this learning approach can be integrated into a deepfake detection pipeline for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). This allows you to keep track of different funds, such as social networks, new generative tools, or third-party datasets, and through the integration of continuous learning, allows constant maintenance of the detectors.
Authors: Rui Wang, Liping Chen, Kong AiK Lee, Zhen-Hua Ling
Abstract: Voice anonymization has been developed as a technique for preserving privacy by replacing the speaker's voice in a speech signal with that of a pseudo-speaker, thereby obscuring the original voice attributes from machine recognition and human perception. In this paper, we focus on altering the voice attributes against machine recognition while retaining human perception. We referred to this as the asynchronous voice anonymization. To this end, a speech generation framework incorporating a speaker disentanglement mechanism is employed to generate the anonymized speech. The speaker attributes are altered through adversarial perturbation applied on the speaker embedding, while human perception is preserved by controlling the intensity of perturbation. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset showed that the speaker attributes were obscured with their human perception preserved for 60.71% of the processed utterances.
Authors: Sha Luo, Sang Jung Kim, Zening Duan, Kaiping Chen
Abstract: In the evolving landscape of computer vision (CV) technologies, the automatic detection and interpretation of gender and emotion in images is a critical area of study. This paper investigates social biases in CV models, emphasizing the limitations of traditional evaluation metrics such as precision, recall, and accuracy. These metrics often fall short in capturing the complexities of gender and emotion, which are fluid and culturally nuanced constructs. Our study proposes a sociotechnical framework for evaluating CV models, incorporating both technical performance measures and considerations of social fairness. Using a dataset of 5,570 images related to vaccination and climate change, we empirically compared the performance of various CV models, including traditional models like DeepFace and FER, and generative models like GPT-4 Vision. Our analysis involved manually validating the gender and emotional expressions in a subset of images to serve as benchmarks. Our findings reveal that while GPT-4 Vision outperforms other models in technical accuracy for gender classification, it exhibits discriminatory biases, particularly in response to transgender and non-binary personas. Furthermore, the model's emotion detection skew heavily towards positive emotions, with a notable bias towards associating female images with happiness, especially when prompted by male personas. These findings underscore the necessity of developing more comprehensive evaluation criteria that address both validity and discriminatory biases in CV models. Our proposed framework provides guidelines for researchers to critically assess CV tools, ensuring their application in communication research is both ethical and effective. The significant contribution of this study lies in its emphasis on a sociotechnical approach, advocating for CV technologies that support social good and mitigate biases rather than perpetuate them.
Authors: Jordy Van Landeghem, Subhajit Maity, Ayan Banerjee, Matthew Blaschko, Marie-Francine Moens, Josep Llad\'os, Sanket Biswas
Abstract: This work explores knowledge distillation (KD) for visually-rich document (VRD) applications such as document layout analysis (DLA) and document image classification (DIC). While VRD research is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and cumbersome models, the field has neglected to study efficiency via model compression. Here, we design a KD experimentation methodology for more lean, performant models on document understanding (DU) tasks that are integral within larger task pipelines. We carefully selected KD strategies (response-based, feature-based) for distilling knowledge to and from backbones with different architectures (ResNet, ViT, DiT) and capacities (base, small, tiny). We study what affects the teacher-student knowledge gap and find that some methods (tuned vanilla KD, MSE, SimKD with an apt projector) can consistently outperform supervised student training. Furthermore, we design downstream task setups to evaluate covariate shift and the robustness of distilled DLA models on zero-shot layout-aware document visual question answering (DocVQA). DLA-KD experiments result in a large mAP knowledge gap, which unpredictably translates to downstream robustness, accentuating the need to further explore how to efficiently obtain more semantic document layout awareness.
Authors: Carlos Garcia Ling, Konrad Tollmar, Linus Gisslen
Abstract: In this paper, we present a method using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to detect common glitches in video games. The problem setting consists of an image (800x800 RGB) as input to be classified into one of five defined classes, normal image, or one of four different kinds of glitches (stretched, low resolution, missing and placeholder textures). Using a supervised approach, we train a ShuffleNetV2 using generated data. This work focuses on detecting texture graphical anomalies achieving arguably good performance with an accuracy of 86.8\%, detecting 88\% of the glitches with a false positive rate of 8.7\%, and with the models being able to generalize and detect glitches even in unseen objects. We apply a confidence measure as well to tackle the issue with false positives as well as an effective way of aggregating images to achieve better detection in production. The main use of this work is the partial automatization of graphical testing in the final stages of video game development.
Authors: Aman Ahluwalia, Suhrud Wani
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in replicating human tasks and boosting productivity. However, their direct application for data extraction presents limitations due to a prioritisation of fluency over factual accuracy and a restricted ability to manipulate specific information. Therefore to overcome these limitations, this research leverages the knowledge representation power of pre-trained LLMs and the targeted information access enabled by RAG models, this research investigates a general-purpose accurate data scraping recipe for RAG models designed for language generation. To capture knowledge in a more modular and interpretable way, we use pre trained language models with a latent knowledge retriever, which allows the model to retrieve and attend over documents from a large corpus. We utilised RAG model architecture and did an in-depth analysis of their capabilities under three tasks: (i) Semantic Classification of HTML elements, (ii) Chunking HTML text for effective understanding, and (iii) comparing results from different LLMs and ranking algorithms. While previous work has developed dedicated architectures and training procedures for HTML understanding and extraction, we show that LLMs pre-trained on standard natural language with an addition of effective chunking, searching and ranking algorithms, can prove to be efficient data scraping tool to extract complex data from unstructured text. Future research directions include addressing the challenges of provenance tracking and dynamic knowledge updates within the proposed RAG-based data extraction framework. By overcoming these limitations, this approach holds the potential to revolutionise data extraction from vast repositories of textual information.
Authors: Marcin Przewi\k{e}\'zlikowski, Marcin Osial, Bartosz Zieli\'nski, Marek \'Smieja
Abstract: Collaborative self-supervised learning has recently become feasible in highly distributed environments by dividing the network layers between client devices and a central server. However, state-of-the-art methods, such as MocoSFL, are optimized for network division at the initial layers, which decreases the protection of the client data and increases communication overhead. In this paper, we demonstrate that splitting depth is crucial for maintaining privacy and communication efficiency in distributed training. We also show that MocoSFL suffers from a catastrophic quality deterioration for the minimal communication overhead. As a remedy, we introduce Momentum-Aligned contrastive Split Federated Learning (MonAcoSFL), which aligns online and momentum client models during training procedure. Consequently, we achieve state-of-the-art accuracy while significantly reducing the communication overhead, making MonAcoSFL more practical in real-world scenarios.
Authors: Mat\'ias Carrasco, Franz Mayr, Sergio Yovine, Johny Kidd, Mart\'in Iturbide, Juan Pedro da Silva, Alejo Garat
Abstract: We define a congruence that copes with null next-symbol probabilities that arise when the output of a language model is constrained by some means during text generation. We develop an algorithm for efficiently learning the quotient with respect to this congruence and evaluate it on case studies for analyzing statistical properties of LLM.
Authors: Ruibo Tu, Zineb Senane, Lele Cao, Cheng Zhang, Hedvig Kjellstr\"om, Gustav Eje Henter
Abstract: Tabular synthesis models remain ineffective at capturing complex dependencies, and the quality of synthetic data is still insufficient for comprehensive downstream tasks, such as prediction under distribution shifts, automated decision-making, and cross-table understanding. A major challenge is the lack of prior knowledge about underlying structures and high-order relationships in tabular data. We argue that a systematic evaluation on high-order structural information for tabular data synthesis is the first step towards solving the problem. In this paper, we introduce high-order structural causal information as natural prior knowledge and provide a benchmark framework for the evaluation of tabular synthesis models. The framework allows us to generate benchmark datasets with a flexible range of data generation processes and to train tabular synthesis models using these datasets for further evaluation. We propose multiple benchmark tasks, high-order metrics, and causal inference tasks as downstream tasks for evaluating the quality of synthetic data generated by the trained models. Our experiments demonstrate to leverage the benchmark framework for evaluating the model capability of capturing high-order structural causal information. Furthermore, our benchmarking results provide an initial assessment of state-of-the-art tabular synthesis models. They have clearly revealed significant gaps between ideal and actual performance and how baseline methods differ. Our benchmark framework is available at URL https://github.com/TURuibo/CauTabBench.
Authors: Wen-Ding Li, Kevin Ellis
Abstract: Programming-by-Examples (PBE) aims to generate an algorithm from input-output examples. Such systems are practically and theoretically important: from an end-user perspective, they are deployed to millions of people, and from an AI perspective, PBE corresponds to a very general form of few-shot inductive inference. Given the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code-generation tasks, we investigate here the extent to which LLMs can be said to have `solved' PBE. We experiment on classic domains such as lists and strings, and an uncommon graphics programming domain not well represented in typical pretraining data. We find that pretrained models are not effective at PBE, but that they can be fine-tuned for much higher performance, provided the test problems are in-distribution. We analyze empirically what causes these models to succeed and fail, and take steps toward understanding how to achieve better out-of-distribution generalization. Collectively these results suggest that LLMs make strong progress toward solving the typical suite of PBE tasks, potentially increasing the flexibility and applicability of PBE systems, while also identifying ways in which LLMs still fall short.
Authors: Alexander Louis-Ferdinand Jung, Jannik Steinmetz, Jonathan Gietz, Konstantin L\"ubeck, Oliver Bringmann
Abstract: Statistical models are widely used to estimate the performance of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) AI hardware accelerators. However, training of statistical performance models often requires vast amounts of data, leading to a significant time investment and can be difficult in case of limited hardware availability. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel performance modeling methodology that significantly reduces the number of training samples while maintaining good accuracy. Our approach leverages knowledge of the target hardware architecture and initial parameter sweeps to identify a set of Performance Representatives (PR) for deep neural network (DNN) layers. These PRs are then used for benchmarking, building a statistical performance model, and making estimations. This targeted approach drastically reduces the number of training samples needed, opposed to random sampling, to achieve a better estimation accuracy. We achieve a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of as low as 0.02% for single-layer estimations and 0.68% for whole DNN estimations with less than 10000 training samples. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method for single-layer estimations compared to models trained with randomly sampled datasets of the same size.
Authors: Hanmei Yang, Jin Zhou, Yao Fu, Xiaoqun Wang, Ramine Roane, Hui Guan, Tongping Liu
Abstract: It is extremely memory-hungry to train Large Language Models (LLM). To solve this problem, existing work exploits the combination of CPU and GPU for the training process, such as ZeRO-Offload. Such a technique largely democratizes billion-scale model training, making it possible to train with few consumer graphics cards. However, based on our observation, existing frameworks often provide coarse-grained memory management and require experienced experts in configuration tuning, leading to suboptimal hardware utilization and performance. This paper proposes ProTrain, a novel training system that intelligently balances memory usage and performance by coordinating memory, computation, and IO. ProTrain achieves adaptive memory management through Chunk-Based Model State Management and Block-Wise Activation Management, guided by a Memory-Aware Runtime Profiler without user intervention. ProTrain does not change the training algorithm and thus does not compromise accuracy. Experiments show that ProTrain improves training throughput by 1.43$\times$ to 2.71$\times$ compared to the SOTA training systems.
Authors: Anthony Mbata, Yaji Sripada, Mingjun Zhong
Abstract: Currently, a variety of pipeline tools are available for use in data engineering. Data scientists can use these tools to resolve data wrangling issues associated with data and accomplish some data engineering tasks from data ingestion through data preparation to utilization as input for machine learning (ML). Some of these tools have essential built-in components or can be combined with other tools to perform desired data engineering operations. While some tools are wholly or partly commercial, several open-source tools are available to perform expert-level data engineering tasks. This survey examines the broad categories and examples of pipeline tools based on their design and data engineering intentions. These categories are Extract Transform Load/Extract Load Transform (ETL/ELT), pipelines for Data Integration, Ingestion, and Transformation, Data Pipeline Orchestration and Workflow Management, and Machine Learning Pipelines. The survey also provides a broad outline of the utilization with examples within these broad groups and finally, a discussion is presented with case studies indicating the usage of pipeline tools for data engineering. The studies present some first-user application experiences with sample data, some complexities of the applied pipeline, and a summary note of approaches to using these tools to prepare data for machine learning.
Authors: Hegan Chen, Jichang Yang, Jia Chen, Songqi Wang, Shaocong Wang, Dingchen Wang, Xinyu Tian, Yifei Yu, Xi Chen, Yinan Lin, Yangu He, Xiaoshan Wu, Yi Li, Xinyuan Zhang, Ning Lin, Meng Xu, Yi Li, Xumeng Zhang, Zhongrui Wang, Han Wang, Dashan Shang, Qi Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Ming Liu
Abstract: Digital twins, the cornerstone of Industry 4.0, replicate real-world entities through computer models, revolutionising fields such as manufacturing management and industrial automation. Recent advances in machine learning provide data-driven methods for developing digital twins using discrete-time data and finite-depth models on digital computers. However, this approach fails to capture the underlying continuous dynamics and struggles with modelling complex system behaviour. Additionally, the architecture of digital computers, with separate storage and processing units, necessitates frequent data transfers and Analogue-Digital (A/D) conversion, thereby significantly increasing both time and energy costs. Here, we introduce a memristive neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver for digital twins, which is capable of capturing continuous-time dynamics and facilitates the modelling of complex systems using an infinite-depth model. By integrating storage and computation within analogue memristor arrays, we circumvent the von Neumann bottleneck, thus enhancing both speed and energy efficiency. We experimentally validate our approach by developing a digital twin of the HP memristor, which accurately extrapolates its nonlinear dynamics, achieving a 4.2-fold projected speedup and a 41.4-fold projected decrease in energy consumption compared to state-of-the-art digital hardware, while maintaining an acceptable error margin. Additionally, we demonstrate scalability through experimentally grounded simulations of Lorenz96 dynamics, exhibiting projected performance improvements of 12.6-fold in speed and 189.7-fold in energy efficiency relative to traditional digital approaches. By harnessing the capabilities of fully analogue computing, our breakthrough accelerates the development of digital twins, offering an efficient and rapid solution to meet the demands of Industry 4.0.
Authors: Sanket Biswas, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I. Morariu, Jiuxiang Gu, Puneet Mathur, Curtis Wigington, Tong Sun, Josep Llad\'os
Abstract: While the generation of document layouts has been extensively explored, comprehensive document generation encompassing both layout and content presents a more complex challenge. This paper delves into this advanced domain, proposing a novel approach called DocSynthv2 through the development of a simple yet effective autoregressive structured model. Our model, distinct in its integration of both layout and textual cues, marks a step beyond existing layout-generation approaches. By focusing on the relationship between the structural elements and the textual content within documents, we aim to generate cohesive and contextually relevant documents without any reliance on visual components. Through experimental studies on our curated benchmark for the new task, we demonstrate the ability of our model combining layout and textual information in enhancing the generation quality and relevance of documents, opening new pathways for research in document creation and automated design. Our findings emphasize the effectiveness of autoregressive models in handling complex document generation tasks.
Authors: Shiwei Wu, Chao Zhang, Joya Chen, Tong Xu, Likang Wu, Yao Hu, Enhong Chen
Abstract: People's social relationships are often manifested through their surroundings, with certain objects or interactions acting as symbols for specific relationships, e.g., wedding rings, roses, hugs, or holding hands. This brings unique challenges to recognizing social relationships, requiring understanding and capturing the essence of these contexts from visual appearances. However, current methods of social relationship understanding rely on the basic classification paradigm of detected persons and objects, which fails to understand the comprehensive context and often overlooks decisive social factors, especially subtle visual cues. To highlight the social-aware context and intricate details, we propose a novel approach that recognizes \textbf{Con}textual \textbf{So}cial \textbf{R}elationships (\textbf{ConSoR}) from a social cognitive perspective. Specifically, to incorporate social-aware semantics, we build a lightweight adapter upon the frozen CLIP to learn social concepts via our novel multi-modal side adapter tuning mechanism. Further, we construct social-aware descriptive language prompts (e.g., scene, activity, objects, emotions) with social relationships for each image, and then compel ConSoR to concentrate more intensively on the decisive visual social factors via visual-linguistic contrasting. Impressively, ConSoR outperforms previous methods with a 12.2\% gain on the People-in-Social-Context (PISC) dataset and a 9.8\% increase on the People-in-Photo-Album (PIPA) benchmark. Furthermore, we observe that ConSoR excels at finding critical visual evidence to reveal social relationships.
Authors: Tianqi Chen, Jun Hou, Yinchi Zhou, Huidong Xie, Xiongchao Chen, Qiong Liu, Xueqi Guo, Menghua Xia, James S. Duncan, Chi Liu, Bo Zhou
Abstract: Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is an important clinical imaging tool but inevitably introduces radiation hazards to patients and healthcare providers. Reducing the tracer injection dose and eliminating the CT acquisition for attenuation correction can reduce the overall radiation dose, but often results in PET with high noise and bias. Thus, it is desirable to develop 3D methods to translate the non-attenuation-corrected low-dose PET (NAC-LDPET) into attenuation-corrected standard-dose PET (AC-SDPET). Recently, diffusion models have emerged as a new state-of-the-art deep learning method for image-to-image translation, better than traditional CNN-based methods. However, due to the high computation cost and memory burden, it is largely limited to 2D applications. To address these challenges, we developed a novel 2.5D Multi-view Averaging Diffusion Model (MADM) for 3D image-to-image translation with application on NAC-LDPET to AC-SDPET translation. Specifically, MADM employs separate diffusion models for axial, coronal, and sagittal views, whose outputs are averaged in each sampling step to ensure the 3D generation quality from multiple views. To accelerate the 3D sampling process, we also proposed a strategy to use the CNN-based 3D generation as a prior for the diffusion model. Our experimental results on human patient studies suggested that MADM can generate high-quality 3D translation images, outperforming previous CNN-based and Diffusion-based baseline methods.
Authors: Javier Nistal, Marco Pasini, Cyran Aouameur, Maarten Grachten, Stefan Lattner
Abstract: Recent advancements in deep generative models present new opportunities for music production but also pose challenges, such as high computational demands and limited audio quality. Moreover, current systems frequently rely solely on text input and typically focus on producing complete musical pieces, which is incompatible with existing workflows in music production. To address these issues, we introduce "Diff-A-Riff," a Latent Diffusion Model designed to generate high-quality instrumental accompaniments adaptable to any musical context. This model offers control through either audio references, text prompts, or both, and produces 48kHz pseudo-stereo audio while significantly reducing inference time and memory usage. We demonstrate the model's capabilities through objective metrics and subjective listening tests, with extensive examples available on the accompanying website: sonycslparis.github.io/diffariff-companion/
Authors: Sanyam Kapoor, Nate Gruver, Manley Roberts, Katherine Collins, Arka Pal, Umang Bhatt, Adrian Weller, Samuel Dooley, Micah Goldblum, Andrew Gordon Wilson
Abstract: When using large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes applications, we need to know when we can trust their predictions. Some works argue that prompting high-performance LLMs is sufficient to produce calibrated uncertainties, while others introduce sampling methods that can be prohibitively expensive. In this work, we first argue that prompting on its own is insufficient to achieve good calibration and then show that fine-tuning on a small dataset of correct and incorrect answers can create an uncertainty estimate with good generalization and small computational overhead. We show that a thousand graded examples are sufficient to outperform baseline methods and that training through the features of a model is necessary for good performance and tractable for large open-source models when using LoRA. We also investigate the mechanisms that enable reliable LLM uncertainty estimation, finding that many models can be used as general-purpose uncertainty estimators, applicable not just to their own uncertainties but also the uncertainty of other models. Lastly, we show that uncertainty estimates inform human use of LLMs in human-AI collaborative settings through a user study.
Authors: Yoshiaki Bando, Tomohiko Nakamura, Shinji Watanabe
Abstract: This paper presents a neural method for distant speech recognition (DSR) that jointly separates and diarizes speech mixtures without supervision by isolated signals. A standard separation method for multi-talker DSR is a statistical multichannel method called guided source separation (GSS). While GSS does not require signal-level supervision, it relies on speaker diarization results to handle unknown numbers of active speakers. To overcome this limitation, we introduce and train a neural inference model in a weakly-supervised manner, employing the objective function of a statistical separation method. This training requires only multichannel mixtures and their temporal annotations of speaker activities. In contrast to GSS, the trained model can jointly separate and diarize speech mixtures without any auxiliary information. The experiments with the AMI corpus show that our method outperforms GSS with oracle diarization results regarding word error rates. The code is available online.
Authors: Anirudh Sundar, Jin Xu, William Gay, Christopher Richardson, Larry Heck
Abstract: An emerging area of research in situated and multimodal interactive conversations (SIMMC) includes interactions in scientific papers. Since scientific papers are primarily composed of text, equations, figures, and tables, SIMMC methods must be developed specifically for each component to support the depth of inquiry and interactions required by research scientists. This work introduces Conversational Papers (cPAPERS), a dataset of conversational question-answer pairs from reviews of academic papers grounded in these paper components and their associated references from scientific documents available on arXiv. We present a data collection strategy to collect these question-answer pairs from OpenReview and associate them with contextual information from LaTeX source files. Additionally, we present a series of baseline approaches utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) in both zero-shot and fine-tuned configurations to address the cPAPERS dataset.
Authors: Yuhui Wang, Qingyuan Wu, Weida Li, Dylan R. Ashley, Francesco Faccio, Chao Huang, J\"urgen Schmidhuber
Abstract: The Value Iteration Network (VIN) is an end-to-end differentiable architecture that performs value iteration on a latent MDP for planning in reinforcement learning (RL). However, VINs struggle to scale to long-term and large-scale planning tasks, such as navigating a $100\times 100$ maze -- a task which typically requires thousands of planning steps to solve. We observe that this deficiency is due to two issues: the representation capacity of the latent MDP and the planning module's depth. We address these by augmenting the latent MDP with a dynamic transition kernel, dramatically improving its representational capacity, and, to mitigate the vanishing gradient problem, introducing an "adaptive highway loss" that constructs skip connections to improve gradient flow. We evaluate our method on both 2D maze navigation environments and the ViZDoom 3D navigation benchmark. We find that our new method, named Dynamic Transition VIN (DT-VIN), easily scales to 5000 layers and casually solves challenging versions of the above tasks. Altogether, we believe that DT-VIN represents a concrete step forward in performing long-term large-scale planning in RL environments.
Authors: Xuehai He, Weixi Feng, Kaizhi Zheng, Yujie Lu, Wanrong Zhu, Jiachen Li, Yue Fan, Jianfeng Wang, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Kevin Lin, William Yang Wang, Lijuan Wang, Xin Eric Wang
Abstract: Multimodal Language Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate the emerging abilities of "world models" -- interpreting and reasoning about complex real-world dynamics. To assess these abilities, we posit videos are the ideal medium, as they encapsulate rich representations of real-world dynamics and causalities. To this end, we introduce MMWorld, a new benchmark for multi-discipline, multi-faceted multimodal video understanding. MMWorld distinguishes itself from previous video understanding benchmarks with two unique advantages: (1) multi-discipline, covering various disciplines that often require domain expertise for comprehensive understanding; (2) multi-faceted reasoning, including explanation, counterfactual thinking, future prediction, etc. MMWorld consists of a human-annotated dataset to evaluate MLLMs with questions about the whole videos and a synthetic dataset to analyze MLLMs within a single modality of perception. Together, MMWorld encompasses 1,910 videos across seven broad disciplines and 69 subdisciplines, complete with 6,627 question-answer pairs and associated captions. The evaluation includes 2 proprietary and 10 open-source MLLMs, which struggle on MMWorld (e.g., GPT-4V performs the best with only 52.3\% accuracy), showing large room for improvement. Further ablation studies reveal other interesting findings such as models' different skill sets from humans. We hope MMWorld can serve as an essential step towards world model evaluation in videos.
Authors: Xinyan Zhao, Yuan Sun, Wenlin Liu, Chau-Wai Wong
Abstract: This study is among the first to develop different prototypes of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots powered by GPT 4 to communicate hurricane preparedness information to diverse residents. Drawing from the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm and the literature on disaster vulnerability and cultural tailoring, this study conducted a between-subjects experiment with 441 Black, Hispanic, and Caucasian residents of Florida. A computational analysis of chat logs (N = 7,848) shows that anthropomorphism and personalization are key communication topics in GenAI chatbot-user interactions. SEM results (N = 441) suggest that GenAI chatbots varying in tone formality and cultural tailoring significantly predict bot perceptions and, subsequently, hurricane preparedness outcomes. These results highlight the potential of using GenAI chatbots to improve diverse communities' disaster preparedness.
Authors: Qingyun Li, Zhe Chen, Weiyun Wang, Wenhai Wang, Shenglong Ye, Zhenjiang Jin, Guanzhou Chen, Yinan He, Zhangwei Gao, Erfei Cui, Jiashuo Yu, Hao Tian, Jiasheng Zhou, Chao Xu, Bin Wang, Xingjian Wei, Wei Li, Wenjian Zhang, Bo Zhang, Pinlong Cai, Licheng Wen, Xiangchao Yan, Pei Chu, Yi Wang, Min Dou, Changyao Tian, Xizhou Zhu, Lewei Lu, Yushi Chen, Junjun He, Tong Lu, Yali Wang, Limin Wang, Dahua Lin, Yu Qiao, Botian Shi, Conghui He, Jifeng Dai
Abstract: Image-text interleaved data, consisting of multiple images and texts arranged in a natural document format, aligns with the presentation paradigm of internet data and closely resembles human reading habits. Recent studies have shown that such data aids multimodal in-context learning and maintains the capabilities of large language models during multimodal fine-tuning. However, the limited scale and diversity of current image-text interleaved data restrict the development of multimodal large language models. In this paper, we introduce OmniCorpus, a 10 billion-scale image-text interleaved dataset. Using an efficient data engine, we filter and extract large-scale high-quality documents, which contain 8.6 billion images and 1,696 billion text tokens. Compared to counterparts (e.g., MMC4, OBELICS), our dataset 1) has 15 times larger scales while maintaining good data quality; 2) features more diverse sources, including both English and non-English websites as well as video-centric websites; 3) is more flexible, easily degradable from an image-text interleaved format to pure text corpus and image-text pairs. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we validate the quality, usability, and effectiveness of the proposed dataset. We hope this could provide a solid data foundation for future multimodal model research. Code and data are released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/OmniCorpus.
Authors: Maciej Pi\'oro, Maciej Wo{\l}czyk, Razvan Pascanu, Johannes von Oswald, Jo\~ao Sacramento
Abstract: A new breed of gated-linear recurrent neural networks has reached state-of-the-art performance on a range of sequence modeling problems. Such models naturally handle long sequences efficiently, as the cost of processing a new input is independent of sequence length. Here, we explore another advantage of these stateful sequence models, inspired by the success of model merging through parameter interpolation. Building on parallels between fine-tuning and in-context learning, we investigate whether we can treat internal states as task vectors that can be stored, retrieved, and then linearly combined, exploiting the linearity of recurrence. We study this form of fast model merging on Mamba-2.8b, a pretrained recurrent model, and present preliminary evidence that simple linear state interpolation methods suffice to improve next-token perplexity as well as downstream in-context learning task performance.
Authors: Ayush Roy, Payel Pramanik, Dmitrii Kaplun, Sergei Antonov, Ram Sarkar
Abstract: Accurate nuclei segmentation in histopathological images is crucial for cancer diagnosis. Automating this process offers valuable support to clinical experts, as manual annotation is time-consuming and prone to human errors. However, automating nuclei segmentation presents challenges due to uncertain cell boundaries, intricate staining, and diverse structures. In this paper, we present a segmentation approach that combines the U-Net architecture with a DenseNet-121 backbone, harnessing the strengths of both to capture comprehensive contextual and spatial information. Our model introduces the Wavelet-guided channel attention module to enhance cell boundary delineation, along with a learnable weighted global attention module for channel-specific attention. The decoder module, composed of an upsample block and convolution block, further refines segmentation in handling staining patterns. The experimental results conducted on two publicly accessible histopathology datasets, namely Monuseg and TNBC, underscore the superiority of our proposed model, demonstrating its potential to advance histopathological image analysis and cancer diagnosis. The code is made available at: https://github.com/AyushRoy2001/AWGUNET.
Authors: Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang, Hao Chen, Junnan Dong, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang
Abstract: Generating accurate SQL according to natural language questions (text-to-SQL) is a long-standing problem since it is challenging in user question understanding, database schema comprehension, and SQL generation. Conventional text-to-SQL systems include human engineering and deep neural networks. Subsequently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been developed and utilized for text-to-SQL tasks, achieving promising performance. As modern databases become more complex and corresponding user questions more challenging, PLMs with limited comprehension capabilities can lead to incorrect SQL generation. This necessitates more sophisticated and tailored optimization methods, which, in turn, restricts the applications of PLM-based systems. Most recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant abilities in natural language understanding as the model scale remains increasing. Therefore, integrating the LLM-based implementation can bring unique opportunities, challenges, and solutions to text-to-SQL research. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of LLM-based text-to-SQL. Specifically, we propose a brief overview of the current challenges and the evolutionary process of text-to-SQL. Then, we provide a detailed introduction to the datasets and metrics designed to evaluate text-to-SQL systems. After that, we present a systematic analysis of recent advances in LLM-based text-to-SQL. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges in this field and propose expectations for future directions.
Authors: Alfredo Ibias (Personal Health Data Science, Sano - Centre for Computational Personalised Medicine), Karol Capala (Personal Health Data Science, Sano - Centre for Computational Personalised Medicine), Varun Ravi Varma (Personal Health Data Science, Sano - Centre for Computational Personalised Medicine), Anna Drozdz (Personal Health Data Science, Sano - Centre for Computational Personalised Medicine), Jose Sousa (Personal Health Data Science, Sano - Centre for Computational Personalised Medicine)
Abstract: Noise is a fundamental problem in learning theory with huge effects in the application of Machine Learning (ML) methods, due to real world data tendency to be noisy. Additionally, introduction of malicious noise can make ML methods fail critically, as is the case with adversarial attacks. Thus, finding and developing alternatives to improve robustness to noise is a fundamental problem in ML. In this paper, we propose a method to deal with noise: mitigating its effect through the use of data abstractions. The goal is to reduce the effect of noise over the model's performance through the loss of information produced by the abstraction. However, this information loss comes with a cost: it can result in an accuracy reduction due to the missing information. First, we explored multiple methodologies to create abstractions, using the training dataset, for the specific case of numerical data and binary classification tasks. We also tested how these abstractions can affect robustness to noise with several experiments that explore the robustness of an Artificial Neural Network to noise when trained using raw data \emph{vs} when trained using abstracted data. The results clearly show that using abstractions is a viable approach for developing noise robust ML methods.
Authors: Benjamin Biggs, Arjun Seshadri, Yang Zou, Achin Jain, Aditya Golatkar, Yusheng Xie, Alessandro Achille, Ashwin Swaminathan, Stefano Soatto
Abstract: We present Diffusion Soup, a compartmentalization method for Text-to-Image Generation that averages the weights of diffusion models trained on sharded data. By construction, our approach enables training-free continual learning and unlearning with no additional memory or inference costs, since models corresponding to data shards can be added or removed by re-averaging. We show that Diffusion Soup samples from a point in weight space that approximates the geometric mean of the distributions of constituent datasets, which offers anti-memorization guarantees and enables zero-shot style mixing. Empirically, Diffusion Soup outperforms a paragon model trained on the union of all data shards and achieves a 30% improvement in Image Reward (.34 $\to$ .44) on domain sharded data, and a 59% improvement in IR (.37 $\to$ .59) on aesthetic data. In both cases, souping also prevails in TIFA score (respectively, 85.5 $\to$ 86.5 and 85.6 $\to$ 86.8). We demonstrate robust unlearning -- removing any individual domain shard only lowers performance by 1% in IR (.45 $\to$ .44) -- and validate our theoretical insights on anti-memorization using real data. Finally, we showcase Diffusion Soup's ability to blend the distinct styles of models finetuned on different shards, resulting in the zero-shot generation of hybrid styles.
Authors: Yutong Wang, Jiali Zeng, Xuebo Liu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Min Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks. Techniques like instruction tuning have effectively enhanced the proficiency of LLMs in the downstream task of machine translation. However, the existing approaches fail to yield satisfactory translation outputs that match the quality of supervised neural machine translation (NMT) systems. One plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that the straightforward prompts employed in these methodologies are unable to fully exploit the acquired instruction-following capabilities. To this end, we propose the TasTe framework, which stands for translating through self-reflection. The self-reflection process includes two stages of inference. In the first stage, LLMs are instructed to generate preliminary translations and conduct self-assessments on these translations simultaneously. In the second stage, LLMs are tasked to refine these preliminary translations according to the evaluation results. The evaluation results in four language directions on the WMT22 benchmark reveal the effectiveness of our approach compared to existing methods. Our work presents a promising approach to unleash the potential of LLMs and enhance their capabilities in MT. The codes and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/YutongWang1216/ReflectionLLMMT.
Authors: Yuling Gu, Oyvind Tafjord, Bailey Kuehl, Dany Haddad, Jesse Dodge, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Abstract: Progress in AI is often demonstrated by new models claiming improved performance on tasks measuring model capabilities. Evaluating language models in particular is challenging, as small changes to how a model is evaluated on a task can lead to large changes in measured performance. There is no common standard setup, so different models are evaluated on the same tasks in different ways, leading to claims about which models perform best not being reproducible. We propose OLMES, a completely documented, practical, open standard for reproducible LLM evaluations. In developing this standard, we identify and review the varying factors in evaluation practices adopted by the community - such as details of prompt formatting, choice of in-context examples, probability normalizations, and task formulation. In particular, OLMES supports meaningful comparisons between smaller base models that require the unnatural "cloze" formulation of multiple-choice questions against larger models that can utilize the original formulation. OLMES includes well-considered recommendations guided by results from existing literature as well as new experiments investigating open questions.
Authors: Soufiane Hayou, Nikhil Ghosh, Bin Yu
Abstract: In this paper, we study the role of initialization in Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as originally introduced in Hu et al. (2021). Essentially, to start from the pretrained model as initialization for finetuning, one can either initialize B to zero and A to random (default initialization in PEFT package), or vice-versa. In both cases, the product BA is equal to zero at initialization, which makes finetuning starts from the pretrained model. These two initialization schemes are seemingly similar. They should in-principle yield the same performance and share the same optimal learning rate. We demonstrate that this is an incorrect intuition and that the first scheme (initializing B to zero and A to random) on average yields better performance compared to the other scheme. Our theoretical analysis shows that the reason behind this might be that the first initialization allows the use of larger learning rates (without causing output instability) compared to the second initialization, resulting in more efficient learning of the first scheme. We validate our results with extensive experiments on LLMs.
Authors: Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Luyao Niu, Yuntian Deng, Radha Poovendran, Yejin Choi, Bill Yuchen Lin
Abstract: High-quality instruction data is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs). Although some models, such as Llama-3-Instruct, have open weights, their alignment data remain private, which hinders the democratization of AI. High human labor costs and a limited, predefined scope for prompting prevent existing open-source data creation methods from scaling effectively, potentially limiting the diversity and quality of public alignment datasets. Is it possible to synthesize high-quality instruction data at scale by extracting it directly from an aligned LLM? We present a self-synthesis method for generating large-scale alignment data named Magpie. Our key observation is that aligned LLMs like Llama-3-Instruct can generate a user query when we input only the left-side templates up to the position reserved for user messages, thanks to their auto-regressive nature. We use this method to prompt Llama-3-Instruct and generate 4 million instructions along with their corresponding responses. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the extracted data and select 300K high-quality instances. To compare Magpie data with other public instruction datasets, we fine-tune Llama-3-8B-Base with each dataset and evaluate the performance of the fine-tuned models. Our results indicate that in some tasks, models fine-tuned with Magpie perform comparably to the official Llama-3-8B-Instruct, despite the latter being enhanced with 10 million data points through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and subsequent feedback learning. We also show that using Magpie solely for SFT can surpass the performance of previous public datasets utilized for both SFT and preference optimization, such as direct preference optimization with UltraFeedback. This advantage is evident on alignment benchmarks such as AlpacaEval, ArenaHard, and WildBench.
Authors: Licong Lin, Jingfeng Wu, Sham M. Kakade, Peter L. Bartlett, Jason D. Lee
Abstract: Empirically, large-scale deep learning models often satisfy a neural scaling law: the test error of the trained model improves polynomially as the model size and data size grow. However, conventional wisdom suggests the test error consists of approximation, bias, and variance errors, where the variance error increases with model size. This disagrees with the general form of neural scaling laws, which predict that increasing model size monotonically improves performance. We study the theory of scaling laws in an infinite dimensional linear regression setup. Specifically, we consider a model with $M$ parameters as a linear function of sketched covariates. The model is trained by one-pass stochastic gradient descent (SGD) using $N$ data. Assuming the optimal parameter satisfies a Gaussian prior and the data covariance matrix has a power-law spectrum of degree $a>1$, we show that the reducible part of the test error is $\Theta(M^{-(a-1)} + N^{-(a-1)/a})$. The variance error, which increases with $M$, is dominated by the other errors due to the implicit regularization of SGD, thus disappearing from the bound. Our theory is consistent with the empirical neural scaling laws and verified by numerical simulation.
Authors: Chloe Loughridge, Qinyi Sun, Seth Ahrenbach, Federico Cassano, Chuyue Sun, Ying Sheng, Anish Mudide, Md Rakib Hossain Misu, Nada Amin, Max Tegmark
Abstract: We introduce DafnyBench, the largest benchmark of its kind for training and evaluating machine learning systems for formal software verification. We test the ability of LLMs such as GPT-4 and Claude 3 to auto-generate enough hints for the Dafny formal verification engine to successfully verify over 750 programs with about 53,000 lines of code. The best model and prompting scheme achieved 68% success rate, and we quantify how this rate improves when retrying with error message feedback and how it deteriorates with the amount of required code and hints. We hope that DafnyBench will enable rapid improvements from this baseline as LLMs and verification techniques grow in quality.
Authors: Mert Albaba, Sammy Christen, Christoph Gebhardt, Thomas Langarek, Michael J. Black, Otmar Hilliges
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has achieved significant success in generating complex behavior but often requires extensive reward function engineering. Adversarial variants of Imitation Learning and Inverse Reinforcement Learning offer an alternative by learning policies from expert demonstrations via a discriminator. Employing discriminators increases their data- and computational efficiency over the standard approaches; however, results in sensitivity to imperfections in expert data. We propose RILe, a teacher-student system that achieves both robustness to imperfect data and efficiency. In RILe, the student learns an action policy while the teacher dynamically adjusts a reward function based on the student's performance and its alignment with expert demonstrations. By tailoring the reward function to both performance of the student and expert similarity, our system reduces dependence on the discriminator and, hence, increases robustness against data imperfections. Experiments show that RILe outperforms existing methods by 2x in settings with limited or noisy expert data.
Authors: Zhao Mandi, Yijia Weng, Dominik Bauer, Shuran Song
Abstract: We present Real2Code, a novel approach to reconstructing articulated objects via code generation. Given visual observations of an object, we first reconstruct its part geometry using an image segmentation model and a shape completion model. We then represent the object parts with oriented bounding boxes, which are input to a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) to predict joint articulation as code. By leveraging pre-trained vision and language models, our approach scales elegantly with the number of articulated parts, and generalizes from synthetic training data to real world objects in unstructured environments. Experimental results demonstrate that Real2Code significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art in reconstruction accuracy, and is the first approach to extrapolate beyond objects' structural complexity in the training set, and reconstructs objects with up to 10 articulated parts. When incorporated with a stereo reconstruction model, Real2Code also generalizes to real world objects from a handful of multi-view RGB images, without the need for depth or camera information.
Authors: Junbao Zhou, Ziqi Pang, Yu-Xiong Wang
Abstract: With recent video object segmentation (VOS) benchmarks evolving to challenging scenarios, we revisit a simple but overlooked strategy: restricting the size of memory banks. This diverges from the prevalent practice of expanding memory banks to accommodate extensive historical information. Our specially designed "memory deciphering" study offers a pivotal insight underpinning such a strategy: expanding memory banks, while seemingly beneficial, actually increases the difficulty for VOS modules to decode relevant features due to the confusion from redundant information. By restricting memory banks to a limited number of essential frames, we achieve a notable improvement in VOS accuracy. This process balances the importance and freshness of frames to maintain an informative memory bank within a bounded capacity. Additionally, restricted memory banks reduce the training-inference discrepancy in memory lengths compared with continuous expansion. This fosters new opportunities in temporal reasoning and enables us to introduce the previously overlooked "temporal positional embedding." Finally, our insights are embodied in "RMem" ("R" for restricted), a simple yet effective VOS modification that excels at challenging VOS scenarios and establishes new state of the art for object state changes (on the VOST dataset) and long videos (on the Long Videos dataset). Our code and demo are available at https://restricted-memory.github.io/.
Authors: Vishnu Jaganathan, Hannah Hanyun Huang, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Varun Jampani, Amit Raj, Zsolt Kira
Abstract: Recently many techniques have emerged to create high quality 3D assets and scenes. When it comes to editing of these objects, however, existing approaches are either slow, compromise on quality, or do not provide enough customization. We introduce a novel approach to quickly edit a 3D model from a single reference view. Our technique first segments the edit image, and then matches semantically corresponding regions across chosen segmented dataset views using DINO features. A color or texture change from a particular region of the edit image can then be applied to other views automatically in a semantically sensible manner. These edited views act as an updated dataset to further train and re-style the 3D scene. The end-result is therefore an edited 3D model. Our framework enables a wide variety of editing tasks such as manual local edits, correspondence based style transfer from any example image, and a combination of different styles from multiple example images. We use Gaussian Splats as our primary 3D representation due to their speed and ease of local editing, but our technique works for other methods such as NeRFs as well. We show through multiple examples that our method produces higher quality results while offering fine-grained control of editing. Project page: ice-gaussian.github.io
Authors: Huatao Xu, Liying Han, Qirui Yang, Mo Li, Mani Srivastava
Abstract: Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities across a range of tasks. Questions, however, persist about the nature of LLMs and their potential to integrate common-sense human knowledge when performing tasks involving information about the real physical world. This paper delves into these questions by exploring how LLMs can be extended to interact with and reason about the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, a concept that we term "Penetrative AI". The paper explores such an extension at two levels of LLMs' ability to penetrate into the physical world via the processing of sensory signals. Our preliminary findings indicate that LLMs, with ChatGPT being the representative example in our exploration, have considerable and unique proficiency in employing the embedded world knowledge for interpreting IoT sensor data and reasoning over them about tasks in the physical realm. Not only this opens up new applications for LLMs beyond traditional text-based tasks, but also enables new ways of incorporating human knowledge in cyber-physical systems.
Authors: Yuu Jinnai, Tetsuro Morimura, Ukyo Honda, Kaito Ariu, Kenshi Abe
Abstract: Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding has been shown to be a powerful alternative to beam search decoding in a variety of text generation tasks. MBR decoding selects a hypothesis from a pool of hypotheses that has the least expected risk under a probability model according to a given utility function. Since it is impractical to compute the expected risk exactly over all possible hypotheses, two approximations are commonly used in MBR. First, it integrates over a sampled set of hypotheses rather than over all possible hypotheses. Second, it estimates the probability of each hypothesis using a Monte Carlo estimator. While the first approximation is necessary to make it computationally feasible, the second is not essential since we typically have access to the model probability at inference time. We propose Model-Based MBR (MBMBR), a variant of MBR that uses the model probability itself as the estimate of the probability distribution instead of the Monte Carlo estimate. We show analytically and empirically that the model-based estimate is more promising than the Monte Carlo estimate in text generation tasks. Our experiments show that MBMBR outperforms MBR in several text generation tasks, both with encoder-decoder models and with large language models.
Authors: Sabrina Toro, Anna V Anagnostopoulos, Sue Bello, Kai Blumberg, Rhiannon Cameron, Leigh Carmody, Alexander D Diehl, Damion Dooley, William Duncan, Petra Fey, Pascale Gaudet, Nomi L Harris, Marcin Joachimiak, Leila Kiani, Tiago Lubiana, Monica C Munoz-Torres, Shawn O'Neil, David Osumi-Sutherland, Aleix Puig, Justin P Reese, Leonore Reiser, Sofia Robb, Troy Ruemping, James Seager, Eric Sid, Ray Stefancsik, Magalie Weber, Valerie Wood, Melissa A Haendel, Christopher J Mungall
Abstract: Background: Ontologies are fundamental components of informatics infrastructure in domains such as biomedical, environmental, and food sciences, representing consensus knowledge in an accurate and computable form. However, their construction and maintenance demand substantial resources and necessitate substantial collaboration between domain experts, curators, and ontology experts. We present Dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation of Ontologies using AI (DRAGON-AI), an ontology generation method employing Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). DRAGON-AI can generate textual and logical ontology components, drawing from existing knowledge in multiple ontologies and unstructured text sources. Results: We assessed performance of DRAGON-AI on de novo term construction across ten diverse ontologies, making use of extensive manual evaluation of results. Our method has high precision for relationship generation, but has slightly lower precision than from logic-based reasoning. Our method is also able to generate definitions deemed acceptable by expert evaluators, but these scored worse than human-authored definitions. Notably, evaluators with the highest level of confidence in a domain were better able to discern flaws in AI-generated definitions. We also demonstrated the ability of DRAGON-AI to incorporate natural language instructions in the form of GitHub issues. Conclusions: These findings suggest DRAGON-AI's potential to substantially aid the manual ontology construction process. However, our results also underscore the importance of having expert curators and ontology editors drive the ontology generation process.
Authors: Yuu Jinnai, Kaito Ariu
Abstract: Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding is shown to be a powerful alternative to beam search decoding for a wide range of text generation tasks. However, MBR requires a huge amount of time for inference to compute the MBR objective, which makes the method infeasible in many situations where response time is critical. Confidence-based pruning (CBP) (Cheng and Vlachos, 2023) has recently been proposed to reduce the inference time in machine translation tasks. Although it is shown to significantly reduce the amount of computation, it requires hyperparameter tuning using a development set to be effective. To this end, we propose Approximate Minimum Bayes-Risk (AMBR) decoding, a hyperparameter-free method to run MBR decoding approximately. AMBR is derived from the observation that the problem of computing the sample-based MBR objective is the medoid identification problem. AMBR uses the Correlated Sequential Halving (CSH) algorithm (Baharav and Tse, 2019), the best approximation algorithm to date for the medoid identification problem, to compute the sample-based MBR objective. We evaluate AMBR on machine translation, text summarization, and image captioning tasks. The results show that AMBR achieves on par with CBP, with CBP selecting hyperparameters through an Oracle for each given computation budget.
Authors: Luigi Scorzato
Abstract: In recent years, the question of the reliability of Machine Learning (ML) methods has acquired significant importance, and the analysis of the associated uncertainties has motivated a growing amount of research. However, most of these studies have applied standard error analysis to ML models, and in particular Deep Neural Network (DNN) models, which represent a rather significant departure from standard scientific modelling. It is therefore necessary to integrate the standard error analysis with a deeper epistemological analysis of the possible differences between DNN models and standard scientific modelling and the possible implications of these differences in the assessment of reliability. This article offers several contributions. First, it emphasises the ubiquitous role of model assumptions (both in ML and traditional Science) against the illusion of theory-free science. Secondly, model assumptions are analysed from the point of view of their (epistemic) complexity, which is shown to be language-independent. It is argued that the high epistemic complexity of DNN models hinders the estimate of their reliability and also their prospect of long-term progress. Some potential ways forward are suggested. Thirdly, this article identifies the close relation between a model's epistemic complexity and its interpretability, as introduced in the context of responsible AI. This clarifies in which sense, and to what extent, the lack of understanding of a model (black-box problem) impacts its interpretability in a way that is independent of individual skills. It also clarifies how interpretability is a precondition for assessing the reliability of any model, which cannot be based on statistical analysis alone. This article focuses on the comparison between traditional scientific models and DNN models. But, Random Forest and Logistic Regression models are also briefly considered.
Authors: Subbarao Kambhampati, Karthik Valmeekam, Lin Guan, Mudit Verma, Kaya Stechly, Siddhant Bhambri, Lucas Saldyt, Anil Murthy
Abstract: There is considerable confusion about the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in planning and reasoning tasks. On one side are over-optimistic claims that LLMs can indeed do these tasks with just the right prompting or self-verification strategies. On the other side are perhaps over-pessimistic claims that all that LLMs are good for in planning/reasoning tasks are as mere translators of the problem specification from one syntactic format to another, and ship the problem off to external symbolic solvers. In this position paper, we take the view that both these extremes are misguided. We argue that auto-regressive LLMs cannot, by themselves, do planning or self-verification (which is after all a form of reasoning), and shed some light on the reasons for misunderstandings in the literature. We will also argue that LLMs should be viewed as universal approximate knowledge sources that have much more meaningful roles to play in planning/reasoning tasks beyond simple front-end/back-end format translators. We present a vision of {\bf LLM-Modulo Frameworks} that combine the strengths of LLMs with external model-based verifiers in a tighter bi-directional interaction regime. We will show how the models driving the external verifiers themselves can be acquired with the help of LLMs. We will also argue that rather than simply pipelining LLMs and symbolic components, this LLM-Modulo Framework provides a better neuro-symbolic approach that offers tighter integration between LLMs and symbolic components, and allows extending the scope of model-based planning/reasoning regimes towards more flexible knowledge, problem and preference specifications.
Authors: Robert Kasumba, Guanghui Yu, Chien-Ju Ho, Sarah Keren, William Yeoh
Abstract: Goal recognition design aims to make limited modifications to decision-making environments with the goal of making it easier to infer the goals of agents acting within those environments. Although various research efforts have been made in goal recognition design, existing approaches are computationally demanding and often assume that agents are (near-)optimal in their decision-making. To address these limitations, we introduce a data-driven approach to goal recognition design that can account for agents with general behavioral models. Following existing literature, we use worst-case distinctiveness($\textit{wcd}$) as a measure of the difficulty in inferring the goal of an agent in a decision-making environment. Our approach begins by training a machine learning model to predict the $\textit{wcd}$ for a given environment and the agent behavior model. We then propose a gradient-based optimization framework that accommodates various constraints to optimize decision-making environments for enhanced goal recognition. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods in reducing $\textit{wcd}$ and enhancing runtime efficiency in conventional setup. Moreover, our approach also adapts to settings in which existing approaches do not apply, such as those involving flexible budget constraints, more complex environments, and suboptimal agent behavior. Finally, we have conducted human-subject experiments which confirm that our method can create environments that facilitate efficient goal recognition from real-world human decision-makers.
Authors: Ruoxi Cheng, Haoxuan Ma, Shuirong Cao, Tianyu Shi
Abstract: Biases in LLMs can harm user experience and societal outcomes. Current bias mitigation methods such as RLHF usually rely on costly human feedback, lack transferability to other topics, and show poor performance. We find that informing the LLMs that their generated content is not generated by them and querying about potential biases greatly boosts their awareness and ability to mitigate biases. Based on this, we propose RLDF (Reinforcement Learning from Multi-role Debates as Feedback), replacing human feedback with AI for bias mitigation. RLDF engages LLMs in multi-role debates to expose biases and gradually reduce biases in each iteration using a ranking scoring mechanism. The dialogue are then used to create a dataset composed of both high bias and low bias instances to train the reward model in reinforcement learning. This dataset can be generated by the same LLM for self-reflection or a superior LLM like an API which guides the former one in a teacher-student mode. Experimental results across different LLMs and types of bias show the effectiveness of our approach in bias mitigation.
Authors: Jaewoo Lee, Sujin Yun, Taeyoung Yun, Jinkyoo Park
Abstract: Offline Reinforcement Learning (Offline RL) presents challenges of learning effective decision-making policies from static datasets without any online interactions. Data augmentation techniques, such as noise injection and data synthesizing, aim to improve Q-function approximation by smoothing the learned state-action region. However, these methods often fall short of directly improving the quality of offline datasets, leading to suboptimal results. In response, we introduce \textbf{GTA}, Generative Trajectory Augmentation, a novel generative data augmentation approach designed to enrich offline data by augmenting trajectories to be both high-rewarding and dynamically plausible. GTA applies a diffusion model within the data augmentation framework. GTA partially noises original trajectories and then denoises them with classifier-free guidance via conditioning on amplified return value. Our results show that GTA, as a general data augmentation strategy, enhances the performance of widely used offline RL algorithms in both dense and sparse reward settings. Furthermore, we conduct a quality analysis of data augmented by GTA and demonstrate that GTA improves the quality of the data. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jaewoopudding/GTA
Authors: L. B. Soros, Alyssa Adams, Stefano Kalonaris, Olaf Witkowski, Christian Guckelsberger
Abstract: Artificial Life (ALife) as an interdisciplinary field draws inspiration and influence from a variety of perspectives. Scientific progress crucially depends, then, on concerted efforts to invite cross-disciplinary dialogue. The goal of this paper is to revitalize discussions of potential connections between the fields of Computational Creativity (CC) and ALife, focusing specifically on the concept of Open-Endedness (OE); the primary goal of CC is to endow artificial systems with creativity, and ALife has dedicated much research effort into studying and synthesizing OE and artificial innovation. However, despite the close proximity of these concepts, their use so far remains confined to their respective communities, and their relationship is largely unclear. We provide historical context for research in both domains, and review the limited work connecting research on creativity and OE explicitly. We then highlight specific questions to be considered, with the eventual goals of (i) decreasing conceptual ambiguity by highlighting similarities and differences between the concepts of OE, (ii) identifying synergy effects of a research agenda that encompasses both OE and creativity, and (iii) establishing a dialogue between ALife and CC research.
Authors: Lingkai Kong, Haorui Wang, Wenhao Mu, Yuanqi Du, Yuchen Zhuang, Yifei Zhou, Yue Song, Rongzhi Zhang, Kai Wang, Chao Zhang
Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human objectives is crucial for real-world applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs for alignment often suffers from unstable training and requires substantial computing resources. Test-time alignment techniques, such as prompting and guided decoding, do not modify the underlying model, and their performance remains dependent on the original model's capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose aligning LLMs through representation editing. The core of our method is to view a pre-trained autoregressive LLM as a discrete-time stochastic dynamical system. To achieve alignment for specific objectives, we introduce external control signals into the state space of this language dynamical system. We train a value function directly on the hidden states according to the Bellman equation, enabling gradient-based optimization to obtain the optimal control signals at test time. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing test-time alignment techniques while requiring significantly fewer resources compared to fine-tuning methods.
Authors: Teun van der Weij, Felix Hofst\"atter, Ollie Jaffe, Samuel F. Brown, Francis Rhys Ward
Abstract: Trustworthy capability evaluations are crucial for ensuring the safety of AI systems, and are becoming a key component of AI regulation. However, the developers of an AI system, or the AI system itself, may have incentives for evaluations to understate the AI's actual capability. These conflicting interests lead to the problem of sandbagging $\unicode{x2013}$ which we define as "strategic underperformance on an evaluation". In this paper we assess sandbagging capabilities in contemporary language models (LMs). We prompt frontier LMs, like GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus, to selectively underperform on dangerous capability evaluations, while maintaining performance on general (harmless) capability evaluations. Moreover, we find that models can be fine-tuned, on a synthetic dataset, to hide specific capabilities unless given a password. This behaviour generalizes to high-quality, held-out benchmarks such as WMDP. In addition, we show that both frontier and smaller models can be prompted, or password-locked, to target specific scores on a capability evaluation. Even more, we found that a capable password-locked model (Llama 3 70b) is reasonably able to emulate a less capable model (Llama 2 7b). Overall, our results suggest that capability evaluations are vulnerable to sandbagging. This vulnerability decreases the trustworthiness of evaluations, and thereby undermines important safety decisions regarding the development and deployment of advanced AI systems.
Authors: Van Nguyen, Trung Le, Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn, Michael Fu, John Grundy, Hung Nguyen, Seyit Camtepe, Paul Quirk, Dinh Phung
Abstract: Software vulnerabilities are a serious and crucial concern. Typically, in a program or function consisting of hundreds or thousands of source code statements, there are only a few statements causing the corresponding vulnerabilities. Most current approaches to vulnerability labelling are done on a function or program level by experts with the assistance of machine learning tools. Extending this approach to the code statement level is much more costly and time-consuming and remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning-based approach to identify the vulnerability-relevant code statements of a specific function. Inspired by the specific structures observed in real-world vulnerable code, we first leverage mutual information for learning a set of latent variables representing the relevance of the source code statements to the corresponding function's vulnerability. We then propose novel clustered spatial contrastive learning in order to further improve the representation learning and the robust selection process of vulnerability-relevant code statements. Experimental results on real-world datasets of 200k+ C/C++ functions show the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art baselines. In general, our method obtains a higher performance in VCP, VCA, and Top-10 ACC measures of between 3% to 14% over the baselines when running on real-world datasets in an unsupervised setting. Our released source code samples are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/vannguyennd/livuitcl}{https://github.com/vannguyennd/livuitcl.}
URLs: https://github.com/vannguyennd/livuitcl, https://github.com/vannguyennd/livuitcl.
Authors: Maciej P. Polak, Shrey Modi, Anna Latosinska, Jinming Zhang, Ching-Wen Wang, Shaonan Wang, Ayan Deep Hazra, Dane Morgan
Abstract: Accurate and comprehensive material databases extracted from research papers are crucial for materials science and engineering, but their development requires significant human effort. With large language models (LLMs) transforming the way humans interact with text, LLMs provide an opportunity to revolutionize data extraction. In this study, we demonstrate a simple and efficient method for extracting materials data from full-text research papers leveraging the capabilities of LLMs combined with human supervision. This approach is particularly suitable for mid-sized databases and requires minimal to no coding or prior knowledge about the extracted property. It offers high recall and nearly perfect precision in the resulting database. The method is easily adaptable to new and superior language models, ensuring continued utility. We show this by evaluating and comparing its performance on GPT-3 and GPT-3.5/4 (which underlie ChatGPT), as well as free alternatives such as BART and DeBERTaV3. We provide a detailed analysis of the method's performance in extracting sentences containing bulk modulus data, achieving up to 90% precision at 96% recall, depending on the amount of human effort involved. We further demonstrate the method's broader effectiveness by developing a database of critical cooling rates for metallic glasses over twice the size of previous human curated databases.
Authors: Yunze Man, Liang-Yan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang
Abstract: Closing the domain gap between training and deployment and incorporating multiple sensor modalities are two challenging yet critical topics for self-driving. Existing work only focuses on single one of the above topics, overlooking the simultaneous domain and modality shift which pervasively exists in real-world scenarios. A model trained with multi-sensor data collected in Europe may need to run in Asia with a subset of input sensors available. In this work, we propose DualCross, a cross-modality cross-domain adaptation framework to facilitate the learning of a more robust monocular bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception model, which transfers the point cloud knowledge from a LiDAR sensor in one domain during the training phase to the camera-only testing scenario in a different domain. This work results in the first open analysis of cross-domain cross-sensor perception and adaptation for monocular 3D tasks in the wild. We benchmark our approach on large-scale datasets under a wide range of domain shifts and show state-of-the-art results against various baselines.
Authors: Xiao Yu, Yuang Qi, Kejiang Chen, Guoqiang Chen, Xi Yang, Pengyuan Zhu, Xiuwei Shang, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to generate texts that pose risks of misuse, such as plagiarism, planting fake reviews on e-commerce platforms, or creating inflammatory false tweets. Consequently, detecting whether a text is generated by LLMs has become increasingly important. Existing high-quality detection methods usually require access to the interior of the model to extract the intrinsic characteristics. However, since we do not have access to the interior of the black-box model, we must resort to surrogate models, which impacts detection quality. In order to achieve high-quality detection of black-box models, we would like to extract deep intrinsic characteristics of the black-box model generated texts. We view the generation process as a coupled process of prompt and intrinsic characteristics of the generative model. Based on this insight, we propose to decouple prompt and intrinsic characteristics (DPIC) for LLM-generated text detection method. Specifically, given a candidate text, DPIC employs an auxiliary LLM to reconstruct the prompt corresponding to the candidate text, then uses the prompt to regenerate text by the auxiliary LLM, which makes the candidate text and the regenerated text align with their prompts, respectively. Then, the similarity between the candidate text and the regenerated text is used as a detection feature, thus eliminating the prompt in the detection process, which allows the detector to focus on the intrinsic characteristics of the generative model. Compared to the baselines, DPIC has achieved an average improvement of 6.76\% and 2.91\% in detecting texts from different domains generated by GPT4 and Claude3, respectively.
Authors: Chia-Yi Su, Collin McMillan
Abstract: This paper presents a procedure for and evaluation of using a semantic similarity metric as a loss function for neural source code summarization. Code summarization is the task of writing natural language descriptions of source code. Neural code summarization refers to automated techniques for generating these descriptions using neural networks. Almost all current approaches involve neural networks as either standalone models or as part of a pretrained large language models e.g., GPT, Codex, LLaMA. Yet almost all also use a categorical cross-entropy (CCE) loss function for network optimization. Two problems with CCE are that 1) it computes loss over each word prediction one-at-a-time, rather than evaluating a whole sentence, and 2) it requires a perfect prediction, leaving no room for partial credit for synonyms. In this paper, we extend our previous work on semantic similarity metrics to show a procedure for using semantic similarity as a loss function to alleviate this problem, and we evaluate this procedure in several settings in both metrics-driven and human studies. In essence, we propose to use a semantic similarity metric to calculate loss over the whole output sentence prediction per training batch, rather than just loss for each word. We also propose to combine our loss with CCE for each word, which streamlines the training process compared to baselines. We evaluate our approach over several baselines and report improvement in the vast majority of conditions.
Authors: Haldun Balim, Zhe Du, Samet Oymak, Necmiye Ozay
Abstract: Transformer models have shown great success in natural language processing; however, their potential remains mostly unexplored for dynamical systems. In this work, we investigate the optimal output estimation problem using transformers, which generate output predictions using all the past ones. Particularly, we train the transformer using various distinct systems and then evaluate the performance on unseen systems with unknown dynamics. Empirically, the trained transformer adapts exceedingly well to different unseen systems and even matches the optimal performance given by the Kalman filter for linear systems. In more complex settings with non-i.i.d. noise, time-varying dynamics, and nonlinear dynamics like a quadrotor system with unknown parameters, transformers also demonstrate promising results. To support our experimental findings, we provide statistical guarantees that quantify the amount of training data required for the transformer to achieve a desired excess risk. Finally, we point out some limitations by identifying two classes of problems that lead to degraded performance, highlighting the need for caution when using transformers for control and estimation.
Authors: Marco Parigi, Stefano Martina, Filippo Caruso
Abstract: Generative models realized with machine learning techniques are powerful tools to infer complex and unknown data distributions from a finite number of training samples in order to produce new synthetic data. Diffusion models are an emerging framework that have recently overcome the performance of the generative adversarial networks in creating synthetic text and high-quality images. Here, we propose and discuss the quantum generalization of diffusion models, i.e., three quantum-noise-driven generative diffusion models that could be experimentally tested on real quantum systems. The idea is to harness unique quantum features, in particular the non-trivial interplay among coherence, entanglement and noise that the currently available noisy quantum processors do unavoidably suffer from, in order to overcome the main computational burdens of classical diffusion models during inference. Hence, we suggest to exploit quantum noise not as an issue to be detected and solved but instead as a very remarkably beneficial key ingredient to generate much more complex probability distributions that would be difficult or even impossible to express classically, and from which a quantum processor might sample more efficiently than a classical one. An example of numerical simulations for an hybrid classical-quantum generative diffusion model is also included. Therefore, our results are expected to pave the way for new quantum-inspired or quantum-based generative diffusion algorithms addressing more powerfully classical tasks as data generation/prediction with widespread real-world applications ranging from climate forecasting to neuroscience, from traffic flow analysis to financial forecasting.
Authors: Zonglin Yang, Xinya Du, Junxian Li, Jie Zheng, Soujanya Poria, Erik Cambria
Abstract: Hypothetical induction is recognized as the main reasoning type when scientists make observations about the world and try to propose hypotheses to explain those observations. Past research on hypothetical induction is under a constrained setting: (1) the observation annotations in the dataset are carefully manually handpicked sentences (resulting in a close-domain setting); and (2) the ground truth hypotheses are mostly commonsense knowledge, making the task less challenging. In this work, we tackle these problems by proposing the first dataset for social science academic hypotheses discovery, with the final goal to create systems that automatically generate valid, novel, and helpful scientific hypotheses, given only a pile of raw web corpus. Unlike previous settings, the new dataset requires (1) using open-domain data (raw web corpus) as observations; and (2) proposing hypotheses even new to humanity. A multi-module framework is developed for the task, including three different feedback mechanisms to boost performance, which exhibits superior performance in terms of both GPT-4 based and expert-based evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work showing that LLMs are able to generate novel (''not existing in literature'') and valid (''reflecting reality'') scientific hypotheses.
Authors: Bochuan Cao, Yuanpu Cao, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen
Abstract: Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements and are now widely used across various domains. Unfortunately, there has been a rising concern that LLMs can be misused to generate harmful or malicious content. Though a line of research has focused on aligning LLMs with human values and preventing them from producing inappropriate content, such alignments are usually vulnerable and can be bypassed by alignment-breaking attacks via adversarially optimized or handcrafted jailbreaking prompts. In this work, we introduce a Robustly Aligned LLM (RA-LLM) to defend against potential alignment-breaking attacks. RA-LLM can be directly constructed upon an existing aligned LLM with a robust alignment checking function, without requiring any expensive retraining or fine-tuning process of the original LLM. Furthermore, we also provide a theoretical analysis for RA-LLM to verify its effectiveness in defending against alignment-breaking attacks. Through real-world experiments on open-source large language models, we demonstrate that RA-LLM can successfully defend against both state-of-the-art adversarial prompts and popular handcrafted jailbreaking prompts by reducing their attack success rates from nearly 100% to around 10% or less.
Authors: Shirui Chen, Stefano Recanatesi, Eric Shea-Brown
Abstract: The generalization capacity of deep neural networks has been studied in a variety of ways, including at least two distinct categories of approaches: one based on the shape of the loss landscape in parameter space, and the other based on the structure of the representation manifold in feature space (that is, in the space of unit activities). Although these two approaches are related, they are rarely studied together explicitly. Here, we present an analysis that bridges this gap. We show that in the final phase of learning in deep neural networks, the compression of the manifold of neural representations correlates with the flatness of the loss around the minima explored by SGD. This correlation is predicted by a relatively simple mathematical relationship: a flatter loss corresponds to a lower upper bound on the compression metrics of neural representations. Our work builds upon the linear stability insight by Ma and Ying, deriving inequalities between various compression metrics and quantities involving sharpness. Empirically, our derived inequality predicts a consistently positive correlation between representation compression and loss sharpness in multiple experimental settings. Overall, we advance a dual perspective on generalization in neural networks in both parameter and feature space.
Authors: Yao Cheng, Caihua Shan, Yifei Shen, Xiang Li, Siqiang Luo, Dongsheng Li
Abstract: Label noise is a common challenge in large datasets, as it can significantly degrade the generalization ability of deep neural networks. Most existing studies focus on noisy labels in computer vision; however, graph models encompass both node features and graph topology as input, and become more susceptible to label noise through message-passing mechanisms. Recently, only a few works have been proposed to tackle the label noise on graphs. One significant limitation is that they operate under the assumption that the graph exhibits homophily and that the labels are distributed smoothly. However, real-world graphs can exhibit varying degrees of heterophily, or even be dominated by heterophily, which results in the inadequacy of the current methods. In this paper, we study graph label noise in the context of arbitrary heterophily, with the aim of rectifying noisy labels and assigning labels to previously unlabeled nodes. We begin by conducting two empirical analyses to explore the impact of graph homophily on graph label noise. Following observations, we propose a efficient algorithm, denoted as $R^{2}LP$. Specifically, $R^{2}LP$ is an iterative algorithm with three steps: (1) reconstruct the graph to recover the homophily property, (2) utilize label propagation to rectify the noisy labels, (3) select high-confidence labels to retain for the next iteration. By iterating these steps, we obtain a set of correct labels, ultimately achieving high accuracy in the node classification task. The theoretical analysis is also provided to demonstrate its remarkable denoising effect. Finally, we perform experiments on ten benchmark datasets with different levels of graph heterophily and various types of noise. In these experiments, we compare the performance of $R^{2}LP$ against ten typical baseline methods. Our results illustrate the superior performance of the proposed $R^{2}LP$.
Authors: Yiwen Shao, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Dong Yu
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) on multi-talker recordings is challenging. Current methods using 3D spatial data from multi-channel audio and visual cues focus mainly on direct waves from the target speaker, overlooking reflection wave impacts, which hinders performance in reverberant environments. Our research introduces RIR-SF, a novel spatial feature based on room impulse response (RIR) that leverages the speaker's position, room acoustics, and reflection dynamics. RIR-SF significantly outperforms traditional 3D spatial features, showing superior theoretical and empirical performance. We also propose an optimized all-neural multi-channel ASR framework for RIR-SF, achieving a relative 21.3\% reduction in CER for target speaker ASR in multi-channel settings. RIR-SF enhances recognition accuracy and demonstrates robustness in high-reverberation scenarios, overcoming the limitations of previous methods.
Authors: Xiangru Tang, Yuliang Liu, Zefan Cai, Yanjun Shao, Junjie Lu, Yichi Zhang, Zexuan Deng, Helan Hu, Kaikai An, Ruijun Huang, Shuzheng Si, Sheng Chen, Haozhe Zhao, Liang Chen, Yan Wang, Tianyu Liu, Zhiwei Jiang, Baobao Chang, Yin Fang, Yujia Qin, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yilun Zhao, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
Abstract: Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 achieving impressive results in function-level code generation, they struggle with repository-scale code understanding (e.g., coming up with the right arguments for calling routines), requiring a deeper comprehension of complex file interactions. Also, recently, people have developed LLM agents that attempt to interact with repository code (e.g., compiling and evaluating its execution), prompting the need to evaluate their performance. These gaps have motivated our development of ML-Bench, a benchmark rooted in real-world programming applications that leverage existing code repositories to perform tasks. Addressing the need for LLMs to interpret long code contexts and translate instructions into precise, executable scripts, ML-Bench encompasses annotated 9,641 examples across 18 GitHub repositories, challenging LLMs to accommodate user-specified arguments and documentation intricacies effectively. To evaluate both LLMs and AI agents, two setups are employed: ML-LLM-Bench for assessing LLMs' text-to-code conversion within a predefined deployment environment, and ML-Agent-Bench for testing autonomous agents in an end-to-end task execution within a Linux sandbox environment. Our findings indicate that while GPT-4o leads with a Pass@5 rate surpassing 50%, there remains significant scope for improvement, highlighted by issues such as hallucinated outputs and difficulties with bash script generation. Notably, in the more demanding ML-Agent-Bench, GPT-4o achieves a 76.47% success rate, reflecting the efficacy of iterative action and feedback in complex task resolution.
Authors: Ehsan Latif, Luyang Fang, Ping Ma, Xiaoming Zhai
Abstract: This study proposes a method for knowledge distillation (KD) of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient, and accurate neural networks. We specifically target the challenge of deploying these models on resource-constrained devices. Our methodology involves training the smaller student model (Neural Network) using the prediction probabilities (as soft labels) of the LLM, which serves as a teacher model. This is achieved through a specialized loss function tailored to learn from the LLM's output probabilities, ensuring that the student model closely mimics the teacher's performance. To validate the performance of the KD approach, we utilized a large dataset, 7T, containing 6,684 student-written responses to science questions and three mathematical reasoning datasets with student-written responses graded by human experts. We compared accuracy with state-of-the-art (SOTA) distilled models, TinyBERT, and artificial neural network (ANN) models. Results have shown that the KD approach has 3% and 2% higher scoring accuracy than ANN and TinyBERT, respectively, and comparable accuracy to the teacher model. Furthermore, the student model size is 0.03M, 4,000 times smaller in parameters and x10 faster in inferencing than the teacher model and TinyBERT, respectively. The significance of this research lies in its potential to make advanced AI technologies accessible in typical educational settings, particularly for automatic scoring.
Authors: Junjie Wang, Dan Yang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Wen Zhang, Jinjie Gu
Abstract: In this paper, we explore a new way for user targeting, where non-expert marketers could select their target users solely given demands in natural language form. The key to this issue is how to transform natural languages into practical structured logical languages, i.e., the structured understanding of marketer demands. In practical scenarios, the demands of non-expert marketers are often abstract and diverse. Considering the impressive natural language processing ability of large language models (LLMs), we try to leverage LLMs to solve this issue. To stimulate the LLMs' reasoning ability, the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting method is widely used, but existing methods still have some limitations in our scenario: (1) Previous methods either use simple "Let's think step by step" spells or provide fixed examples in demonstrations without considering compatibility between prompts and concrete questions, making LLMs ineffective when the marketers' demands are abstract and diverse. (2) Previous methods are often implemented in closed-source models or excessively large models, which is not suitable in industrial practical scenarios. Based on these, we propose ARALLM (i.e., Analogical Reasoning Augmented Large Language Models) consisting of two modules: Analogical Reasoning based Prompting and Reasoning-Augmented Multi-Task Model Distillation. Part of our data and code can be found at https://github.com/alipay/Analogic-Reasoning-Augmented-Large-Language-Model.
URLs: https://github.com/alipay/Analogic-Reasoning-Augmented-Large-Language-Model.
Authors: Yuu Jinnai, Ukyo Honda, Tetsuro Morimura, Peinan Zhang
Abstract: One of the most important challenges in text generation systems is to produce outputs that are not only correct but also diverse. Recently, Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding has gained prominence for generating sentences of the highest quality among the decoding algorithms. However, existing algorithms proposed for generating diverse outputs are predominantly based on beam search or random sampling, thus their output quality is capped by these underlying methods. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach -- we develop diversity-promoting decoding algorithms by enforcing diversity objectives to MBR decoding. We propose two variants of MBR, Diverse MBR (DMBR) and $k$-medoids MBR (KMBR), methods to generate a set of sentences with high quality and diversity. We evaluate DMBR and KMBR on a variety of directed text generation tasks using encoder-decoder models and a large language model with prompting. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a better trade-off than the diverse beam search and sampling algorithms.
Authors: Emanuele La Malfa, Christoph Weinhuber, Orazio Torre, Fangru Lin, Samuele Marro, Anthony Cohn, Nigel Shadbolt, Michael Wooldridge
Abstract: Many reasoning, planning, and problem-solving tasks share an intrinsic algorithmic nature: correctly simulating each step is a sufficient condition to solve them correctly. This work studies to what extent Large Language Models (LLMs) can simulate coding and algorithmic tasks to provide insights into general capabilities in such algorithmic reasoning tasks. We introduce benchmarks for straight-line programs, code that contains critical paths, and approximate and redundant instructions. We further assess the simulation capabilities of LLMs with sorting algorithms and nested loops and show that a routine's computational complexity directly affects an LLM's ability to simulate its execution. While the most powerful LLMs exhibit relatively strong simulation capabilities, the process is fragile, seems to rely heavily on pattern recognition, and is affected by memorisation. We propose a novel off-the-shelf prompting method, Chain of Simulation (CoSm), which instructs LLMs to simulate code execution line by line/follow the computation pattern of compilers. CoSm efficiently helps LLMs reduce memorisation and shallow pattern recognition while improving simulation performance. We consider the success of CoSm in code simulation to be inspirational for other general routine simulation reasoning tasks.
Authors: Yihao Li, Ru Zhang, Jianyi Liu
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in a multitude of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, they encounter challenges in practical applications, including issues with hallucinations, inadequate knowledge updating, and limited transparency in the reasoning process. To overcome these limitations, this study innovatively proposes a collaborative training-free reasoning scheme involving tight cooperation between Knowledge Graph (KG) and LLMs. This scheme first involves using LLMs to iteratively explore KG, selectively retrieving a task-relevant knowledge subgraph to support reasoning. The LLMs are then guided to further combine inherent implicit knowledge to reason on the subgraph while explicitly elucidating the reasoning process. Through such a cooperative approach, our scheme achieves more reliable knowledge-based reasoning and facilitates the tracing of the reasoning results. Experimental results show that our scheme significantly progressed across multiple datasets, notably achieving over a 10% improvement on the QALD10 dataset compared to the best baseline and the fine-tuned state-of-the-art (SOTA) work. Building on this success, this study hopes to offer a valuable reference for future research in the fusion of KG and LLMs, thereby enhancing LLMs' proficiency in solving complex issues.
Authors: Harry Dong, Xinyu Yang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhangyang Wang, Yuejie Chi, Beidi Chen
Abstract: Many computational factors limit broader deployment of large language models. In this paper, we focus on a memory bottleneck imposed by the key-value (KV) cache, a computational shortcut that requires storing previous KV pairs during decoding. While existing KV cache methods approach this problem by pruning or evicting large swaths of relatively less important KV pairs to dramatically reduce the memory footprint of the cache, they can have limited success in tasks that require recollecting a majority of previous tokens. To alleviate this issue, we propose LESS, a simple integration of a (nearly free) constant sized cache with eviction-based cache methods, such that all tokens can be queried at later decoding steps. Its ability to retain information throughout time shows merit on a variety of tasks where we demonstrate LESS can help reduce the performance gap from caching everything, sometimes even matching it, all while being efficient. Relevant code can be found at https://github.com/hdong920/LESS.
Authors: Tao Yang, Cuiling Lan, Yan Lu, Nanning zheng
Abstract: Disentangled representation learning strives to extract the intrinsic factors within observed data. Factorizing these representations in an unsupervised manner is notably challenging and usually requires tailored loss functions or specific structural designs. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective and framework, demonstrating that diffusion models with cross-attention can serve as a powerful inductive bias to facilitate the learning of disentangled representations. We propose to encode an image to a set of concept tokens and treat them as the condition of the latent diffusion for image reconstruction, where cross-attention over the concept tokens is used to bridge the interaction between the encoder and diffusion. Without any additional regularization, this framework achieves superior disentanglement performance on the benchmark datasets, surpassing all previous methods with intricate designs. We have conducted comprehensive ablation studies and visualization analysis, shedding light on the functioning of this model. This is the first work to reveal the potent disentanglement capability of diffusion models with cross-attention, requiring no complex designs. We anticipate that our findings will inspire more investigation on exploring diffusion for disentangled representation learning towards more sophisticated data analysis and understanding.
Authors: Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Yujie Fan, Xin Dai, Uday Singh Saini, Vivian Lai, Prince Osei Aboagye, Junpeng Wang, Huiyuan Chen, Yan Zheng, Zhongfang Zhuang, Liang Wang, Wei Zhang
Abstract: Spatial-temporal forecasting systems play a crucial role in addressing numerous real-world challenges. In this paper, we investigate the potential of addressing spatial-temporal forecasting problems using general time series forecasting models, i.e., models that do not leverage the spatial relationships among the nodes. We propose a all-Multi-Layer Perceptron (all-MLP) time series forecasting architecture called RPMixer. The all-MLP architecture was chosen due to its recent success in time series forecasting benchmarks. Furthermore, our method capitalizes on the ensemble-like behavior of deep neural networks, where each individual block within the network behaves like a base learner in an ensemble model, particularly when identity mapping residual connections are incorporated. By integrating random projection layers into our model, we increase the diversity among the blocks' outputs, thereby improving the overall performance of the network. Extensive experiments conducted on the largest spatial-temporal forecasting benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms alternative methods, including both spatial-temporal graph models and general forecasting models.
Authors: Jianrui Zhang, Mu Cai, Tengyang Xie, Yong Jae Lee
Abstract: We propose CounterCurate, a framework to comprehensively improve the visio-linguistic compositional reasoning capability for both contrastive and generative multimodal models. In particular, we identify two critical under-explored problems: the neglect of the physically grounded reasoning (counting and position understanding) and the potential of using highly capable text and image generation models for semantic counterfactual fine-tuning. Our work pioneers an approach that addresses these gaps. We first spotlight the near-chance performance of multimodal models like CLIP and LLaVA in physically grounded compositional reasoning. We then apply simple data augmentation using grounded image generation model GLIGEN to generate fine-tuning data, resulting in significant performance improvements: +33% and +37% for CLIP and LLaVA, respectively, on our newly curated Flickr30k-Positions benchmark. Moreover, we exploit the capabilities of high-performing text generation and image generation models, specifically GPT-4V and DALLE-3, to curate challenging semantic counterfactuals, thereby further enhancing compositional reasoning capabilities on benchmarks such as SugarCrepe, where CounterCurate outperforms GPT-4V. To facilitate future research, we release our code, dataset, benchmark, and checkpoints at https://countercurate.github.io.
Authors: Diana Cai, Chirag Modi, Loucas Pillaud-Vivien, Charles C. Margossian, Robert M. Gower, David M. Blei, Lawrence K. Saul
Abstract: Most leading implementations of black-box variational inference (BBVI) are based on optimizing a stochastic evidence lower bound (ELBO). But such approaches to BBVI often converge slowly due to the high variance of their gradient estimates and their sensitivity to hyperparameters. In this work, we propose batch and match (BaM), an alternative approach to BBVI based on a score-based divergence. Notably, this score-based divergence can be optimized by a closed-form proximal update for Gaussian variational families with full covariance matrices. We analyze the convergence of BaM when the target distribution is Gaussian, and we prove that in the limit of infinite batch size the variational parameter updates converge exponentially quickly to the target mean and covariance. We also evaluate the performance of BaM on Gaussian and non-Gaussian target distributions that arise from posterior inference in hierarchical and deep generative models. In these experiments, we find that BaM typically converges in fewer (and sometimes significantly fewer) gradient evaluations than leading implementations of BBVI based on ELBO maximization.
Authors: Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Mo Yu, Fandong Meng, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng, Jie Zhou
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating additional information from retrieval. However, studies have shown that LLMs still face challenges in effectively using the retrieved information, even ignoring it or being misled by it. The key reason is that the training of LLMs does not clearly make LLMs learn how to utilize input retrieved texts with varied quality. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective that considers the role of LLMs in RAG as ``Information Refiner'', which means that regardless of correctness, completeness, or usefulness of retrieved texts, LLMs can consistently integrate knowledge within the retrieved texts and model parameters to generate the texts that are more concise, accurate, and complete than the retrieved texts. To this end, we propose an information refinement training method named InFO-RAG that optimizes LLMs for RAG in an unsupervised manner. InFO-RAG is low-cost and general across various tasks. Extensive experiments on zero-shot prediction of 11 datasets in diverse tasks including Question Answering, Slot-Filling, Language Modeling, Dialogue, and Code Generation show that InFO-RAG improves the performance of LLaMA2 by an average of 9.39\% relative points. InFO-RAG also shows advantages in in-context learning and robustness of RAG.
Authors: Philip Feldman, James R. Foulds, Shimei Pan
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT demonstrate the remarkable progress of artificial intelligence. However, their tendency to hallucinate -- generate plausible but false information -- poses a significant challenge. This issue is critical, as seen in recent court cases where ChatGPT's use led to citations of non-existent legal rulings. This paper explores how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can counter hallucinations by integrating external knowledge with prompts. We empirically evaluate RAG against standard LLMs using prompts designed to induce hallucinations. Our results show that RAG increases accuracy in some cases, but can still be misled when prompts directly contradict the model's pre-trained understanding. These findings highlight the complex nature of hallucinations and the need for more robust solutions to ensure LLM reliability in real-world applications. We offer practical recommendations for RAG deployment and discuss implications for the development of more trustworthy LLMs.
Authors: Bryan Li, Tamer Alkhouli, Daniele Bonadiman, Nikolaos Pappas, Saab Mansour
Abstract: The development of large language models (LLM) has shown progress on reasoning, though studies have largely considered either English or simple reasoning tasks. To address this, we introduce a multilingual structured reasoning and explanation dataset, termed xSTREET, that covers four tasks across six languages. xSTREET exposes a gap in base LLM performance between English and non-English reasoning tasks. We then propose two methods to remedy this gap, building on the insight that LLMs trained on code are better reasoners. First, at training time, we augment a code dataset with multilingual comments using machine translation while keeping program code as-is. Second, at inference time, we bridge the gap between training and inference by employing a prompt structure that incorporates step-by-step code primitives to derive new facts and find a solution. Our methods show improved multilingual performance on xSTREET, most notably on the scientific commonsense reasoning subtask. Furthermore, the models show no regression on non-reasoning tasks, thus demonstrating our techniques maintain general-purpose abilities.
Authors: Dionysios Diamantopoulos, Roman Pletka, Slavisa Sarafijanovic, A. L. Narasimha Reddy, Haris Pozidis
Abstract: Ransomware, a fearsome and rapidly evolving cybersecurity threat, continues to inflict severe consequences on individuals and organizations worldwide. Traditional detection methods, reliant on static signatures and application behavioral patterns, are challenged by the dynamic nature of these threats. This paper introduces three primary contributions to address this challenge. First, we introduce a ransomware emulator. This tool is designed to safely mimic ransomware attacks without causing actual harm or spreading malware, making it a unique solution for studying ransomware behavior. Second, we demonstrate how we use this emulator to create storage I/O traces. These traces are then utilized to train machine-learning models. Our results show that these models are effective in detecting ransomware, highlighting the practical application of our emulator in developing responsible cybersecurity tools. Third, we show how our emulator can be used to mimic the I/O behavior of existing ransomware thereby enabling safe trace collection. Both the emulator and its application represent significant steps forward in ransomware detection in the era of machine-learning-driven cybersecurity.
Authors: Maonan Wang, Aoyu Pang, Yuheng Kan, Man-On Pun, Chung Shue Chen, Bo Huang
Abstract: Traffic congestion in metropolitan areas presents a formidable challenge with far-reaching economic, environmental, and societal ramifications. Therefore, effective congestion management is imperative, with traffic signal control (TSC) systems being pivotal in this endeavor. Conventional TSC systems, designed upon rule-based algorithms or reinforcement learning (RL), frequently exhibit deficiencies in managing the complexities and variabilities of urban traffic flows, constrained by their limited capacity for adaptation to unfamiliar scenarios. In response to these limitations, this work introduces an innovative approach that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) into TSC, harnessing their advanced reasoning and decision-making faculties. Specifically, a hybrid framework that augments LLMs with a suite of perception and decision-making tools is proposed, facilitating the interrogation of both the static and dynamic traffic information. This design places the LLM at the center of the decision-making process, combining external traffic data with established TSC methods. Moreover, a simulation platform is developed to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed framework. The findings from our simulations attest to the system's adeptness in adjusting to a multiplicity of traffic environments without the need for additional training. Notably, in cases of Sensor Outage (SO), our approach surpasses conventional RL-based systems by reducing the average waiting time by $20.4\%$. This research signifies a notable advance in TSC strategies and paves the way for the integration of LLMs into real-world, dynamic scenarios, highlighting their potential to revolutionize traffic management. The related code is available at https://github.com/Traffic-Alpha/LLM-Assisted-Light.
Authors: Payel Das, Subhajit Chaudhury, Elliot Nelson, Igor Melnyk, Sarath Swaminathan, Sihui Dai, Aur\'elie Lozano, Georgios Kollias, Vijil Chenthamarakshan, Ji\v{r}\'i, Navr\'atil, Soham Dan, Pin-Yu Chen
Abstract: Efficient and accurate updating of knowledge stored in Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the most pressing research challenges today. This paper presents Larimar - a novel, brain-inspired architecture for enhancing LLMs with a distributed episodic memory. Larimar's memory allows for dynamic, one-shot updates of knowledge without the need for computationally expensive re-training or fine-tuning. Experimental results on multiple fact editing benchmarks demonstrate that Larimar attains accuracy comparable to most competitive baselines, even in the challenging sequential editing setup, but also excels in speed - yielding speed-ups of 8-10x depending on the base LLM - as well as flexibility due to the proposed architecture being simple, LLM-agnostic, and hence general. We further provide mechanisms for selective fact forgetting, information leakage prevention, and input context length generalization with Larimar and show their effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/IBM/larimar
Authors: Jinge Wang, Zien Cheng, Qiuming Yao, Li Liu, Dong Xu, Gangqing Hu
Abstract: The year 2023 marked a significant surge in the exploration of applying large language model (LLM) chatbots, notably ChatGPT, across various disciplines. We surveyed the applications of ChatGPT in bioinformatics and biomedical informatics throughout the year, covering omics, genetics, biomedical text mining, drug discovery, biomedical image understanding, bioinformatics programming, and bioinformatics education. Our survey delineates the current strengths and limitations of this chatbot in bioinformatics and offers insights into potential avenues for future developments.
Authors: Qian Chen, Dongyang Li, Xiaofeng He, Hongzhao Li, Hongyu Yi
Abstract: The black-box nature of deep learning models in NLP hinders their widespread application. The research focus has shifted to Hierarchical Attribution (HA) for its ability to model feature interactions. Recent works model non-contiguous combinations with a time-costly greedy search in Eculidean spaces, neglecting underlying linguistic information in feature representations. In this work, we introduce a novel method, namely Poincare Explanation (PE), for modeling feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces in a time efficient manner. Specifically, we take building text hierarchies as finding spanning trees in hyperbolic spaces. First we project the embeddings into hyperbolic spaces to elicit inherit semantic and syntax hierarchical structures. Then we propose a simple yet effective strategy to calculate Shapley score. Finally we build the the hierarchy with proving the constructing process in the projected space could be viewed as building a minimum spanning tree and introduce a time efficient building algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors: Maciej K Wozniak, Mattias Hansson, Marko Thiel, Patric Jensfelt
Abstract: In this study, we address a gap in existing unsupervised domain adaptation approaches on LiDAR-based 3D object detection, which have predominantly concentrated on adapting between established, high-density autonomous driving datasets. We focus on sparser point clouds, capturing scenarios from different perspectives: not just from vehicles on the road but also from mobile robots on sidewalks, which encounter significantly different environmental conditions and sensor configurations. We introduce Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection (UADA3D). UADA3D does not depend on pre-trained source models or teacher-student architectures. Instead, it uses an adversarial approach to directly learn domain-invariant features. We demonstrate its efficacy in various adaptation scenarios, showing significant improvements in both self-driving car and mobile robot domains. Our code is open-source and will be available soon.
Authors: Hamidreza Kamkari, Brendan Leigh Ross, Jesse C. Cresswell, Anthony L. Caterini, Rahul G. Krishnan, Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem
Abstract: Likelihood-based deep generative models (DGMs) commonly exhibit a puzzling behaviour: when trained on a relatively complex dataset, they assign higher likelihood values to out-of-distribution (OOD) data from simpler sources. Adding to the mystery, OOD samples are never generated by these DGMs despite having higher likelihoods. This two-pronged paradox has yet to be conclusively explained, making likelihood-based OOD detection unreliable. Our primary observation is that high-likelihood regions will not be generated if they contain minimal probability mass. We demonstrate how this seeming contradiction of large densities yet low probability mass can occur around data confined to low-dimensional manifolds. We also show that this scenario can be identified through local intrinsic dimension (LID) estimation, and propose a method for OOD detection which pairs the likelihoods and LID estimates obtained from a pre-trained DGM. Our method can be applied to normalizing flows and score-based diffusion models, and obtains results which match or surpass state-of-the-art OOD detection benchmarks using the same DGM backbones. Our code is available at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/dgm_ood_detection.
Authors: Tianle Li, Ge Zhang, Quy Duc Do, Xiang Yue, Wenhu Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in handling long sequences. Some models like Gemini could even to be capable of dealing with millions of tokens. However, their performance evaluation has largely been confined to metrics like perplexity and synthetic tasks, which may not fully capture their true abilities in more challenging, real-world scenarios. We introduce a benchmark (LongICLBench) for long in-context learning in extreme-label classification using six datasets with 28 to 174 classes and input lengths from 2K to 50K tokens. Our benchmark requires LLMs to comprehend the entire input to recognize the massive label spaces to make correct predictions. We evaluate on 15 long-context LLMs and find that they perform well on less challenging classification tasks with smaller label space and shorter demonstrations. However, they struggle with more challenging task like Discovery with 174 labels, suggesting a gap in their ability to process long, context-rich sequences. Further analysis reveals a bias towards labels presented later in the sequence and a need for improved reasoning over multiple pieces of information. Our study reveals that long context understanding and reasoning is still a challenging task for the existing LLMs. We believe LongICLBench could serve as a more realistic evaluation for the future long-context LLMs.
Authors: Abhijit Anand, Venktesh V, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
Abstract: An important problem in text-ranking systems is handling the hard queries that form the tail end of the query distribution. The difficulty may arise due to the presence of uncommon, underspecified, or incomplete queries. In this work, we improve the ranking performance of hard or difficult queries without compromising the performance of other queries. Firstly, we do LLM based query enrichment for training queries using relevant documents. Next, a specialized ranker is fine-tuned only on the enriched hard queries instead of the original queries. We combine the relevance scores from the specialized ranker and the base ranker, along with a query performance score estimated for each query. Our approach departs from existing methods that usually employ a single ranker for all queries, which is biased towards easy queries, which form the majority of the query distribution. In our extensive experiments on the DL-Hard dataset, we find that a principled query performance based scoring method using base and specialized ranker offers a significant improvement of up to 25% on the passage ranking task and up to 48.4% on the document ranking task when compared to the baseline performance of using original queries, even outperforming SOTA model.
Authors: Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Simone Alghisi, Giuseppe Riccardi
Abstract: LLMs acquire knowledge from massive data snapshots collected at different timestamps. Their knowledge is then commonly evaluated using static benchmarks. However, factual knowledge is generally subject to time-sensitive changes, and static benchmarks cannot address those cases. We present an approach to dynamically evaluate the knowledge in LLMs and their time-sensitiveness against Wikidata, a publicly available up-to-date knowledge graph. We evaluate the time-sensitive knowledge in twenty-four private and open-source LLMs, as well as the effectiveness of four editing methods in updating the outdated facts. Our results show that 1) outdatedness is a critical problem across state-of-the-art LLMs; 2) LLMs output inconsistent answers when prompted with slight variations of the question prompt; and 3) the performance of the state-of-the-art knowledge editing algorithms is very limited, as they can not reduce the cases of outdatedness and output inconsistency.
Authors: Yiwen Tu, Pingbang Hu, Jiaqi Ma
Abstract: Machine unlearning is the process of updating machine learning models to remove the information of specific training data samples, in order to comply with data protection regulations that allow individuals to request the removal of their personal data. Despite the recent development of numerous unlearning algorithms, reliable evaluation of these algorithms remains an open research question. In this work, we focus on membership inference attack (MIA) based evaluation, one of the most common approaches for evaluating unlearning algorithms, and address various pitfalls of existing evaluation metrics that lack reliability. Specifically, we propose a game-theoretic framework that formalizes the evaluation process as a game between unlearning algorithms and MIA adversaries, measuring the data removal efficacy of unlearning algorithms by the capability of the MIA adversaries. Through careful design of the game, we demonstrate that the natural evaluation metric induced from the game enjoys provable guarantees that the existing evaluation metrics fail to satisfy. Furthermore, we propose a practical and efficient algorithm to estimate the evaluation metric induced from the game, and demonstrate its effectiveness through both theoretical analysis and empirical experiments. This work presents a novel and reliable approach to empirically evaluating unlearning algorithms, paving the way for the development of more effective unlearning techniques.
Authors: Geyu Lin, Bin Wang, Zhengyuan Liu, Nancy F. Chen
Abstract: Multilingual proficiency presents a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). English-centric models are usually suboptimal in other languages, particularly those that are linguistically distant from English. This performance discrepancy mainly stems from the imbalanced distribution of training data across languages during pre-training and instruction tuning stages. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach called CrossIn, which utilizes a mixed composition of cross-lingual instruction tuning data. Our method leverages the compressed representation shared by various languages to efficiently enhance the model's task-solving capabilities and multilingual proficiency within a single process. In addition, we introduce a multi-task and multi-faceted benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of CrossIn. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves performance across tasks and languages, and we provide extensive insights into the impact of cross-lingual data volume and the integration of translation data on enhancing multilingual consistency and accuracy.
Authors: Xun Jiao, Fred Lin, Harish D. Dixit, Joel Coburn, Abhinav Pandey, Han Wang, Venkat Ramesh, Jianyu Huang, Wang Xu, Daniel Moore, Sriram Sankar
Abstract: Reliability of AI systems is a fundamental concern for the successful deployment and widespread adoption of AI technologies. Unfortunately, the escalating complexity and heterogeneity of AI hardware systems make them increasingly susceptible to hardware faults, e.g., silent data corruptions (SDC), that can potentially corrupt model parameters. When this occurs during AI inference/servicing, it can potentially lead to incorrect or degraded model output for users, ultimately affecting the quality and reliability of AI services. In light of the escalating threat, it is crucial to address key questions: How vulnerable are AI models to parameter corruptions, and how do different components (such as modules, layers) of the models exhibit varying vulnerabilities to parameter corruptions? To systematically address this question, we propose a novel quantitative metric, Parameter Vulnerability Factor (PVF), inspired by architectural vulnerability factor (AVF) in computer architecture community, aiming to standardize the quantification of AI model vulnerability against parameter corruptions. We define a model parameter's PVF as the probability that a corruption in that particular model parameter will result in an incorrect output. In this paper, we present several use cases on applying PVF to three types of tasks/models during inference -- recommendation (DLRM), vision classification (CNN), and text classification (BERT), while presenting an in-depth vulnerability analysis on DLRM. PVF can provide pivotal insights to AI hardware designers in balancing the tradeoff between fault protection and performance/efficiency such as mapping vulnerable AI parameter components to well-protected hardware modules. PVF metric is applicable to any AI model and has a potential to help unify and standardize AI vulnerability/resilience evaluation practice.
Authors: Max Yang, Chenghua Lu, Alex Church, Yijiong Lin, Chris Ford, Haoran Li, Efi Psomopoulou, David A. W. Barton, Nathan F. Lepora
Abstract: Human hands are capable of in-hand manipulation in the presence of different hand motions. For a robot hand, harnessing rich tactile information to achieve this level of dexterity still remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we present AnyRotate, a system for gravity-invariant multi-axis in-hand object rotation using dense featured sim-to-real touch. We tackle this problem by training a dense tactile policy in simulation and present a sim-to-real method for rich tactile sensing to achieve zero-shot policy transfer. Our formulation allows the training of a unified policy to rotate unseen objects about arbitrary rotation axes in any hand direction. In our experiments, we highlight the benefit of capturing detailed contact information when handling objects with varying properties. Interestingly, despite not having explicit slip detection, we found rich multi-fingered tactile sensing can implicitly detect object movement within grasp and provide a reactive behavior that improves the robustness of the policy. The project website can be found at https://maxyang27896.github.io/anyrotate/.
Authors: Hanze Dong, Wei Xiong, Bo Pang, Haoxiang Wang, Han Zhao, Yingbo Zhou, Nan Jiang, Doyen Sahoo, Caiming Xiong, Tong Zhang
Abstract: We present the workflow of Online Iterative Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in this technical report, which is widely reported to outperform its offline counterpart by a large margin in the recent large language model (LLM) literature. However, existing open-source RLHF projects are still largely confined to the offline learning setting. In this technical report, we aim to fill in this gap and provide a detailed recipe that is easy to reproduce for online iterative RLHF. In particular, since online human feedback is usually infeasible for open-source communities with limited resources, we start by constructing preference models using a diverse set of open-source datasets and use the constructed proxy preference model to approximate human feedback. Then, we discuss the theoretical insights and algorithmic principles behind online iterative RLHF, followed by a detailed practical implementation. Our trained LLM, LLaMA-3-8B-SFR-Iterative-DPO-R, achieves impressive performance on LLM chatbot benchmarks, including AlpacaEval-2, Arena-Hard, and MT-Bench, as well as other academic benchmarks such as HumanEval and TruthfulQA. We have shown that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and iterative RLHF can obtain state-of-the-art performance with fully open-source datasets. Further, we have made our models, curated datasets, and comprehensive step-by-step code guidebooks publicly available. Please refer to https://github.com/RLHFlow/RLHF-Reward-Modeling and https://github.com/RLHFlow/Online-RLHF for more detailed information.
URLs: https://github.com/RLHFlow/RLHF-Reward-Modeling, https://github.com/RLHFlow/Online-RLHF
Authors: Jiatong Bai, Feng Shu, Qinghe Zheng, Bo Xu, Baihua Shi, Yiwen Chen, Weibin Zhang, Xianpeng Wang
Abstract: Due to its excellent performance in rate and resolution, fully-digital (FD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna arrays has been widely applied in data transmission and direction of arrival (DOA) measurements, etc. But it confronts with two main challenges: high computational complexity and circuit cost. The two problems may be addressed well by hybrid analog-digital (HAD) structure. But there exists the problem of phase ambiguity for HAD, which leads to its low-efficiency or high-latency. Does exist there such a MIMO structure of owning low-cost, low-complexity and high time efficiency at the same time. To satisfy the three properties, a novel heterogeneous hybrid MIMO receiver structure of integrating FD and heterogeneous HAD ($\rm{H}^2$AD-FD) is proposed and corresponding multi-modal (MD)-learning framework is developed. The framework includes three major stages: 1) generate the candidate sets via root multiple signal classification (Root-MUSIC) or deep learning (DL); 2) infer the class of true solutions from candidate sets using machine learning (ML) methods; 3) fuse the two-part true solutions to achieve a better DOA estimation. The above process form two methods named MD-Root-MUSIC and MDDL. To improve DOA estimation accuracy and reduce the clustering complexity, a co-learning-aided MD framework is proposed to form two enhanced methods named CoMDDL and CoMD-RootMUSIC. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the proposed $\rm{H}^2$AD-FD structure is also derived. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed four methods could approach the CRLB for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) > 0 dB and the proposed CoMDDL and MDDL perform better than CoMD-RootMUSIC and MD-RootMUSIC, particularly in the extremely low SNR region.
Authors: Jihwan Kim, Junoh Kang, Jinyoung Choi, Bohyung Han
Abstract: We propose a novel inference technique based on a pretrained diffusion model for text-conditional video generation. Our approach, called FIFO-Diffusion, is conceptually capable of generating infinitely long videos without additional training. This is achieved by iteratively performing diagonal denoising, which concurrently processes a series of consecutive frames with increasing noise levels in a queue; our method dequeues a fully denoised frame at the head while enqueuing a new random noise frame at the tail. However, diagonal denoising is a double-edged sword as the frames near the tail can take advantage of cleaner ones by forward reference but such a strategy induces the discrepancy between training and inference. Hence, we introduce latent partitioning to reduce the training-inference gap and lookahead denoising to leverage the benefit of forward referencing. Practically, FIFO-Diffusion consumes a constant amount of memory regardless of the target video length given a baseline model, while well-suited for parallel inference on multiple GPUs. We have demonstrated the promising results and effectiveness of the proposed methods on existing text-to-video generation baselines. Generated video samples and source codes are available at our project page.
Authors: Md Yousuf Harun, Kyungbok Lee, Jhair Gallardo, Giri Krishnan, Christopher Kanan
Abstract: Embeddings produced by pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used; however, their efficacy for downstream tasks can vary widely. We study the factors influencing out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of pre-trained DNN embeddings through the lens of the tunnel effect hypothesis, which suggests deeper DNN layers compress representations and hinder OOD performance. Contrary to earlier work, we find the tunnel effect is not universal. Based on 10,584 linear probes, we study the conditions that mitigate the tunnel effect by varying DNN architecture, training dataset, image resolution, and augmentations. We quantify each variable's impact using a novel SHAP analysis. Our results emphasize the danger of generalizing findings from toy datasets to broader contexts.
Authors: Siyuan Ma, Weidi Luo, Yu Wang, Xiaogeng Liu
Abstract: With the advent and widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), ensuring their safety has become increasingly critical. To achieve this objective, it requires us to proactively discover the vulnerability of MLLMs by exploring the attack methods. Thus, structure-based jailbreak attacks, where harmful semantic content is embedded within images, have been proposed to mislead the models. However, previous structure-based jailbreak methods mainly focus on transforming the format of malicious queries, such as converting harmful content into images through typography, which lacks sufficient jailbreak effectiveness and generalizability. To address these limitations, we first introduce the concept of "Role-play" into MLLM jailbreak attacks and propose a novel and effective method called Visual Role-play (VRP). Specifically, VRP leverages Large Language Models to generate detailed descriptions of high-risk characters and create corresponding images based on the descriptions. When paired with benign role-play instruction texts, these high-risk character images effectively mislead MLLMs into generating malicious responses by enacting characters with negative attributes. We further extend our VRP method into a universal setup to demonstrate its generalizability. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that VRP outperforms the strongest baseline, Query relevant and FigStep, by an average Attack Success Rate (ASR) margin of 14.3% across all models.
Authors: Francisco Robledo (LMAP, UPPA, UPV / EHU), Urtzi Ayesta (IRIT-RMESS, UPV/EHU, CNRS), Konstantin Avrachenkov (Inria)
Abstract: This paper introduces the Lagrange Policy for Continuous Actions (LPCA), a reinforcement learning algorithm specifically designed for weakly coupled MDP problems with continuous action spaces. LPCA addresses the challenge of resource constraints dependent on continuous actions by introducing a Lagrange relaxation of the weakly coupled MDP problem within a neural network framework for Q-value computation. This approach effectively decouples the MDP, enabling efficient policy learning in resource-constrained environments. We present two variations of LPCA: LPCA-DE, which utilizes differential evolution for global optimization, and LPCA-Greedy, a method that incrementally and greadily selects actions based on Q-value gradients. Comparative analysis against other state-of-the-art techniques across various settings highlight LPCA's robustness and efficiency in managing resource allocation while maximizing rewards.
Authors: Jaeho Kim, Seok-Ju Hahn, Yoontae Hwang, Junghye Lee, Seulki Lee
Abstract: In multivariate time series (MTS) classification, finding the important features (e.g., sensors) for model performance is crucial yet challenging due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of MTS data, intricate temporal dynamics, and the necessity for domain-specific interpretations. Current explanation methods for MTS mostly focus on time-centric explanations, apt for pinpointing important time periods but less effective in identifying key features. This limitation underscores the pressing need for a feature-centric approach, a vital yet often overlooked perspective that complements time-centric analysis. To bridge this gap, our study introduces a novel feature-centric explanation and evaluation framework for MTS, named CAFO (Channel Attention and Feature Orthgonalization). CAFO employs a convolution-based approach with channel attention mechanisms, incorporating a depth-wise separable channel attention module (DepCA) and a QR decomposition-based loss for promoting feature-wise orthogonality. We demonstrate that this orthogonalization enhances the separability of attention distributions, thereby refining and stabilizing the ranking of feature importance. This improvement in feature-wise ranking enhances our understanding of feature explainability in MTS. Furthermore, we develop metrics to evaluate global and class-specific feature importance. Our framework's efficacy is validated through extensive empirical analyses on two major public benchmarks and real-world datasets, both synthetic and self-collected, specifically designed to highlight class-wise discriminative features. The results confirm CAFO's robustness and informative capacity in assessing feature importance in MTS classification tasks. This study not only advances the understanding of feature-centric explanations in MTS but also sets a foundation for future explorations in feature-centric explanations.
Authors: Yichuan Wang, Yang Liu, Yu Yan, Qun Wang, Shulei Wu, Xucheng Huang, Ling Jiang
Abstract: We introduce Xmodel-LM, a compact and efficient 1.1B language model pre-trained on around 2 trillion tokens. Trained on our self-built dataset (Xdata), which balances Chinese and English corpora based on downstream task optimization, Xmodel-LM exhibits remarkable performance despite its smaller size. It notably surpasses existing open-source language models of similar scale. Our model checkpoints and code are publicly accessible on GitHub at https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/XmodelLM.
Authors: Qutub Syed Sha, Michael Paulitsch, Karthik Pattabiraman, Korbinian Hagn, Fabian Oboril, Cornelius Buerkle, Kay-Ulrich Scholl, Gereon Hinz, Alois Knoll
Abstract: As transformer-based object detection models progress, their impact in critical sectors like autonomous vehicles and aviation is expected to grow. Soft errors causing bit flips during inference have significantly impacted DNN performance, altering predictions. Traditional range restriction solutions for CNNs fall short for transformers. This study introduces the Global Clipper and Global Hybrid Clipper, effective mitigation strategies specifically designed for transformer-based models. It significantly enhances their resilience to soft errors and reduces faulty inferences to ~ 0\%. We also detail extensive testing across over 64 scenarios involving two transformer models (DINO-DETR and Lite-DETR) and two CNN models (YOLOv3 and SSD) using three datasets, totalling approximately 3.3 million inferences, to assess model robustness comprehensively. Moreover, the paper explores unique aspects of attention blocks in transformers and their operational differences from CNNs.
Authors: Yangbin Chen, Chenyang Xu, Chunfeng Liang, Yanbao Tao, Chuan Shi
Abstract: This study investigates the utility of speech signals for AI-based depression screening across varied interaction scenarios, including psychiatric interviews, chatbot conversations, and text readings. Participants include depressed patients recruited from the outpatient clinics of Peking University Sixth Hospital and control group members from the community, all diagnosed by psychiatrists following standardized diagnostic protocols. We extracted acoustic and deep speech features from each participant's segmented recordings. Classifications were made using neural networks or SVMs, with aggregated clip outcomes determining final assessments. Our analysis across interaction scenarios, speech processing techniques, and feature types confirms speech as a crucial marker for depression screening. Specifically, human-computer interaction matches clinical interview efficacy, surpassing reading tasks. Segment duration and quantity significantly affect model performance, with deep speech features substantially outperforming traditional acoustic features.
Authors: Nicolas M. M\"uller, Nicholas Evans, Hemlata Tak, Philip Sperl, Konstantin B\"ottinger
Abstract: Recent research has highlighted a key issue in speech deepfake detection: models trained on one set of deepfakes perform poorly on others. The question arises: is this due to the continuously improving quality of Text-to-Speech (TTS) models, i.e., are newer DeepFakes just 'harder' to detect? Or, is it because deepfakes generated with one model are fundamentally different to those generated using another model? We answer this question by decomposing the performance gap between in-domain and out-of-domain test data into 'hardness' and 'difference' components. Experiments performed using ASVspoof databases indicate that the hardness component is practically negligible, with the performance gap being attributed primarily to the difference component. This has direct implications for real-world deepfake detection, highlighting that merely increasing model capacity, the currently-dominant research trend, may not effectively address the generalization challenge.
Authors: Feiyang Wang, Xingquan Zuo, Hai Huang, Gang Chen
Abstract: Many machine learning models are susceptible to adversarial attacks, with decision-based black-box attacks representing the most critical threat in real-world applications. These attacks are extremely stealthy, generating adversarial examples using hard labels obtained from the target machine learning model. This is typically realized by optimizing perturbation directions, guided by decision boundaries identified through query-intensive exact search, significantly limiting the attack success rate. This paper introduces a novel approach using the Approximation Decision Boundary (ADB) to efficiently and accurately compare perturbation directions without precisely determining decision boundaries. The effectiveness of our ADB approach (ADBA) hinges on promptly identifying suitable ADB, ensuring reliable differentiation of all perturbation directions. For this purpose, we analyze the probability distribution of decision boundaries, confirming that using the distribution's median value as ADB can effectively distinguish different perturbation directions, giving rise to the development of the ADBA-md algorithm. ADBA-md only requires four queries on average to differentiate any pair of perturbation directions, which is highly query-efficient. Extensive experiments on six well-known image classifiers clearly demonstrate the superiority of ADBA and ADBA-md over multiple state-of-the-art black-box attacks. The source code is available at https://github.com/BUPTAIOC/ADBA.
Authors: Jianing Yang, Xuweiyi Chen, Nikhil Madaan, Madhavan Iyengar, Shengyi Qian, David F. Fouhey, Joyce Chai
Abstract: The integration of language and 3D perception is crucial for developing embodied agents and robots that comprehend and interact with the physical world. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, their adaptation to 3D environments (3D-LLMs) remains in its early stages. A primary challenge is the absence of large-scale datasets that provide dense grounding between language and 3D scenes. In this paper, we introduce 3D-GRAND, a pioneering large-scale dataset comprising 40,087 household scenes paired with 6.2 million densely-grounded scene-language instructions. Our results show that instruction tuning with 3D-GRAND significantly enhances grounding capabilities and reduces hallucinations in 3D-LLMs. As part of our contributions, we propose a comprehensive benchmark 3D-POPE to systematically evaluate hallucination in 3D-LLMs, enabling fair comparisons among future models. Our experiments highlight a scaling effect between dataset size and 3D-LLM performance, emphasizing the critical role of large-scale 3D-text datasets in advancing embodied AI research. Notably, our results demonstrate early signals for effective sim-to-real transfer, indicating that models trained on large synthetic data can perform well on real-world 3D scans. Through 3D-GRAND and 3D-POPE, we aim to equip the embodied AI community with essential resources and insights, setting the stage for more reliable and better-grounded 3D-LLMs. Project website: https://3d-grand.github.io
Authors: Qingsong Xie, Zhenyi Liao, Chen chen, Zhijie Deng, Shixiang Tang, Haonan Lu
Abstract: Distilling large latent diffusion models (LDMs) into ones that are fast to sample from is attracting growing research interest. However, the majority of existing methods face a dilemma where they either (i) depend on multiple individual distilled models for different sampling budgets, or (ii) sacrifice generation quality with limited (e.g., 2-4) and/or moderate (e.g., 5-8) sampling steps. To address these, we extend the recent multistep consistency distillation (MCD) strategy to representative LDMs, establishing the Multistep Latent Consistency Models (MLCMs) approach for low-cost high-quality image synthesis. MLCM serves as a unified model for various sampling steps due to the promise of MCD. We further augment MCD with a progressive training strategy to strengthen inter-segment consistency to boost the quality of few-step generations. We take the states from the sampling trajectories of the teacher model as training data for MLCMs to lift the requirements for high-quality training datasets and to bridge the gap between the training and inference of the distilled model. MLCM is compatible with preference learning strategies for further improvement of visual quality and aesthetic appeal. Empirically, MLCM can generate high-quality, delightful images with only 2-8 sampling steps. On the MSCOCO-2017 5K benchmark, MLCM distilled from SDXL gets a CLIP Score of 33.30, Aesthetic Score of 6.19, and Image Reward of 1.20 with only 4 steps, substantially surpassing 4-step LCM [23], 8-step SDXL-Lightning [17], and 8-step HyperSD [33]. We also demonstrate the versatility of MLCMs in applications including controllable generation, image style transfer, and Chinese-to-image generation.
Authors: Alva Markelius
Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in social robotics presents a unique set of ethical challenges and social impacts. This research is set out to identify ethical considerations that arise in the design and development of these two technologies in combination. Using LLMs for social robotics may provide benefits, such as enabling natural language open-domain dialogues. However, the intersection of these two technologies also gives rise to ethical concerns related to misinformation, non-verbal cues, emotional disruption, and biases. The robot's physical social embodiment adds complexity, as ethical hazards associated with LLM-based Social AI, such as hallucinations and misinformation, can be exacerbated due to the effects of physical embodiment on social perception and communication. To address these challenges, this study employs an empirical design justice-based methodology, focusing on identifying socio-technical ethical considerations through a qualitative co-design and interaction study. The purpose of the study is to identify ethical considerations relevant to the process of co-design of, and interaction with a humanoid social robot as the interface of a LLM, and to evaluate how a design justice methodology can be used in the context of designing LLMs-based social robotics. The findings reveal a mapping of ethical considerations arising in four conceptual dimensions: interaction, co-design, terms of service and relationship and evaluates how a design justice approach can be used empirically in the intersection of LLMs and social robotics.
Authors: Reid McIlroy-Young, Katrina Brown, Conlan Olson, Linjun Zhang, Cynthia Dwork
Abstract: The development of generative language models that can create long and coherent textual outputs via autoregression has lead to a proliferation of uses and a corresponding sweep of analyses as researches work to determine the limitations of this new paradigm. Unlike humans, these 'Large Language Models' (LLMs) are highly sensitive to small changes in their inputs, leading to unwanted inconsistency in their behavior. One problematic inconsistency when LLMs are used to answer multiple-choice questions or analyze multiple inputs is order dependency: the output of an LLM can (and often does) change significantly when sub-sequences are swapped, despite both orderings being semantically identical. In this paper we present Set-Based Prompting, a technique that guarantees the output of an LLM will not have order dependence on a specified set of sub-sequences. We show that this method provably eliminates order dependency, and that it can be applied to any transformer-based LLM to enable text generation that is unaffected by re-orderings. Delving into the implications of our method, we show that, despite our inputs being out of distribution, the impact on expected accuracy is small, where the expectation is over the order of uniformly chosen shuffling of the candidate responses, and usually significantly less in practice. Thus, Set-Based Prompting can be used as a 'dropped-in' method on fully trained models. Finally, we discuss how our method's success suggests that other strong guarantees can be obtained on LLM performance via modifying the input representations.
Authors: Alina Leidinger, Robert van Rooij, Ekaterina Shutova
Abstract: Recent scholarship on reasoning in LLMs has supplied evidence of impressive performance and flexible adaptation to machine generated or human feedback. Nonmonotonic reasoning, crucial to human cognition for navigating the real world, remains a challenging, yet understudied task. In this work, we study nonmonotonic reasoning capabilities of seven state-of-the-art LLMs in one abstract and one commonsense reasoning task featuring generics, such as 'Birds fly', and exceptions, 'Penguins don't fly' (see Fig. 1). While LLMs exhibit reasoning patterns in accordance with human nonmonotonic reasoning abilities, they fail to maintain stable beliefs on truth conditions of generics at the addition of supporting examples ('Owls fly') or unrelated information ('Lions have manes'). Our findings highlight pitfalls in attributing human reasoning behaviours to LLMs, as well as assessing general capabilities, while consistent reasoning remains elusive.
Authors: Hidetoshi Matsuo, Mizuho Nishio, Takaaki Matsunaga, Koji Fujimoto, Takamichi Murakami
Abstract: Background: Structured radiology reports remains underdeveloped due to labor-intensive structuring and narrative-style reporting. Deep learning, particularly large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5, offers promise in automating the structuring of radiology reports in natural languages. However, although it has been reported that LLMs are less effective in languages other than English, their radiological performance has not been extensively studied. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the accuracy of TNM classification based on radiology reports using GPT3.5-turbo (GPT3.5) and the utility of multilingual LLMs in both Japanese and English. Material and Methods: Utilizing GPT3.5, we developed a system to automatically generate TNM classifications from chest CT reports for lung cancer and evaluate its performance. We statistically analyzed the impact of providing full or partial TNM definitions in both languages using a Generalized Linear Mixed Model. Results: Highest accuracy was attained with full TNM definitions and radiology reports in English (M = 94%, N = 80%, T = 47%, and ALL = 36%). Providing definitions for each of the T, N, and M factors statistically improved their respective accuracies (T: odds ratio (OR) = 2.35, p < 0.001; N: OR = 1.94, p < 0.01; M: OR = 2.50, p < 0.001). Japanese reports exhibited decreased N and M accuracies (N accuracy: OR = 0.74 and M accuracy: OR = 0.21). Conclusion: This study underscores the potential of multilingual LLMs for automatic TNM classification in radiology reports. Even without additional model training, performance improvements were evident with the provided TNM definitions, indicating LLMs' relevance in radiology contexts.
Authors: Athanasios Tragakis, Marco Aversa, Chaitanya Kaul, Roderick Murray-Smith, Daniele Faccio
Abstract: In this work, we introduce Pixelsmith, a zero-shot text-to-image generative framework to sample images at higher resolutions with a single GPU. We are the first to show that it is possible to scale the output of a pre-trained diffusion model by a factor of 1000, opening the road for gigapixel image generation at no additional cost. Our cascading method uses the image generated at the lowest resolution as a baseline to sample at higher resolutions. For the guidance, we introduce the Slider, a tunable mechanism that fuses the overall structure contained in the first-generated image with enhanced fine details. At each inference step, we denoise patches rather than the entire latent space, minimizing memory demands such that a single GPU can handle the process, regardless of the image's resolution. Our experimental results show that Pixelsmith not only achieves higher quality and diversity compared to existing techniques, but also reduces sampling time and artifacts. The code for our work is available at https://github.com/Thanos-DB/Pixelsmith.
Authors: Frederic Kirstein, Jan Philip Wahle, Bela Gipp, Terry Ruas
Abstract: Abstractive dialogue summarization is the task of distilling conversations into informative and concise summaries. Although reviews have been conducted on this topic, there is a lack of comprehensive work detailing the challenges of dialogue summarization, unifying the differing understanding of the task, and aligning proposed techniques, datasets, and evaluation metrics with the challenges. This article summarizes the research on Transformer-based abstractive summarization for English dialogues by systematically reviewing 1262 unique research papers published between 2019 and 2024, relying on the Semantic Scholar and DBLP databases. We cover the main challenges present in dialog summarization (i.e., language, structure, comprehension, speaker, salience, and factuality) and link them to corresponding techniques such as graph-based approaches, additional training tasks, and planning strategies, which typically overly rely on BART-based encoder-decoder models. We find that while some challenges, like language, have seen considerable progress, mainly due to training methods, others, such as comprehension, factuality, and salience, remain difficult and hold significant research opportunities. We investigate how these approaches are typically assessed, covering the datasets for the subdomains of dialogue (e.g., meeting, medical), the established automatic metrics and human evaluation approaches for assessing scores and annotator agreement. We observe that only a few datasets span across all subdomains. The ROUGE metric is the most used, while human evaluation is frequently reported without sufficient detail on inner-annotator agreement and annotation guidelines. Additionally, we discuss the possible implications of the recently explored large language models and conclude that despite a potential shift in relevance and difficulty, our described challenge taxonomy remains relevant.