Authors: Desmond C. Ong
Abstract: Large Language Models have taken the cognitive science world by storm. It is perhaps timely now to take stock of the various research paradigms that have been used to make scientific inferences about ``cognition" in these models or about human cognition. We review several emerging research paradigms -- GPT-ology, LLMs-as-computational-models, and ``silicon sampling" -- and review recent papers that have used LLMs under these paradigms. In doing so, we discuss their claims as well as challenges to scientific inference under these various paradigms. We highlight several outstanding issues about LLMs that have to be addressed to push our science forward: closed-source vs open-sourced models; (the lack of visibility of) training data; and reproducibility in LLM research, including forming conventions on new task ``hyperparameters" like instructions and prompts.
Authors: Zibin Dong, Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao, Fei Ni, Yi Ma, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng
Abstract: Leveraging the powerful generative capability of diffusion models (DMs) to build decision-making agents has achieved extensive success. However, there is still a demand for an easy-to-use and modularized open-source library that offers customized and efficient development for DM-based decision-making algorithms. In this work, we introduce CleanDiffuser, the first DM library specifically designed for decision-making algorithms. By revisiting the roles of DMs in the decision-making domain, we identify a set of essential sub-modules that constitute the core of CleanDiffuser, allowing for the implementation of various DM algorithms with simple and flexible building blocks. To demonstrate the reliability and flexibility of CleanDiffuser, we conduct comprehensive evaluations of various DM algorithms implemented with CleanDiffuser across an extensive range of tasks. The analytical experiments provide a wealth of valuable design choices and insights, reveal opportunities and challenges, and lay a solid groundwork for future research. CleanDiffuser will provide long-term support to the decision-making community, enhancing reproducibility and fostering the development of more robust solutions. The code and documentation of CleanDiffuser are open-sourced on the https://github.com/CleanDiffuserTeam/CleanDiffuser.
Authors: Aleksandar Pavlovic, Emanuel Sallinger, Steven Schockaert
Abstract: Methods for knowledge graph (KG) completion need to capture semantic regularities and use these regularities to infer plausible knowledge that is not explicitly stated. Most embedding-based methods are opaque in the kinds of regularities they can capture, although region-based KG embedding models have emerged as a more transparent alternative. By modeling relations as geometric regions in high-dimensional vector spaces, such models can explicitly capture semantic regularities in terms of the spatial arrangement of these regions. Unfortunately, existing region-based approaches are severely limited in the kinds of rules they can capture. We argue that this limitation arises because the considered regions are defined as the Cartesian product of two-dimensional regions. As an alternative, in this paper, we propose RESHUFFLE, a simple model based on ordering constraints that can faithfully capture a much larger class of rule bases than existing approaches. Moreover, the embeddings in our framework can be learned by a monotonic Graph Neural Network (GNN), which effectively acts as a differentiable rule base. This approach has the important advantage that embeddings can be easily updated as new knowledge is added to the KG. At the same time, since the resulting representations can be used similarly to standard KG embeddings, our approach is significantly more efficient than existing approaches to differentiable reasoning.
Authors: Shichang Zhang, Botao Xia, Zimin Zhang, Qianli Wu, Fang Sun, Ziniu Hu, Yizhou Sun
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is significantly transforming scientific research. Explainable AI methods, such as concept-based models (CMs), are promising for driving new scientific discoveries because they make predictions based on meaningful concepts and offer insights into the prediction process. In molecular science, however, explainable CMs are not as common compared to black-box models like Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), primarily due to their requirement for predefined concepts and manual label for each instance, which demand domain knowledge and can be labor-intensive. This paper introduces a novel framework for Automated Molecular Concept (AutoMolCo) generation and labeling. AutoMolCo leverages the knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate predictive molecular concepts and label them for each molecule. Such procedures are repeated through iterative interactions with LLMs to refine concepts, enabling simple linear models on the refined concepts to outperform GNNs and LLM in-context learning on several benchmarks. The whole AutoMolCo framework is automated without any human knowledge inputs in either concept generation, labeling, or refinement, thereby surpassing the limitations of extant CMs while maintaining their explainability and allowing easy intervention. Through systematic experiments on MoleculeNet and High-Throughput Experimentation (HTE) datasets, we demonstrate that the AutoMolCo-induced explainable CMs are beneficial and promising for molecular science research.
Authors: Nabor C. Mendon\c{c}a
Abstract: The recent integration of visual capabilities into Large Language Models (LLMs) has the potential to play a pivotal role in science and technology education, where visual elements such as diagrams, charts, and tables are commonly used to improve the learning experience. This study investigates the performance of ChatGPT-4 Vision, OpenAI's most advanced visual model at the time the study was conducted, on the Bachelor in Computer Science section of Brazil's 2021 National Undergraduate Exam (ENADE). By presenting the model with the exam's open and multiple-choice questions in their original image format and allowing for reassessment in response to differing answer keys, we were able to evaluate the model's reasoning and self-reflecting capabilities in a large-scale academic assessment involving textual and visual content. ChatGPT-4 Vision significantly outperformed the average exam participant, positioning itself within the top 10 best score percentile. While it excelled in questions that incorporated visual elements, it also encountered challenges with question interpretation, logical reasoning, and visual acuity. The involvement of an independent expert panel to review cases of disagreement between the model and the answer key revealed some poorly constructed questions containing vague or ambiguous statements, calling attention to the critical need for improved question design in future exams. Our findings suggest that while ChatGPT-4 Vision shows promise in multimodal academic evaluations, human oversight remains crucial for verifying the model's accuracy and ensuring the fairness of high-stakes educational exams. The paper's research materials are publicly available at https://github.com/nabormendonca/gpt-4v-enade-cs-2021.
URLs: https://github.com/nabormendonca/gpt-4v-enade-cs-2021.
Authors: Xiaojun Bi, Mingjie He, Yiwen Sun
Abstract: Lane-changing decisions, which are crucial for autonomous vehicle path planning, face practical challenges due to rule-based constraints and limited data. Deep reinforcement learning has become a major research focus due to its advantages in data acquisition and interpretability. However, current models often overlook collaboration, which affects not only impacts overall traffic efficiency but also hinders the vehicle's own normal driving in the long run. To address the aforementioned issue, this paper proposes a method named Mix Q-learning for Lane Changing(MQLC) that integrates a hybrid value Q network, taking into account both collective and individual benefits for the greater good. At the collective level, our method coordinates the individual Q and global Q networks by utilizing global information. This enables agents to effectively balance their individual interests with the collective benefit. At the individual level, we integrated a deep learning-based intent recognition module into our observation and enhanced the decision network. These changes provide agents with richer decision information and more accurate feature extraction for improved lane-changing decisions. This strategy enables the multi-agent system to learn and formulate optimal decision-making strategies effectively. Our MQLC model, through extensive experimental results, impressively outperforms other state-of-the-art multi-agent decision-making methods, achieving significantly safer and faster lane-changing decisions.
Authors: Jingtao Cao, Zheng Zhang, Hongru Wang, Bin Liang, Hao Wang, Kam-Fai Wong
Abstract: Memes, which rapidly disseminate personal opinions and positions across the internet, also pose significant challenges in propagating social bias and prejudice. This study presents a novel approach to detecting harmful memes, particularly within the multicultural and multilingual context of Singapore. Our methodology integrates image captioning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Large Language Model (LLM) analysis to comprehensively understand and classify harmful memes. Utilizing the BLIP model for image captioning, PP-OCR and TrOCR for text recognition across multiple languages, and the Qwen LLM for nuanced language understanding, our system is capable of identifying harmful content in memes created in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. To enhance the system's performance, we fine-tuned our approach by leveraging additional data labeled using GPT-4V, aiming to distill the understanding capability of GPT-4V for harmful memes to our system. Our framework achieves top-1 at the public leaderboard of the Online Safety Prize Challenge hosted by AI Singapore, with the AUROC as 0.7749 and accuracy as 0.7087, significantly ahead of the other teams. Notably, our approach outperforms previous benchmarks, with FLAVA achieving an AUROC of 0.5695 and VisualBERT an AUROC of 0.5561.
Authors: Alfredo Ibias, Guillem Ramirez-Miranda, Enric Guinovart, Eduard Alarcon
Abstract: The Artificial Intelligence field is flooded with optimisation methods. In this paper, we change the focus to developing modelling methods with the aim of getting us closer to Artificial General Intelligence. To do so, we propose a novel way to interpret reality as an information source, that is later translated into a computational framework able to capture and represent such information. This framework is able to build elements of classical cognitive architectures, like Long Term Memory and Working Memory, starting from a simple primitive that only processes Spatial Distributed Representations. Moreover, it achieves such level of verticality in a seamless scalable hierarchical way.
Authors: Zhe Yang, Wenrui Li, Guanghui Cheng
Abstract: The Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) task holds significant potential for applications. Compared to traditional unimodal approaches, the multi-modal input of AVQA makes feature extraction and fusion processes more challenging. Euclidean space is difficult to effectively represent multi-dimensional relationships of data. Especially when extracting and processing data with a tree structure or hierarchical structure, Euclidean space is not suitable as an embedding space. Additionally, the self-attention mechanism in Transformers is effective in capturing the dynamic relationships between elements in a sequence. However, the self-attention mechanism's limitations in window modeling and quadratic computational complexity reduce its effectiveness in modeling long sequences. To address these limitations, we propose SHMamba: Structured Hyperbolic State Space Model to integrate the advantages of hyperbolic geometry and state space models. Specifically, SHMamba leverages the intrinsic properties of hyperbolic space to represent hierarchical structures and complex relationships in audio-visual data. Meanwhile, the state space model captures dynamic changes over time by globally modeling the entire sequence. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive curvature hyperbolic alignment module and a cross fusion block to enhance the understanding of hierarchical structures and the dynamic exchange of cross-modal information, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SHMamba outperforms previous methods with fewer parameters and computational costs. Our learnable parameters are reduced by 78.12\%, while the average performance improves by 2.53\%. Experiments show that our method demonstrates superiority among all current major methods and is more suitable for practical application scenarios.
Authors: Victor-Alexandru P\u{a}durean, Adish Singla
Abstract: Generative models have demonstrated human-level proficiency in various benchmarks across domains like programming, natural sciences, and general knowledge. Despite these promising results on competitive benchmarks, they still struggle with seemingly simple problem-solving tasks typically carried out by elementary-level students. How do state-of-the-art models perform on standardized tests designed to assess computational thinking and problem-solving skills at schools? In this paper, we curate a novel benchmark involving computational thinking tests grounded in elementary visual programming domains. Our initial results show that state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Llama3 barely match the performance of an average school student. To further boost the performance of these models, we fine-tune them using a novel synthetic data generation methodology. The key idea is to develop a comprehensive dataset using symbolic methods that capture different skill levels, ranging from recognition of visual elements to multi-choice quizzes to synthesis-style tasks. We showcase how various aspects of symbolic information in synthetic data help improve fine-tuned models' performance. We will release the full implementation and datasets to facilitate further research on enhancing computational thinking in generative models.
Authors: Wolfgang Stammer, Antonia W\"ust, David Steinmann, Kristian Kersting
Abstract: The challenge in object-based visual reasoning lies in generating descriptive yet distinct concept representations. Moreover, doing this in an unsupervised fashion requires human users to understand a model's learned concepts and potentially revise false concepts. In addressing this challenge, we introduce the Neural Concept Binder, a new framework for deriving discrete concept representations resulting in what we term "concept-slot encodings". These encodings leverage both "soft binding" via object-centric block-slot encodings and "hard binding" via retrieval-based inference. The Neural Concept Binder facilitates straightforward concept inspection and direct integration of external knowledge, such as human input or insights from other AI models like GPT-4. Additionally, we demonstrate that incorporating the hard binding mechanism does not compromise performance; instead, it enables seamless integration into both neural and symbolic modules for intricate reasoning tasks, as evidenced by evaluations on our newly introduced CLEVR-Sudoku dataset.
Authors: Xiaowen Sun, Xufeng Zhao, Jae Hee Lee, Wenhao Lu, Matthias Kerzel, Stefan Wermter
Abstract: The state of an object reflects its current status or condition and is important for a robot's task planning and manipulation. However, detecting an object's state and generating a state-sensitive plan for robots is challenging. Recently, pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating plans. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is hardly any investigation on whether LLMs or VLMs can also generate object state-sensitive plans. To study this, we introduce an Object State-Sensitive Agent (OSSA), a task-planning agent empowered by pre-trained neural networks. We propose two methods for OSSA: (i) a modular model consisting of a pre-trained vision processing module (dense captioning model, DCM) and a natural language processing model (LLM), and (ii) a monolithic model consisting only of a VLM. To quantitatively evaluate the performances of the two methods, we use tabletop scenarios where the task is to clear the table. We contribute a multimodal benchmark dataset that takes object states into consideration. Our results show that both methods can be used for object state-sensitive tasks, but the monolithic approach outperforms the modular approach. The code for OSSA is available at \url{https://github.com/Xiao-wen-Sun/OSSA}
Authors: Federico Tavella, Aphrodite Galata, Angelo Cangelosi
Abstract: Artificial agents, particularly humanoid robots, interact with their environment, objects, and people using cameras, actuators, and physical presence. Their communication methods are often pre-programmed, limiting their actions and interactions. Our research explores acquiring non-verbal communication skills through learning from demonstrations, with potential applications in sign language comprehension and expression. In particular, we focus on imitation learning for artificial agents, exemplified by teaching a simulated humanoid American Sign Language. We use computer vision and deep learning to extract information from videos, and reinforcement learning to enable the agent to replicate observed actions. Compared to other methods, our approach eliminates the need for additional hardware to acquire information. We demonstrate how the combination of these different techniques offers a viable way to learn sign language. Our methodology successfully teaches 5 different signs involving the upper body (i.e., arms and hands). This research paves the way for advanced communication skills in artificial agents.
Authors: Paul-Antoine Le Tolguenec, Yann Besse, Florent Teichteil-Konigsbuch, Dennis G. Wilson, Emmanuel Rachelson
Abstract: The ability to perform different skills can encourage agents to explore. In this work, we aim to construct a set of diverse skills which uniformly cover the state space. We propose a formalization of this search for diverse skills, building on a previous definition based on the mutual information between states and skills. We consider the distribution of states reached by a policy conditioned on each skill and leverage the successor state measure to maximize the difference between these skill distributions. We call this approach LEADS: Learning Diverse Skills through Successor States. We demonstrate our approach on a set of maze navigation and robotic control tasks which show that our method is capable of constructing a diverse set of skills which exhaustively cover the state space without relying on reward or exploration bonuses. Our findings demonstrate that this new formalization promotes more robust and efficient exploration by combining mutual information maximization and exploration bonuses.
Authors: N'Dah Jean Kouagou, Arif Yilmaz, Michel Dumontier, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
Abstract: Rule mining on knowledge graphs allows for explainable link prediction. Contrarily, embedding-based methods for link prediction are well known for their generalization capabilities, but their predictions are not interpretable. Several approaches combining the two families have been proposed in recent years. The majority of the resulting hybrid approaches are usually trained within a unified learning framework, which often leads to convergence issues due to the complexity of the learning task. In this work, we propose a new way to combine the two families of approaches. Specifically, we enrich a given knowledge graph by means of its pre-trained entity and relation embeddings before applying rule mining systems on the enriched knowledge graph. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets. An analysis of the results generated by our approach suggests that we discover new valuable rules on the enriched graphs. We provide an open source implementation of our approach as well as pretrained models and datasets at https://github.com/Jean-KOUAGOU/EnhancedRuleLearning
Authors: Carson Denison, Monte MacDiarmid, Fazl Barez, David Duvenaud, Shauna Kravec, Samuel Marks, Nicholas Schiefer, Ryan Soklaski, Alex Tamkin, Jared Kaplan, Buck Shlegeris, Samuel R. Bowman, Ethan Perez, Evan Hubinger
Abstract: In reinforcement learning, specification gaming occurs when AI systems learn undesired behaviors that are highly rewarded due to misspecified training goals. Specification gaming can range from simple behaviors like sycophancy to sophisticated and pernicious behaviors like reward-tampering, where a model directly modifies its own reward mechanism. However, these more pernicious behaviors may be too complex to be discovered via exploration. In this paper, we study whether Large Language Model (LLM) assistants which find easily discovered forms of specification gaming will generalize to perform rarer and more blatant forms, up to and including reward-tampering. We construct a curriculum of increasingly sophisticated gameable environments and find that training on early-curriculum environments leads to more specification gaming on remaining environments. Strikingly, a small but non-negligible proportion of the time, LLM assistants trained on the full curriculum generalize zero-shot to directly rewriting their own reward function. Retraining an LLM not to game early-curriculum environments mitigates, but does not eliminate, reward-tampering in later environments. Moreover, adding harmlessness training to our gameable environments does not prevent reward-tampering. These results demonstrate that LLMs can generalize from common forms of specification gaming to more pernicious reward tampering and that such behavior may be nontrivial to remove.
Authors: Tomas de la Rosa, Sriram Gopalakrishnan, Alberto Pozanco, Zhen Zeng, Daniel Borrajo
Abstract: Travel planning is a complex task that involves generating a sequence of actions related to visiting places subject to constraints and maximizing some user satisfaction criteria. Traditional approaches rely on problem formulation in a given formal language, extracting relevant travel information from web sources, and use an adequate problem solver to generate a valid solution. As an alternative, recent Large Language Model (LLM) based approaches directly output plans from user requests using language. Although LLMs possess extensive travel domain knowledge and provide high-level information like points of interest and potential routes, current state-of-the-art models often generate plans that lack coherence, fail to satisfy constraints fully, and do not guarantee the generation of high-quality solutions. We propose TRIP-PAL, a hybrid method that combines the strengths of LLMs and automated planners, where (i) LLMs get and translate travel information and user information into data structures that can be fed into planners; and (ii) automated planners generate travel plans that guarantee constraint satisfaction and optimize for users' utility. Our experiments across various travel scenarios show that TRIP-PAL outperforms an LLM when generating travel plans.
Authors: Yunwei Mao, Qi He, Ju Li
Abstract: Networked computing power is a critical utility in the era of artificial intelligence. This paper presents a novel Physical Infrastructure Finance (PinFi) protocol designed to facilitate the distribution of computing power within networks in a decentralized manner. Addressing the core challenges of coordination, pricing, and liquidity in decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), the PinFi protocol introduces a distinctive dynamic pricing mechanism. It enables providers to allocate excess computing resources to a "dissipative" PinFi liquidity pool, distinct from traditional DeFi liquidity pools, ensuring seamless access for clients at equitable, market-based prices. This approach significantly reduces the costs of accessing computing power, potentially to as low as 1% compared to existing services, while simultaneously enhancing security and dependability. The PinFi protocol is poised to transform the dynamics of supply and demand in computing power networks, setting a new standard for efficiency and accessibility.
Authors: Yimeng Min
Abstract: We identify two major issues in the SoftDist paper (Xia et al.): (1) the failure to run all steps of different baselines on the same hardware environment, and (2) the use of inconsistent time measurements when comparing to other baselines. These issues lead to flawed conclusions. When all steps are executed in the same hardware environment, the primary claim made in SoftDist is no longer supported.
Authors: Zekai Chen, Arda Pekis, Kevin Brown
Abstract: Multi-modal learning has significantly advanced generative AI, especially in vision-language modeling. Innovations like GPT-4V and open-source projects such as LLaVA have enabled robust conversational agents capable of zero-shot task completions. However, applying these technologies in the biomedical field presents unique challenges. Recent initiatives like LLaVA-Med have started to adapt instruction-tuning for biomedical contexts using large datasets such as PMC-15M. Our research offers three key contributions: (i) we present a new instruct dataset enriched with medical image-text pairs from Claude3-Opus and LLaMA3 70B, (ii) we propose a novel image encoding strategy using hierarchical representations to improve fine-grained biomedical visual comprehension, and (iii) we develop the Llama3-Med model, which achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on biomedical visual question answering benchmarks, with an average performance improvement of over 10% compared to previous methods. These advancements provide more accurate and reliable tools for medical professionals, bridging gaps in current multi-modal conversational assistants and promoting further innovations in medical AI.
Authors: Jiannan Xiang, Guangyi Liu, Yi Gu, Qiyue Gao, Yuting Ning, Yuheng Zha, Zeyu Feng, Tianhua Tao, Shibo Hao, Yemin Shi, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric P. Xing, Zhiting Hu
Abstract: World models simulate future states of the world in response to different actions. They facilitate interactive content creation and provides a foundation for grounded, long-horizon reasoning. Current foundation models do not fully meet the capabilities of general world models: large language models (LLMs) are constrained by their reliance on language modality and their limited understanding of the physical world, while video models lack interactive action control over the world simulations. This paper makes a step towards building a general world model by introducing Pandora, a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion model that simulates world states by generating videos and allows real-time control with free-text actions. Pandora achieves domain generality, video consistency, and controllability through large-scale pretraining and instruction tuning. Crucially, Pandora bypasses the cost of training-from-scratch by integrating a pretrained LLM (7B) and a pretrained video model, requiring only additional lightweight finetuning. We illustrate extensive outputs by Pandora across diverse domains (indoor/outdoor, natural/urban, human/robot, 2D/3D, etc.). The results indicate great potential of building stronger general world models with larger-scale training.
Authors: Amir Zur, Elisa Kreiss, Karel D'Oosterlinck, Christopher Potts, Atticus Geiger
Abstract: Although CLIPScore is a powerful generic metric that captures the similarity between a text and an image, it fails to distinguish between a caption that is meant to complement the information in an image and a description that is meant to replace an image entirely, e.g., for accessibility. We address this shortcoming by updating the CLIP model with the Concadia dataset to assign higher scores to descriptions than captions using parameter efficient fine-tuning and a loss objective derived from work on causal interpretability. This model correlates with the judgements of blind and low-vision people while preserving transfer capabilities and has interpretable structure that sheds light on the caption--description distinction.
Authors: MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, S\'ebastien Lahaie, Keivan Rezaei, Suho Shin
Abstract: In the field of computational advertising, the integration of ads into the outputs of large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to support these services without compromising content integrity. This paper introduces novel auction mechanisms for ad allocation and pricing within the textual outputs of LLMs, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We propose a segment auction where an ad is probabilistically retrieved for each discourse segment (paragraph, section, or entire output) according to its bid and relevance, following the RAG framework, and priced according to competing bids. We show that our auction maximizes logarithmic social welfare, a new notion of welfare that balances allocation efficiency and fairness, and we characterize the associated incentive-compatible pricing rule. These results are extended to multi-ad allocation per segment. An empirical evaluation validates the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach over several ad auction scenarios, and exhibits inherent tradeoffs in metrics as we allow the LLM more flexibility to allocate ads.
Authors: Hector A. Valdez, Kyle Min, Subarna Tripathi
Abstract: Pretraining egocentric vision-language models has become essential to improving downstream egocentric video-text tasks. These egocentric foundation models commonly use the transformer architecture. The memory footprint of these models during pretraining can be substantial. Therefore, we pretrain SViTT-Ego, the first sparse egocentric video-text transformer model integrating edge and node sparsification. We pretrain on the EgoClip dataset and incorporate the egocentric-friendly objective EgoNCE, instead of the frequently used InfoNCE. Most notably, SViTT-Ego obtains a +2.8% gain on EgoMCQ (intra-video) accuracy compared to LAVILA large, with no additional data augmentation techniques other than standard image augmentations, yet pretrainable on memory-limited devices.
Authors: Steven Abreu, Jens E. Pedersen, Kade M. Heckel, Alessandro Pierro
Abstract: In the quest for next-generation sequence modeling architectures, State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as a potent alternative to transformers, particularly for their computational efficiency and suitability for dynamical systems. This paper investigates the effect of quantization on the S5 model to understand its impact on model performance and to facilitate its deployment to edge and resource-constrained platforms. Using quantization-aware training (QAT) and post-training quantization (PTQ), we systematically evaluate the quantization sensitivity of SSMs across different tasks like dynamical systems modeling, Sequential MNIST (sMNIST) and most of the Long Range Arena (LRA). We present fully quantized S5 models whose test accuracy drops less than 1% on sMNIST and most of the LRA. We find that performance on most tasks degrades significantly for recurrent weights below 8-bit precision, but that other components can be compressed further without significant loss of performance. Our results further show that PTQ only performs well on language-based LRA tasks whereas all others require QAT. Our investigation provides necessary insights for the continued development of efficient and hardware-optimized SSMs.
Authors: Carlos Guerrero, Isaac Lera, Carlos Juiz
Abstract: The increasing complexity of fog computing environments calls for efficient resource optimization techniques. In this paper, we propose and evaluate three distributed designs of a genetic algorithm (GA) for resource optimization in fog computing, within an increasing degree of distribution. The designs leverage the execution of the GA in the fog devices themselves by dealing with the specific features of this domain: constrained resources and widely geographical distribution of the devices. For their evaluation, we implemented a benchmark case using the NSGA-II for the specific problem of optimizing the fog service placement, according to the guidelines of our three distributed designs. These three experimental scenarios were compared with a control case, a traditional centralized version of this GA algorithm, considering solution quality and network overhead. The results show that the design with the lowest distribution degree, which keeps centralized storage of the objective space, achieves comparable solution quality to the traditional approach but incurs a higher network load. The second design, which completely distributes the population between the workers, reduces network overhead but exhibits lower solution diversity while keeping enough good results in terms of optimization objective minimization. Finally, the proposal with a distributed population and that only interchanges solution between the workers' neighbors achieves the lowest network load but with compromised solution quality.
Authors: Shenghua Wan, Ziyuan Chen, Le Gan, Shuai Feng, De-Chuan Zhan
Abstract: Model-based offline reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach that leverages existing data effectively in many real-world applications, especially those involving high-dimensional inputs like images and videos. To alleviate the distribution shift issue in offline RL, existing model-based methods heavily rely on the uncertainty of learned dynamics. However, the model uncertainty estimation becomes significantly biased when observations contain complex distractors with non-trivial dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose a new approach - \emph{Separated Model-based Offline Policy Optimization} (SeMOPO) - decomposing latent states into endogenous and exogenous parts via conservative sampling and estimating model uncertainty on the endogenous states only. We provide a theoretical guarantee of model uncertainty and performance bound of SeMOPO. To assess the efficacy, we construct the Low-Quality Vision Deep Data-Driven Datasets for RL (LQV-D4RL), where the data are collected by non-expert policy and the observations include moving distractors. Experimental results show that our method substantially outperforms all baseline methods, and further analytical experiments validate the critical designs in our method. The project website is \href{https://sites.google.com/view/semopo}{https://sites.google.com/view/semopo}.
URLs: https://sites.google.com/view/semopo, https://sites.google.com/view/semopo
Authors: Yujie Lin, Dong Li, Chen Zhao, Minglai Shao
Abstract: The fairness of AI decision-making has garnered increasing attention, leading to the proposal of numerous fairness algorithms. In this paper, we aim not to address this issue by directly introducing fair learning algorithms, but rather by generating entirely new, fair synthetic data from biased datasets for use in any downstream tasks. Additionally, the distribution of test data may differ from that of the training set, potentially impacting the performance of the generated synthetic data in downstream tasks. To address these two challenges, we propose a diffusion model-based framework, FADM: Fairness-Aware Diffusion with Meta-training. FADM introduces two types of gradient induction during the sampling phase of the diffusion model: one to ensure that the generated samples belong to the desired target categories, and another to make the sensitive attributes of the generated samples difficult to classify into any specific sensitive attribute category. To overcome data distribution shifts in the test environment, we train the diffusion model and the two classifiers used for induction within a meta-learning framework. Compared to other baselines, FADM allows for flexible control over the categories of the generated samples and exhibits superior generalization capability. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate that FADM achieves better accuracy and optimal fairness in downstream tasks.
Authors: Jabez Magomere, Shu Ishida, Tejumade Afonja, Aya Salama, Daniel Kochin, Foutse Yuehgoh, Imane Hamzaoui, Raesetje Sefala, Aisha Alaagib, Elizaveta Semenova, Lauren Crais, Siobhan Mackenzie Hall
Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives, used in everyday tasks such as text-image searches, interactions with chatbots, and content generation. As use increases, so does concern over the disparities in performance and fairness of these models for different people in different parts of the world. To assess these growing regional disparities, we present World Wide Dishes, a mixed text and image dataset consisting of 765 dishes, with dish names collected in 131 local languages. World Wide Dishes has been collected purely through human contribution and decentralised means, by creating a website widely distributed through social networks. Using the dataset, we demonstrate a novel means of operationalising capability and representational biases in foundation models such as language models and text-to-image generative models. We enrich these studies with a pilot community review to understand, from a first-person perspective, how these models generate images for people in five African countries and the United States. We find that these models generally do not produce quality text and image outputs of dishes specific to different regions. This is true even for the US, which is typically considered to be more well-resourced in training data - though the generation of US dishes does outperform that of the investigated African countries. The models demonstrate a propensity to produce outputs that are inaccurate as well as culturally misrepresentative, flattening, and insensitive. These failures in capability and representational bias have the potential to further reinforce stereotypes and disproportionately contribute to erasure based on region. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/oxai/world-wide-dishes/.
Authors: Jack Merullo, Carsten Eickhoff, Ellie Pavlick
Abstract: Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. By analyzing particular mechanism LMs use to accomplish this, we find that it is also used to recall items from a list, and show that this mechanism can explain an otherwise arbitrary-seeming sensitivity of the model to the order of items in the prompt. Specifically, we find that models write into low-rank subspaces of the residual stream to represent features which are then read out by specific later layers, forming low-rank communication channels between layers. By decomposing attention head weight matrices with the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), we find that previously described interactions between heads separated by one or more layers can be predicted via analysis of their weight matrices. We show that it is possible to manipulate the internal model representations as well as edit model weights based on the mechanism we discover in order to significantly improve performance on our synthetic Laundry List task, which requires recall from a list, often improving task accuracy by over 20%. Our analysis reveals a surprisingly intricate interpretable structure learned from language model pretraining, and helps us understand why sophisticated LMs sometimes fail in simple domains, facilitating future analysis of more complex behaviors.
Authors: Bayode Ogunleye, Kudirat Ibilola Zakariyyah, Oluwaseun Ajao, Olakunle Olayinka, Hemlata Sharma
Abstract: The use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in academia is a subjective and hotly debated topic. Currently, there are no agreed guidelines towards the usage of GenAI systems in higher education (HE) and, thus, it is still unclear how to make effective use of the technology for teaching and learning practice. This paper provides an overview of the current state of research on GenAI for teaching and learning in HE. To this end, this study conducted a systematic review of relevant studies indexed by Scopus, using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The search criteria revealed a total of 625 research papers, of which 355 met the final inclusion criteria. The findings from the review showed the current state and the future trends in documents, citations, document sources/authors, keywords, and co-authorship. The research gaps identified suggest that while some authors have looked at understanding the detection of AI-generated text, it may be beneficial to understand how GenAI can be incorporated into supporting the educational curriculum for assessments, teaching, and learning delivery. Furthermore, there is a need for additional interdisciplinary, multidimensional studies in HE through collaboration. This will strengthen the awareness and understanding of students, tutors, and other stakeholders, which will be instrumental in formulating guidelines, frameworks, and policies for GenAI usage.
Authors: A. Feder Cooper
Abstract: To develop rigorous knowledge about ML models -- and the systems in which they are embedded -- we need reliable measurements. But reliable measurement is fundamentally challenging, and touches on issues of reproducibility, scalability, uncertainty quantification, epistemology, and more. This dissertation addresses criteria needed to take reliability seriously: both criteria for designing meaningful metrics, and for methodologies that ensure that we can dependably and efficiently measure these metrics at scale and in practice. In doing so, this dissertation articulates a research vision for a new field of scholarship at the intersection of machine learning, law, and policy. Within this frame, we cover topics that fit under three different themes: (1) quantifying and mitigating sources of arbitrariness in ML, (2) taming randomness in uncertainty estimation and optimization algorithms, in order to achieve scalability without sacrificing reliability, and (3) providing methods for evaluating generative-AI systems, with specific focuses on quantifying memorization in language models and training latent diffusion models on open-licensed data. By making contributions in these three themes, this dissertation serves as an empirical proof by example that research on reliable measurement for machine learning is intimately and inescapably bound up with research in law and policy. These different disciplines pose similar research questions about reliable measurement in machine learning. They are, in fact, two complementary sides of the same research vision, which, broadly construed, aims to construct machine-learning systems that cohere with broader societal values.
Authors: Umur Aybars Ciftci, Ali Kemal Tanriverdi, Ilke Demir
Abstract: In an era of increasing privacy concerns for our online presence, we propose that the decision to appear in a piece of content should only belong to the owner of the body. Although some automatic approaches for full-body anonymization have been proposed, human-guided anonymization can adapt to various contexts, such as cultural norms, personal relations, esthetic concerns, and security issues. ''My Body My Choice'' (MBMC) enables physical and adversarial anonymization by removal and swapping approaches aimed for four tasks, designed by single or multi, ControlNet or GAN modules, combining several diffusion models. We evaluate anonymization on seven datasets; compare with SOTA inpainting and anonymization methods; evaluate by image, adversarial, and generative metrics; and conduct reidentification experiments.
Authors: Sankalp KJ, Vinija Jain, Sreyoshi Bhaduri, Tamoghna Roy, Aman Chadha
Abstract: This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of large language model (LLM) research directions within Indic languages. Indic languages are those spoken in the Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan, among others. These languages have a rich cultural and linguistic heritage and are spoken by over 1.5 billion people worldwide. With the tremendous market potential and growing demand for natural language processing (NLP) based applications in diverse languages, generative applications for Indic languages pose unique challenges and opportunities for research. Our paper deep dives into the recent advancements in Indic generative modeling, contributing with a taxonomy of research directions, tabulating 84 recent publications. Research directions surveyed in this paper include LLM development, fine-tuning existing LLMs, development of corpora, benchmarking and evaluation, as well as publications around specific techniques, tools, and applications. We found that researchers across the publications emphasize the challenges associated with limited data availability, lack of standardization, and the peculiar linguistic complexities of Indic languages. This work aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in the field of NLP, particularly those focused on Indic languages, and contributes to the development of more accurate and efficient LLM applications for these languages.
Authors: Nathan Stromberg, Rohan Ayyagari, Sanmi Koyejo, Richard Nock, Lalitha Sankar
Abstract: Last-layer retraining methods have emerged as an efficient framework for correcting existing base models. Within this framework, several methods have been proposed to deal with correcting models for subgroup fairness with and without group membership information. Importantly, prior work has demonstrated that many methods are susceptible to noisy labels. To this end, we propose a drop-in correction for label noise in last-layer retraining, and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art worst-group accuracy for a broad range of symmetric label noise and across a wide variety of datasets exhibiting spurious correlations. Our proposed approach uses label spreading on a latent nearest neighbors graph and has minimal computational overhead compared to existing methods.
Authors: Ziyan Wang, Hao Wang
Abstract: Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from mice (as a source domain) and humans (as a target domain). Unfortunately, adapting a contextual bandit algorithm from a source domain to a target domain with distribution shift still remains a major challenge and largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce the first general domain adaptation method for contextual bandits. Our approach learns a bandit model for the target domain by collecting feedback from the source domain. Our theoretical analysis shows that our algorithm maintains a sub-linear regret bound even adapting across domains. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art contextual bandit algorithms on real-world datasets.
Authors: Frank Seide, Morrie Doulaty, Yangyang Shi, Yashesh Gaur, Junteng Jia, Chunyang Wu
Abstract: We introduce Speech ReaLLM, a new ASR architecture that marries "decoder-only" ASR with the RNN-T to make multimodal LLM architectures capable of real-time streaming. This is the first "decoder-only" ASR architecture designed to handle continuous audio without explicit end-pointing. Speech ReaLLM is a special case of the more general ReaLLM ("real-time LLM") approach, also introduced here for the first time. The idea is inspired by RNN-T: Instead of generating a response only at the end of a user prompt, generate after every input token received in real time (it is often empty). On Librispeech "test", an 80M Speech ReaLLM achieves WERs of 3.0% and 7.4% in real time (without an external LM or auxiliary loss). This is only slightly above a 3x larger Attention-Encoder-Decoder baseline. We also show that this way, an LLM architecture can learn to represent and reproduce the flow of time; and that a pre-trained 7B LLM can be fine-tuned to do reasonably well on this task.
Authors: Thibaut Issenhuth, Ludovic Dos Santos, Jean-Yves Franceschi, Alain Rakotomamonjy
Abstract: Consistency models are promising generative models as they distill the multi-step sampling of score-based diffusion in a single forward pass of a neural network. Without access to sampling trajectories of a pre-trained diffusion model, consistency training relies on proxy trajectories built on an independent coupling between the noise and data distributions. Refining this coupling is a key area of improvement to make it more adapted to the task and reduce the resulting randomness in the training process. In this work, we introduce a novel coupling associating the input noisy data with their generated output from the consistency model itself, as a proxy to the inaccessible diffusion flow output. Our affordable approach exploits the inherent capacity of consistency models to compute the transport map in a single step. We provide intuition and empirical evidence of the relevance of our generator-induced coupling (GC), which brings consistency training closer to score distillation. Consequently, our method not only accelerates consistency training convergence by significant amounts but also enhances the resulting performance. The code is available at: https://github.com/thibautissenhuth/consistency_GC.
Authors: Saba Yousefian Jazi, Amir Mirzaeinia, Sina Yousefian Jazi
Abstract: In this effort we fine tuned different models based on BERT to detect the gender polarity of twitter accounts. We specially focused on analyzing the effect of using emojis and emoticons in performance of our model in classifying task. We were able to demonstrate that the use of these none word inputs alongside the mention of other accounts in a short text format like tweet has an impact in detecting the account holder's gender.
Authors: Zongyue Qin, Yunsheng Bai, Atefeh Sograbizadeh, Zijian Ding, Ziniu Hu, Yizhou Sun, Jason Cong
Abstract: In recent years, domain-specific accelerators (DSAs) have gained popularity for applications such as deep learning and autonomous driving. To facilitate DSA designs, programmers use high-level synthesis (HLS) to compile a high-level description written in C/C++ into a design with low-level hardware description languages that eventually synthesize DSAs on circuits. However, creating a high-quality HLS design still demands significant domain knowledge, particularly in microarchitecture decisions expressed as \textit{pragmas}. Thus, it is desirable to automate such decisions with the help of machine learning for predicting the quality of HLS designs, requiring a deeper understanding of the program that consists of original code and pragmas. Naturally, these programs can be considered as sequence data. In addition, these programs can be compiled and converted into a control data flow graph (CDFG). But existing works either fail to leverage both modalities or combine the two in shallow or coarse ways. We propose ProgSG, a model that allows interaction between the source code sequence modality and the graph modality in a deep and fine-grained way. To alleviate the scarcity of labeled designs, a pre-training method is proposed based on a suite of compiler's data flow analysis tasks. Experimental results show that ProgSG reduces the RMSE of design performance predictions by up to $22\%$, and identifies designs with an average of $1.10\times$ and $1.26\times$ (up to $8.17\times$ and $13.31\times$) performance improvement in design space exploration (DSE) task compared to HARP and AutoDSE, respectively.
Authors: Jari Kolehmainen, Aditya Gourav, Prashanth Gurunath Shivakumar, Yile Gu, Ankur Gandhe, Ariya Rastrow, Grant Strimel, Ivan Bulyko
Abstract: Retrieval is a widely adopted approach for improving language models leveraging external information. As the field moves towards multi-modal large language models, it is important to extend the pure text based methods to incorporate other modalities in retrieval as well for applications across the wide spectrum of machine learning tasks and data types. In this work, we propose multi-modal retrieval with two approaches: kNN-LM and cross-attention techniques. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our retrieval approaches empirically by applying them to automatic speech recognition tasks with access to external information. Under this setting, we show that speech-based multi-modal retrieval outperforms text based retrieval, and yields up to 50 % improvement in word error rate over the multi-modal language model baseline. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art recognition results on the Spoken-Squad question answering dataset.
Authors: Wei-Ting Chen, Gurunandan Krishnan, Qiang Gao, Sy-Yen Kuo, Sizhuo Ma, Jian Wang
Abstract: Generic Face Image Quality Assessment (GFIQA) evaluates the perceptual quality of facial images, which is crucial in improving image restoration algorithms and selecting high-quality face images for downstream tasks. We present a novel transformer-based method for GFIQA, which is aided by two unique mechanisms. First, a Dual-Set Degradation Representation Learning (DSL) mechanism uses facial images with both synthetic and real degradations to decouple degradation from content, ensuring generalizability to real-world scenarios. This self-supervised method learns degradation features on a global scale, providing a robust alternative to conventional methods that use local patch information in degradation learning. Second, our transformer leverages facial landmarks to emphasize visually salient parts of a face image in evaluating its perceptual quality. We also introduce a balanced and diverse Comprehensive Generic Face IQA (CGFIQA-40k) dataset of 40K images carefully designed to overcome the biases, in particular the imbalances in skin tone and gender representation, in existing datasets. Extensive analysis and evaluation demonstrate the robustness of our method, marking a significant improvement over prior methods.
Authors: Mohamed Elrefaie, Florin Morar, Angela Dai, Faez Ahmed
Abstract: We present DrivAerNet++, the largest and most comprehensive multimodal dataset for aerodynamic car design. DrivAerNet++ comprises 8,000 diverse car designs modeled with high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The dataset includes diverse car configurations such as fastback, notchback, and estateback, with different underbody and wheel designs to represent both internal combustion engines and electric vehicles. Each entry in the dataset features detailed 3D meshes, parametric models, aerodynamic coefficients, and extensive flow and surface field data, along with segmented parts for car classification and point cloud data. This dataset supports a wide array of machine learning applications including data-driven design optimization, generative modeling, surrogate model training, CFD simulation acceleration, and geometric classification. With more than 39 TB of publicly available engineering data, DrivAerNet++ fills a significant gap in available resources, providing high-quality, diverse data to enhance model training, promote generalization, and accelerate automotive design processes. Along with rigorous dataset validation, we also provide ML benchmarking results on the task of aerodynamic drag prediction, showcasing the breadth of applications supported by our dataset. This dataset is set to significantly impact automotive design and broader engineering disciplines by fostering innovation and improving the fidelity of aerodynamic evaluations.
Authors: Wei-Ting Chen, Yu-Jiet Vong, Sy-Yen Kuo, Sizhuo Ma, Jian Wang
Abstract: Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a transformative approach in image segmentation, acclaimed for its robust zero-shot segmentation capabilities and flexible prompting system. Nonetheless, its performance is challenged by images with degraded quality. Addressing this limitation, we propose the Robust Segment Anything Model (RobustSAM), which enhances SAM's performance on low-quality images while preserving its promptability and zero-shot generalization. Our method leverages the pre-trained SAM model with only marginal parameter increments and computational requirements. The additional parameters of RobustSAM can be optimized within 30 hours on eight GPUs, demonstrating its feasibility and practicality for typical research laboratories. We also introduce the Robust-Seg dataset, a collection of 688K image-mask pairs with different degradations designed to train and evaluate our model optimally. Extensive experiments across various segmentation tasks and datasets confirm RobustSAM's superior performance, especially under zero-shot conditions, underscoring its potential for extensive real-world application. Additionally, our method has been shown to effectively improve the performance of SAM-based downstream tasks such as single image dehazing and deblurring.
Authors: Kate Sanders, Benjamin Van Durme
Abstract: While existing video benchmarks largely consider specialized downstream tasks like retrieval or question-answering (QA), contemporary multimodal AI systems must be capable of well-rounded common-sense reasoning akin to human visual understanding. A critical component of human temporal-visual perception is our ability to identify and cognitively model "things happening", or events. Historically, video benchmark tasks have implicitly tested for this ability (e.g., video captioning, in which models describe visual events with natural language), but they do not consider video event understanding as a task in itself. Recent work has begun to explore video analogues to textual event extraction but consists of competing task definitions and datasets limited to highly specific event types. Therefore, while there is a rich domain of event-centric video research spanning the past 10+ years, it is unclear how video event understanding should be framed and what resources we have to study it. In this paper, we survey 105 video datasets that require event understanding capability, consider how they contribute to the study of robust event understanding in video, and assess proposed video event extraction tasks in the context of this body of research. We propose suggestions informed by this survey for dataset curation and task framing, with an emphasis on the uniquely temporal nature of video events and ambiguity in visual content.
Authors: Jingcheng Li, Ye Qiao, Haocheng Xu, Sitao Huang
Abstract: Images captured under low-light scenarios often suffer from low quality. Previous CNN-based deep learning methods often involve using Retinex theory. Nevertheless, most of them cannot perform well in more complicated datasets like LOL-v2 while consuming too much computational resources. Besides, some of these methods require sophisticated training at different stages, making the procedure even more time-consuming and tedious. In this paper, we propose a more accurate, concise, and one-stage Retinex theory based framework, RSEND. RSEND first divides the low-light image into the illumination map and reflectance map, then captures the important details in the illumination map and performs light enhancement. After this step, it refines the enhanced gray-scale image and does element-wise matrix multiplication with the reflectance map. By denoising the output it has from the previous step, it obtains the final result. In all the steps, RSEND utilizes Squeeze and Excitation network to better capture the details. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our Efficient Retinex model significantly outperforms other CNN-based models, achieving a PSNR improvement ranging from 0.44 dB to 4.2 dB in different datasets and even outperforms transformer-based models in the LOL-v2-real dataset.
Authors: Miquel Ramirez, Anubhav Singh, Peter Stuckey, Chris Manzie
Abstract: Many automated planning methods and formulations rely on suitably designed abstractions or simplifications of the constrained dynamics associated with agents to attain computational scalability. We consider formulations of temporal planning where intervals are associated with both action and fluent atoms, and relations between these are given as sentences in Allen's Interval Logic. We propose a notion of planning graphs that can account for complex concurrency relations between actions and fluents as a Constraint Programming (CP) model. We test an implementation of our algorithm on a state-of-the-art framework for CP and compare it with PDDL 2.1 planners that capture plans requiring complex concurrent interactions between agents. We demonstrate our algorithm outperforms existing PDDL 2.1 planners in the case studies. Still, scalability remains challenging when plans must comply with intricate concurrent interactions and the sequencing of actions.
Authors: Freda Shi
Abstract: Language is highly structured, with syntactic and semantic structures, to some extent, agreed upon by speakers of the same language. With implicit or explicit awareness of such structures, humans can learn and use language efficiently and generalize to sentences that contain unseen words. Motivated by human language learning, in this dissertation, we consider a family of machine learning tasks that aim to learn language structures through grounding. We seek distant supervision from other data sources (i.e., grounds), including but not limited to other modalities (e.g., vision), execution results of programs, and other languages. We demonstrate the potential of this task formulation and advocate for its adoption through three schemes. In Part I, we consider learning syntactic parses through visual grounding. We propose the task of visually grounded grammar induction, present the first models to induce syntactic structures from visually grounded text and speech, and find that the visual grounding signals can help improve the parsing quality over language-only models. As a side contribution, we propose a novel evaluation metric that enables the evaluation of speech parsing without text or automatic speech recognition systems involved. In Part II, we propose two execution-aware methods to map sentences into corresponding semantic structures (i.e., programs), significantly improving compositional generalization and few-shot program synthesis. In Part III, we propose methods that learn language structures from annotations in other languages. Specifically, we propose a method that sets a new state of the art on cross-lingual word alignment. We then leverage the learned word alignments to improve the performance of zero-shot cross-lingual dependency parsing, by proposing a novel substructure-based projection method that preserves structural knowledge learned from the source language.
Authors: Ningyi Liao, Haoyu Liu, Zulun Zhu, Siqiang Luo, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
Abstract: With the recent advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs), spectral GNNs have received increasing popularity by virtue of their specialty in capturing graph signals in the frequency domain, demonstrating promising capability in specific tasks. However, few systematic studies have been conducted on assessing their spectral characteristics. This emerging family of models also varies in terms of designs and settings, leading to difficulties in comparing their performance and deciding on the suitable model for specific scenarios, especially for large-scale tasks. In this work, we extensively benchmark spectral GNNs with a focus on the frequency perspective. We analyze and categorize over 30 GNNs with 27 corresponding filters. Then, we implement these spectral models under a unified framework with dedicated graph computations and efficient training schemes. Thorough experiments are conducted on the spectral models with inclusive metrics on effectiveness and efficiency, offering practical guidelines on evaluating and selecting spectral GNNs with desirable performance. Our implementation enables application on larger graphs with comparable performance and less overhead, which is available at: https://github.com/gdmnl/Spectral-GNN-Benchmark.
Authors: Pap M. Corea, Yongxin Liu, Jian Wang, Shuteng Niu, Houbing Song
Abstract: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become a widely discussed topic, the related technologies facilitate better understanding of conventional black-box models like Random Forest, Neural Networks and etc. However, domain-specific applications of XAI are still insufficient. To fill this gap, this research analyzes various machine learning models to the tasks of binary and multi-class classification for intrusion detection from network traffic on the same dataset using occlusion sensitivity. The models evaluated include Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest, Decision Trees, and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP). We trained all models to the accuracy of 90\% on the UNSW-NB15 Dataset. We found that most classifiers leverage only less than three critical features to achieve such accuracies, indicating that effective feature engineering could actually be far more important for intrusion detection than applying complicated models. We also discover that Random Forest provides the best performance in terms of accuracy, time efficiency and robustness. Data and code available at https://github.com/pcwhy/XML-IntrusionDetection.git
Authors: Shilu Yuan, Dongfeng Li, Wei Liu, Xinxin Zhang, Meng Chen, Junjie Zhang, Yongshun Gong
Abstract: Fine-grained urban flow inference (FUFI) is a crucial transportation service aimed at improving traffic efficiency and safety. FUFI can infer fine-grained urban traffic flows based solely on observed coarse-grained data. However, most of existing methods focus on the influence of single-scale static geographic information on FUFI, neglecting the interactions and dynamic information between different-scale regions within the city. Different-scale geographical features can capture redundant information from the same spatial areas. In order to effectively learn multi-scale information across time and space, we propose an effective fine-grained urban flow inference model called UrbanMSR, which uses self-supervised contrastive learning to obtain dynamic multi-scale representations of neighborhood-level and city-level geographic information, and fuses multi-scale representations to improve fine-grained accuracy. The fusion of multi-scale representations enhances fine-grained. We validate the performance through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The resutls compared with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model.
Authors: Christian Raymond
Abstract: Humans can often quickly and efficiently solve complex new learning tasks given only a small set of examples. In contrast, modern artificially intelligent systems often require thousands or millions of observations in order to solve even the most basic tasks. Meta-learning aims to resolve this issue by leveraging past experiences from similar learning tasks to embed the appropriate inductive biases into the learning system. Historically methods for meta-learning components such as optimizers, parameter initializations, and more have led to significant performance increases. This thesis aims to explore the concept of meta-learning to improve performance, through the often-overlooked component of the loss function. The loss function is a vital component of a learning system, as it represents the primary learning objective, where success is determined and quantified by the system's ability to optimize for that objective successfully.
Authors: Joon Soo Yoo, Baek Kyung Song, Tae Min Ahn, Ji Won Heo, Ji Won Yoon
Abstract: Homomorphic encryption (HE) is pivotal for secure computation on encrypted data, crucial in privacy-preserving data analysis. However, efficiently processing high-dimensional data in HE, especially for machine learning and statistical (ML/STAT) algorithms, poses a challenge. In this paper, we present an effective acceleration method using the kernel method for HE schemes, enhancing time performance in ML/STAT algorithms within encrypted domains. This technique, independent of underlying HE mechanisms and complementing existing optimizations, notably reduces costly HE multiplications, offering near constant time complexity relative to data dimension. Aimed at accessibility, this method is tailored for data scientists and developers with limited cryptography background, facilitating advanced data analysis in secure environments.
Authors: Hancheol Park, Soyeong Jeong, Sukmin Cho, Jong C. Park
Abstract: Recent language models have shown remarkable performance on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. However, they are often sub-optimal when faced with ambiguous samples that can be interpreted in multiple ways, over-confidently predicting a single label without consideration for its correctness. To address this issue, we propose a novel self-knowledge distillation method that enables models to learn label distributions more accurately by leveraging knowledge distilled from their lower layers. This approach also includes a learning phase that re-calibrates the unnecessarily strengthened confidence for training samples judged as extremely ambiguous based on the distilled distribution knowledge. We validate our method on diverse NLU benchmark datasets and the experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in producing better label distributions. Particularly, through the process of re-calibrating the confidence for highly ambiguous samples, the issue of over-confidence when predictions for unseen samples do not match with their ground-truth labels has been significantly alleviated. This has been shown to contribute to generating better distributions than the existing state-of-the-art method. Moreover, our method is more efficient in training the models compared to the existing method, as it does not involve additional training processes to refine label distributions.
Authors: Yang Zhao, Hao Zhang, Xiuyuan Hu
Abstract: Gradient regularization (GR), which aims to penalize the gradient norm atop the loss function, has shown promising results in training modern over-parameterized deep neural networks. However, can we trust this powerful technique? This paper reveals that GR can cause performance degeneration in adaptive optimization scenarios, particularly with learning rate warmup. Our empirical and theoretical analyses suggest this is due to GR inducing instability and divergence in gradient statistics of adaptive optimizers at the initial training stage. Inspired by the warmup heuristic, we propose three GR warmup strategies, each relaxing the regularization effect to a certain extent during the warmup course to ensure the accurate and stable accumulation of gradients. With experiments on Vision Transformer family, we confirm the three GR warmup strategies can effectively circumvent these issues, thereby largely improving the model performance. Meanwhile, we note that scalable models tend to rely more on the GR warmup, where the performance can be improved by up to 3\% on Cifar10 compared to baseline GR. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}.
URLs: https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp, https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp
Authors: Xiang Li, Kai Qiu, Hao Chen, Jason Kuen, Zhe Lin, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
Abstract: Conditional visual generation has witnessed remarkable progress with the advent of diffusion models (DMs), especially in tasks like control-to-image generation. However, challenges such as expensive computational cost, high inference latency, and difficulties of integration with large language models (LLMs) have necessitated exploring alternatives to DMs. This paper introduces ControlVAR, a novel framework that explores pixel-level controls in visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling for flexible and efficient conditional generation. In contrast to traditional conditional models that learn the conditional distribution, ControlVAR jointly models the distribution of image and pixel-level conditions during training and imposes conditional controls during testing. To enhance the joint modeling, we adopt the next-scale AR prediction paradigm and unify control and image representations. A teacher-forcing guidance strategy is proposed to further facilitate controllable generation with joint modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior efficacy and flexibility of ControlVAR across various conditional generation tasks against popular conditional DMs, \eg, ControlNet and T2I-Adaptor.
Authors: Alper G\"ung\"or, Bahri Batuhan Bilecen, Tolga \c{C}ukur
Abstract: Diffusion models have recently been shown to excel in many image reconstruction tasks that involve inverse problems based on a forward measurement operator. A common framework uses task-agnostic unconditional models that are later post-conditioned for reconstruction, an approach that typically suffers from suboptimal task performance. While task-specific conditional models have also been proposed, current methods heuristically inject measured data as a naive input channel that elicits sampling inaccuracies. Here, we address the optimal conditioning of diffusion models for solving challenging inverse problems that arise during image reconstruction. Specifically, we propose a novel Bayesian conditioning technique for diffusion models, BCDM, based on score-functions associated with the conditional distribution of desired images given measured data. We rigorously derive the theory to express and train the conditional score-function. Finally, we show state-of-the-art performance in image dealiasing, deblurring, super-resolution, and inpainting with the proposed technique.
Authors: Anke Tang, Li Shen, Yong Luo, Shiwei Liu, Han Hu, Bo Du
Abstract: Solving multi-objective optimization problems for large deep neural networks is a challenging task due to the complexity of the loss landscape and the expensive computational cost of training and evaluating models. Efficient Pareto front approximation of large models enables multi-objective optimization for various tasks such as multi-task learning and trade-off analysis. Existing algorithms for learning Pareto set, including (1) evolutionary, hypernetworks, and hypervolume-maximization methods, are computationally expensive and have restricted scalability to large models; (2) Scalarization algorithms, where a separate model is trained for each objective ray, which is inefficient for learning the entire Pareto set and fails to capture the objective trade-offs effectively. Inspired by the recent success of model merging, we propose a practical and scalable approach to Pareto set learning problem via mixture of experts (MoE) based model fusion. By ensembling the weights of specialized single-task models, the MoE module can effectively capture the trade-offs between multiple objectives and closely approximate the entire Pareto set of large neural networks. Once the routers are learned and a preference vector is set, the MoE module can be unloaded, thus no additional computational cost is introduced during inference. We conduct extensive experiments on vision and language tasks using large-scale models such as CLIP-ViT and GPT-2. The experimental results demonstrate that our method efficiently approximates the entire Pareto front of large models. Using only hundreds of trainable parameters of the MoE routers, our method even has lower memory usage compared to linear scalarization and algorithms that learn a single Pareto optimal solution, and are scalable to both the number of objectives and the size of the model.
Authors: Haowei Yang, Liyang Wang, Jingyu Zhang, Yu Cheng, Ao Xiang
Abstract: With the widespread application of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology in fields such as autonomous driving, robot navigation, and terrain mapping, the importance of edge detection in LiDAR images has become increasingly prominent. Traditional edge detection methods often face challenges in accuracy and computational complexity when processing LiDAR images. To address these issues, this study proposes an edge detection method for LiDAR images based on artificial intelligence technology. This paper first reviews the current state of research on LiDAR technology and image edge detection, introducing common edge detection algorithms and their applications in LiDAR image processing. Subsequently, a deep learning-based edge detection model is designed and implemented, optimizing the model training process through preprocessing and enhancement of the LiDAR image dataset. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms traditional methods in terms of detection accuracy and computational efficiency, showing significant practical application value. Finally, improvement strategies are proposed for the current method's shortcomings, and the improvements are validated through experiments.
Authors: Erwan Plantec, Joachin W. Pedersen, Milton L. Montero, Eleni Nisioti, Sebastian Risi
Abstract: Biological neural networks are characterized by their high degree of plasticity, a core property that enables the remarkable adaptability of natural organisms. Importantly, this ability affects both the synaptic strength and the topology of the nervous systems. Artificial neural networks, on the other hand, have been mainly designed as static, fully connected structures that can be notoriously brittle in the face of changing environments and novel inputs. Building on previous works on Neural Developmental Programs (NDPs), we propose a class of self-organizing neural networks capable of synaptic and structural plasticity in an activity and reward-dependent manner which we call Lifelong Neural Developmental Program (LNDP). We present an instance of such a network built on the graph transformer architecture and propose a mechanism for pre-experience plasticity based on the spontaneous activity of sensory neurons. Our results demonstrate the ability of the model to learn from experiences in different control tasks starting from randomly connected or empty networks. We further show that structural plasticity is advantageous in environments necessitating fast adaptation or with non-stationary rewards.
Authors: Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Lanyu Shang, Yifan Liu, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
Abstract: The rapid propagation of misinformation poses substantial risks to public interest. To combat misinformation, large language models (LLMs) are adapted to automatically verify claim credibility. Nevertheless, existing methods heavily rely on the embedded knowledge within LLMs and / or black-box APIs for evidence collection, leading to subpar performance with smaller LLMs or upon unreliable context. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented fact verification through the synthesis of contrasting arguments (RAFTS). Upon input claims, RAFTS starts with evidence retrieval, where we design a retrieval pipeline to collect and re-rank relevant documents from verifiable sources. Then, RAFTS forms contrastive arguments (i.e., supporting or refuting) conditioned on the retrieved evidence. In addition, RAFTS leverages an embedding model to identify informative demonstrations, followed by in-context prompting to generate the prediction and explanation. Our method effectively retrieves relevant documents as evidence and evaluates arguments from varying perspectives, incorporating nuanced information for fine-grained decision-making. Combined with informative in-context examples as prior, RAFTS achieves significant improvements to supervised and LLM baselines without complex prompts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments, where RAFTS can outperform GPT-based methods with a significantly smaller 7B LLM.
Authors: Ferdinand Rewicki, Jakob Gawlikowski, Julia Niebling, Joachim Denzler
Abstract: The detection of abnormal or critical system states is essential in condition monitoring. While much attention is given to promptly identifying anomalies, a retrospective analysis of these anomalies can significantly enhance our comprehension of the underlying causes of observed undesired behavior. This aspect becomes particularly critical when the monitored system is deployed in a vital environment. In this study, we delve into anomalies within the domain of Bio-Regenerative Life Support Systems (BLSS) for space exploration and analyze anomalies found in telemetry data stemming from the EDEN ISS space greenhouse in Antarctica. We employ time series clustering on anomaly detection results to categorize various types of anomalies in both uni- and multivariate settings. We then assess the effectiveness of these methods in identifying systematic anomalous behavior. Additionally, we illustrate that the anomaly detection methods MDI and DAMP produce complementary results, as previously indicated by research.
Authors: Youyang Qu
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) offers a compelling framework for training large language models (LLMs) while addressing data privacy and decentralization challenges. This paper surveys recent advancements in the federated learning of large language models, with a particular focus on machine unlearning, a crucial aspect for complying with privacy regulations like the Right to be Forgotten. Machine unlearning in the context of federated LLMs involves systematically and securely removing individual data contributions from the learned model without retraining from scratch. We explore various strategies that enable effective unlearning, such as perturbation techniques, model decomposition, and incremental learning, highlighting their implications for maintaining model performance and data privacy. Furthermore, we examine case studies and experimental results from recent literature to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these approaches in real-world scenarios. Our survey reveals a growing interest in developing more robust and scalable federated unlearning methods, suggesting a vital area for future research in the intersection of AI ethics and distributed machine learning technologies.
Authors: Jian Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Dading Chong, Meng Cao, Yaowei Li, Zixuan Yuan, Bing Zhu, Junwei Liang
Abstract: Real-time detection and prediction of extreme weather protect human lives and infrastructure. Traditional methods rely on numerical threshold setting and manual interpretation of weather heatmaps with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which can be slow and error-prone. Our research redefines Extreme Weather Events Detection (EWED) by framing it as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem, thereby introducing a more precise and automated solution. Leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLM) to simultaneously process visual and textual data, we offer an effective aid to enhance the analysis process of weather heatmaps. Our initial assessment of general-purpose VLMs (e.g., GPT-4-Vision) on EWED revealed poor performance, characterized by low accuracy and frequent hallucinations due to inadequate color differentiation and insufficient meteorological knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce ClimateIQA, the first meteorological VQA dataset, which includes 8,760 wind gust heatmaps and 254,040 question-answer pairs covering four question types, both generated from the latest climate reanalysis data. We also propose Sparse Position and Outline Tracking (SPOT), an innovative technique that leverages OpenCV and K-Means clustering to capture and depict color contours in heatmaps, providing ClimateIQA with more accurate color spatial location information. Finally, we present Climate-Zoo, the first meteorological VLM collection, which adapts VLMs to meteorological applications using the ClimateIQA dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that models from Climate-Zoo substantially outperform state-of-the-art general VLMs, achieving an accuracy increase from 0% to over 90% in EWED verification. The datasets and models in this study are publicly available for future climate science research: https://github.com/AlexJJJChen/Climate-Zoo.
Authors: Wei Wei, Tom De Schepper, Kevin Mets
Abstract: Dataset condensation (DC) methods aim to learn a smaller synthesized dataset with informative data records to accelerate the training of machine learning models. Current distribution matching (DM) based DC methods learn a synthesized dataset by matching the mean of the latent embeddings between the synthetic and the real dataset. However two distributions with the same mean can still be vastly different. In this work we demonstrate the shortcomings of using Maximum Mean Discrepancy to match latent distributions i.e. the weak matching power and lack of outlier regularization. To alleviate these shortcomings we propose our new method: Latent Quantile Matching (LQM) which matches the quantiles of the latent embeddings to minimize the goodness of fit test statistic between two distributions. Empirical experiments on both image and graph-structured datasets show that LQM matches or outperforms previous state of the art in distribution matching based DC. Moreover we show that LQM improves the performance in continual graph learning (CGL) setting where memory efficiency and privacy can be important. Our work sheds light on the application of DM based DC for CGL.
Authors: Grigor Bezirganyan, Sana Sellami, Laure Berti-\'Equille, S\'ebastien Fournier
Abstract: Multimodal Deep Learning enhances decision-making by integrating diverse information sources, such as texts, images, audio, and videos. To develop trustworthy multimodal approaches, it is essential to understand how uncertainty impacts these models. We introduce LUMA, a unique benchmark dataset, featuring audio, image, and textual data from 50 classes, for learning from uncertain and multimodal data. It extends the well-known CIFAR 10/100 dataset with audio samples extracted from three audio corpora, and text data generated using the Gemma-7B Large Language Model (LLM). The LUMA dataset enables the controlled injection of varying types and degrees of uncertainty to achieve and tailor specific experiments and benchmarking initiatives. LUMA is also available as a Python package including the functions for generating multiple variants of the dataset with controlling the diversity of the data, the amount of noise for each modality, and adding out-of-distribution samples. A baseline pre-trained model is also provided alongside three uncertainty quantification methods: Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensemble, and Reliable Conflictive Multi-View Learning. This comprehensive dataset and its tools are intended to promote and support the development and benchmarking of trustworthy and robust multimodal deep learning approaches.
Authors: Jiawen Qin, Haonan Yuan, Qingyun Sun, Lyujin Xu, Jiaqi Yuan, Pengfeng Huang, Zhaonan Wang, Xingcheng Fu, Hao Peng, Jianxin Li, Philip S. Yu
Abstract: Deep graph learning has gained grand popularity over the past years due to its versatility and success in representing graph data across a wide range of domains. However, the pervasive issue of imbalanced graph data distributions, where certain parts exhibit disproportionally abundant data while others remain sparse, undermines the efficacy of conventional graph learning algorithms, leading to biased outcomes. To address this challenge, Imbalanced Graph Learning (IGL) has garnered substantial attention, enabling more balanced data distributions and better task performance. Despite the proliferation of IGL algorithms, the absence of consistent experimental protocols and fair performance comparisons pose a significant barrier to comprehending advancements in this field. To bridge this gap, we introduce IGL-Bench, a foundational comprehensive benchmark for imbalanced graph learning, embarking on 16 diverse graph datasets and 24 distinct IGL algorithms with uniform data processing and splitting strategies. Specifically, IGL-Bench systematically investigates state-of-the-art IGL algorithms in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency on node-level and graph-level tasks, with the scope of class-imbalance and topology-imbalance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the potential benefits of IGL algorithms on various imbalanced conditions, offering insights and opportunities in the IGL field. Further, we have developed an open-sourced and unified package to facilitate reproducible evaluation and inspire further innovative research, which is available at https://github.com/RingBDStack/IGL-Bench.
Authors: Yicong Jiang, Tianzi Wang, Xurong Xie, Juan Liu, Wei Sun, Nan Yan, Hui Chen, Lan Wang, Xunying Liu, Feng Tian
Abstract: Disordered speech recognition profound implications for improving the quality of life for individuals afflicted with, for example, dysarthria. Dysarthric speech recognition encounters challenges including limited data, substantial dissimilarities between dysarthric and non-dysarthric speakers, and significant speaker variations stemming from the disorder. This paper introduces Perceiver-Prompt, a method for speaker adaptation that utilizes P-Tuning on the Whisper large-scale model. We first fine-tune Whisper using LoRA and then integrate a trainable Perceiver to generate fixed-length speaker prompts from variable-length inputs, to improve model recognition of Chinese dysarthric speech. Experimental results from our Chinese dysarthric speech dataset demonstrate consistent improvements in recognition performance with Perceiver-Prompt. Relative reduction up to 13.04% in CER is obtained over the fine-tuned Whisper.
Authors: Jong-Ik Park, Carlee Joe-Wong
Abstract: Traditional federated learning (FL) methods have limited support for clients with varying computational and communication abilities, leading to inefficiencies and potential inaccuracies in model training. This limitation hinders the widespread adoption of FL in diverse and resource-constrained environments, such as those with client devices ranging from powerful servers to mobile devices. To address this need, this paper introduces Federated Learning with Flexible Architectures (FedFA), an FL training algorithm that allows clients to train models of different widths and depths. Each client can select a network architecture suitable for its resources, with shallower and thinner networks requiring fewer computing resources for training. Unlike prior work in this area, FedFA incorporates the layer grafting technique to align clients' local architectures with the largest network architecture in the FL system during model aggregation. Layer grafting ensures that all client contributions are uniformly integrated into the global model, thereby minimizing the risk of any individual client's data skewing the model's parameters disproportionately and introducing security benefits. Moreover, FedFA introduces the scalable aggregation method to manage scale variations in weights among different network architectures. Experimentally, FedFA outperforms previous width and depth flexible aggregation strategies. Furthermore, FedFA demonstrates increased robustness against performance degradation in backdoor attack scenarios compared to earlier strategies.
Authors: Zhentao Tan, Yadong Mu
Abstract: Recently various optimization problems, such as Mixed Integer Linear Programming Problems (MILPs), have undergone comprehensive investigation, leveraging the capabilities of machine learning. This work focuses on learning-based solutions for efficiently solving the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAPs), which stands as a formidable challenge in combinatorial optimization. While many instances of simpler problems admit fully polynomial-time approximate solution (FPTAS), QAP is shown to be strongly NP-hard. Even finding a FPTAS for QAP is difficult, in the sense that the existence of a FPTAS implies $P = NP$. Current research on QAPs suffer from limited scale and computational inefficiency. To attack the aforementioned issues, we here propose the first solution of its kind for QAP in the learn-to-improve category. This work encodes facility and location nodes separately, instead of forming computationally intensive association graphs prevalent in current approaches. This design choice enables scalability to larger problem sizes. Furthermore, a \textbf{S}olution \textbf{AW}are \textbf{T}ransformer (SAWT) architecture integrates the incumbent solution matrix with the attention score to effectively capture higher-order information of the QAPs. Our model's effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments on self-generated QAP instances of varying sizes and the QAPLIB benchmark.
Authors: Amit Rozner, Barak Battash, Lior Wolf, Ofir Lindenbaum
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can become outdated over time as they may lack updated world knowledge, leading to factual knowledge errors and gaps. Knowledge Editing (KE) aims to overcome this challenge using weight updates that do not require expensive retraining. We propose treating KE as an LLM alignment problem. Toward this goal, we introduce Knowledge Direct Preference Optimization (KDPO), a variation of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that is more effective for knowledge modifications. Our method is based on an online approach that continually updates the knowledge stored in the model. We use the current knowledge as a negative sample and the new knowledge we want to introduce as a positive sample in a process called DPO. We also use teacher-forcing for negative sample generation and optimize using the positive sample, which helps maintain localized changes. We tested our KE method on various datasets and models, comparing it to several cutting-edge methods, with 100 and 500 sequential edits. Additionally, we conducted an ablation study comparing our method to the standard DPO approach. Our experimental results show that our modified DPO method allows for more refined KE, achieving similar or better performance compared to previous methods.
Authors: Mingyu Derek Ma, Chenchen Ye, Yu Yan, Xiaoxuan Wang, Peipei Ping, Timothy S Chang, Wei Wang
Abstract: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Large Language Models (LLMs), into the clinical diagnosis process offers significant potential to improve the efficiency and accessibility of medical care. While LLMs have shown some promise in the medical domain, their application in clinical diagnosis remains underexplored, especially in real-world clinical practice, where highly sophisticated, patient-specific decisions need to be made. Current evaluations of LLMs in this field are often narrow in scope, focusing on specific diseases or specialties and employing simplified diagnostic tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce CliBench, a novel benchmark developed from the MIMIC IV dataset, offering a comprehensive and realistic assessment of LLMs' capabilities in clinical diagnosis. This benchmark not only covers diagnoses from a diverse range of medical cases across various specialties but also incorporates tasks of clinical significance: treatment procedure identification, lab test ordering and medication prescriptions. Supported by structured output ontologies, CliBench enables a precise and multi-granular evaluation, offering an in-depth understanding of LLM's capability on diverse clinical tasks of desired granularity. We conduct a zero-shot evaluation of leading LLMs to assess their proficiency in clinical decision-making. Our preliminary results shed light on the potential and limitations of current LLMs in clinical settings, providing valuable insights for future advancements in LLM-powered healthcare.
Authors: Tanel P\"arnamaa, Ando Saabas
Abstract: Personalized speech enhancement (PSE) models can improve the audio quality of teleconferencing systems by adapting to the characteristics of a speaker's voice. However, most existing methods require a separate speaker embedding model to extract a vector representation of the speaker from enrollment audio, which adds complexity to the training and deployment process. We propose to use the internal representation of the PSE model itself as the speaker embedding, thereby avoiding the need for a separate model. We show that our approach performs equally well or better than the standard method of using a pre-trained speaker embedding model on noise suppression and echo cancellation tasks. Moreover, our approach surpasses the ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge winner by 0.15 in Mean Opinion Score.
Authors: Adham Ibrahim, Shady Shehata, Ajinkya Kulkarni, Mukhtar Mohamed, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Abstract: Speech emotion recognition (SER) is essential for enhancing human-computer interaction in speech-based applications. Despite improvements in specific emotional datasets, there is still a research gap in SER's capability to generalize across real-world situations. In this paper, we investigate approaches to generalize the SER system across different emotion datasets. In particular, we incorporate 11 emotional speech datasets and illustrate a comprehensive benchmark on the SER task. We also address the challenge of imbalanced data distribution using over-sampling methods when combining SER datasets for training. Furthermore, we explore various evaluation protocols for adeptness in the generalization of SER. Building on this, we explore the potential of Whisper for SER, emphasizing the importance of thorough evaluation. Our approach is designed to advance SER technology by integrating speaker-independent methods.
Authors: Tim Menzner, Jochen L. Leidner
Abstract: The World Wide Web provides unrivalled access to information globally, including factual news reporting and commentary. However, state actors and commercial players increasingly spread biased (distorted) or fake (non-factual) information to promote their agendas. We compare several large, pre-trained language models on the task of sentence-level news bias detection and sub-type classification, providing quantitative and qualitative results.
Authors: Jesus Marco de Lucas, Maria Pe\~na Fernandez, Lara Lloret Iglesias
Abstract: We have previously presented the idea of how complex multimodal information could be represented in our brains in a compressed form, following mechanisms similar to those employed in machine learning tools, like autoencoders. In this short comment note we reflect, mainly with a didactical purpose, upon the basic question for a biological implementation: what could be the mechanism working as a loss function, and how it could be connected to a neuronal network providing the required feedback to build a simple training configuration. We present our initial ideas based on a basic motif that implements an XOR switch, using few excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Such motif is guided by a principle of homeostasis, and it implements a loss function that could provide feedback to other neuronal structures, establishing a control system. We analyse the presence of this XOR motif in the connectome of C.Elegans, and indicate the relationship with the well-known lateral inhibition motif. We then explore how to build a basic biological neuronal structure with learning capacity integrating this XOR motif. Guided by the computational analogy, we show an initial example that indicates the feasibility of this approach, applied to learning binary sequences, like it is the case for simple melodies. In summary, we provide didactical examples exploring the parallelism between biological and computational learning mechanisms, identifying basic motifs and training procedures, and how an engram encoding a melody could be built using a simple recurrent network involving both excitatory and inhibitory neurons.
Authors: Zeyu Gao, Yao Mu, Jinye Qu, Mengkang Hu, Lingyue Guo, Ping Luo, Yanfeng Lu
Abstract: Dual-arm robots offer enhanced versatility and efficiency over single-arm counterparts by enabling concurrent manipulation of multiple objects or cooperative execution of tasks using both arms. However, effectively coordinating the two arms for complex long-horizon tasks remains a significant challenge. Existing task planning methods predominantly focus on single-arm robots or rely on predefined bimanual operations, failing to fully leverage the capabilities of dual-arm systems. To address this limitation, we introduce DAG-Plan, a structured task planning framework tailored for dual-arm robots. DAG-Plan harnesses large language models (LLMs) to decompose intricate tasks into actionable sub-tasks represented as nodes within a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Critically, DAG-Plan dynamically assigns these sub-tasks to the appropriate arm based on real-time environmental observations, enabling parallel and adaptive execution. We evaluate DAG-Plan on the novel Dual-Arm Kitchen Benchmark, comprising 9 sequential tasks with 78 sub-tasks and 26 objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DAG-Plan over directly using LLM to generate plans, achieving nearly 50% higher efficiency compared to the single-arm task planning baseline and nearly double the success rate of the dual-arm task planning baseline.
Authors: Constantine Maganaris, Eftychios Protopapadakis, Nikolaos Doulamis
Abstract: A methodology based on deep recurrent models for maritime surveillance, over publicly available Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, is presented in this paper. The setup employs a deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based model, for encoding and reconstructing the observed ships' motion patterns. Our approach is based on a thresholding mechanism, over the calculated errors between observed and reconstructed motion patterns of maritime vessels. Specifically, a deep-learning framework, i.e. an encoder-decoder architecture, is trained using the observed motion patterns, enabling the models to learn and predict the expected trajectory, which will be compared to the effective ones. Our models, particularly the bidirectional GRU with recurrent dropouts, showcased superior performance in capturing the temporal dynamics of maritime data, illustrating the potential of deep learning to enhance maritime surveillance capabilities. Our work lays a solid foundation for future research in this domain, highlighting a path toward improved maritime safety through the innovative application of technology.
Authors: Siemen Herremans, Ali Anwar, Siegfried Mercelis
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has demonstrated impressive performance in various challenging problems such as robotics, board games, and classical arcade games. However, its real-world applications can be hindered by the absence of robustness and safety in the learned policies. More specifically, an RL agent that trains in a certain Markov decision process (MDP) often struggles to perform well in nearly identical MDPs. To address this issue, we employ the framework of Robust MDPs (RMDPs) in a model-based setting and introduce a novel learned transition model. Our method specifically incorporates an auxiliary pessimistic model, updated adversarially, to estimate the worst-case MDP within a Kullback-Leibler uncertainty set. In comparison to several existing works, our work does not impose any additional conditions on the training environment, such as the need for a parametric simulator. To test the effectiveness of the proposed pessimistic model in enhancing policy robustness, we integrate it into a practical RL algorithm, called Robust Model-Based Policy Optimization (RMBPO). Our experimental results indicate a notable improvement in policy robustness on high-dimensional MuJoCo control tasks, with the auxiliary model enhancing the performance of the learned policy in distorted MDPs. We further explore the learned deviation between the proposed auxiliary world model and the nominal model, to examine how pessimism is achieved. By learning a pessimistic world model and demonstrating its role in improving policy robustness, our research contributes towards making (model-based) RL more robust.
Authors: Krish Goel, Mahek Chandak
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language tasks but face limitations due to static training datasets, resulting in outdated or contextually shallow responses. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this by integrating real-time external knowledge, enhancing model accuracy and credibility, especially for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, RAG-enhanced LLMs struggle with long contexts, causing them to "choke" on information overload, compromising response quality. Recent RAG applications use hierarchical data structures for storing documents, organized at various levels of summarization and information density. In this context, we introduce HIRO (Hierarchical Information Retrieval Optimization), a novel querying approach for RAG applications using hierarchical structures for storing documents. HIRO employs DFS-based recursive similarity score calculation and branch pruning to minimize the context returned to the LLM without informational loss. HIRO outperforms existing querying mechanisms on the NarrativeQA dataset by an absolute performance gain of 10.85%.
Authors: Lenka T\v{e}tkov\'a, Erik Schou Dreier, Robin Malm, Lars Kai Hansen
Abstract: Much machine learning research progress is based on developing models and evaluating them on a benchmark dataset (e.g., ImageNet for images). However, applying such benchmark-successful methods to real-world data often does not work as expected. This is particularly the case for biological data where we expect variability at multiple time and spatial scales. In this work, we are using grain data and the goal is to detect diseases and damages. Pink fusarium, skinned grains, and other diseases and damages are key factors in setting the price of grains or excluding dangerous grains from food production. Apart from challenges stemming from differences of the data from the standard toy datasets, we also present challenges that need to be overcome when explaining deep learning models. For example, explainability methods have many hyperparameters that can give different results, and the ones published in the papers do not work on dissimilar images. Other challenges are more general: problems with visualization of the explanations and their comparison since the magnitudes of their values differ from method to method. An open fundamental question also is: How to evaluate explanations? It is a non-trivial task because the "ground truth" is usually missing or ill-defined. Also, human annotators may create what they think is an explanation of the task at hand, yet the machine learning model might solve it in a different and perhaps counter-intuitive way. We discuss several of these challenges and evaluate various post-hoc explainability methods on grain data. We focus on robustness, quality of explanations, and similarity to particular "ground truth" annotations made by experts. The goal is to find the methods that overall perform well and could be used in this challenging task. We hope the proposed pipeline will be used as a framework for evaluating explainability methods in specific use cases.
Authors: Chaeyeon Han, Pavan Seshadri, Yiwei Ding, Noah Posner, Bon Woo Koo, Animesh Agrawal, Alexander Lerch, Subhrajit Guhathakurta
Abstract: While various sensors have been deployed to monitor vehicular flows, sensing pedestrian movement is still nascent. Yet walking is a significant mode of travel in many cities, especially those in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Understanding pedestrian volumes and flows is essential for designing safer and more attractive pedestrian infrastructure and for controlling periodic overcrowding. This study discusses a new approach to scale up urban sensing of people with the help of novel audio-based technology. It assesses the benefits and limitations of microphone-based sensors as compared to other forms of pedestrian sensing. A large-scale dataset called ASPED is presented, which includes high-quality audio recordings along with video recordings used for labeling the pedestrian count data. The baseline analyses highlight the promise of using audio sensors for pedestrian tracking, although algorithmic and technological improvements to make the sensors practically usable continue. This study also demonstrates how the data can be leveraged to predict pedestrian trajectories. Finally, it discusses the use cases and scenarios where audio-based pedestrian sensing can support better urban and transportation planning.
Authors: Hanna Foerster, Robert Mullins, Ilia Shumailov, Jamie Hayes
Abstract: Deep neural networks, costly to train and rich in intellectual property value, are increasingly threatened by model extraction attacks that compromise their confidentiality. Previous attacks have succeeded in reverse-engineering model parameters up to a precision of float64 for models trained on random data with at most three hidden layers using cryptanalytical techniques. However, the process was identified to be very time consuming and not feasible for larger and deeper models trained on standard benchmarks. Our study evaluates the feasibility of parameter extraction methods of Carlini et al. [1] further enhanced by Canales-Mart\'inez et al. [2] for models trained on standard benchmarks. We introduce a unified codebase that integrates previous methods and reveal that computational tools can significantly influence performance. We develop further optimisations to the end-to-end attack and improve the efficiency of extracting weight signs by up to 14.8 times compared to former methods through the identification of easier and harder to extract neurons. Contrary to prior assumptions, we identify extraction of weights, not extraction of weight signs, as the critical bottleneck. With our improvements, a 16,721 parameter model with 2 hidden layers trained on MNIST is extracted within only 98 minutes compared to at least 150 minutes previously. Finally, addressing methodological deficiencies observed in previous studies, we propose new ways of robust benchmarking for future model extraction attacks.
Authors: Steve Yuwono, Marlon L\"oppenberg, Dorothea Schwung, Andreas Schwung
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce novel gradient-based optimization methods for state-based potential games (SbPGs) within self-learning distributed production systems. SbPGs are recognised for their efficacy in enabling self-optimizing distributed multi-agent systems and offer a proven convergence guarantee, which facilitates collaborative player efforts towards global objectives. Our study strives to replace conventional ad-hoc random exploration-based learning in SbPGs with contemporary gradient-based approaches, which aim for faster convergence and smoother exploration dynamics, thereby shortening training duration while upholding the efficacy of SbPGs. Moreover, we propose three distinct variants for estimating the objective function of gradient-based learning, each developed to suit the unique characteristics of the systems under consideration. To validate our methodology, we apply it to a laboratory testbed, namely Bulk Good Laboratory Plant, which represents a smart and flexible distributed multi-agent production system. The incorporation of gradient-based learning in SbPGs reduces training times and achieves more optimal policies than its baseline.
Authors: Gyusang Cho, Chan-Hyun Youn
Abstract: After the revelation that neural networks tend to produce overconfident predictions, the problem of calibration, which aims to align confidence with accuracy to enhance the reliability of predictions, has gained significant importance. Several solutions based on calibration maps have been proposed to address the problem of recalibrating a trained classifier using additional datasets. In this paper, we offer an algorithm that transforms the weights of the last layer of the classifier, distinct from the calibration-map-based approach. We concentrate on the geometry of the final linear layer, specifically its angular aspect, and adjust the weights of the corresponding layer. We name the method Tilt and Average(\textsc{Tna}), and validate the calibration effect empirically and theoretically. Through this, we demonstrate that our approach, in addition to the existing calibration-map-based techniques, can yield improved calibration performance. Code available : https://github.com/GYYYYYUUUUU/TNA_Angular_Scaling.
Authors: Mikhail Gorbunov, Nikolay Yudin, Vera Soboleva, Aibek Alanov, Alexey Naumov, Maxim Rakhuba
Abstract: The increasing size of neural networks has led to a growing demand for methods of efficient fine-tuning. Recently, an orthogonal fine-tuning paradigm was introduced that uses orthogonal matrices for adapting the weights of a pretrained model. In this paper, we introduce a new class of structured matrices, which unifies and generalizes structured classes from previous works. We examine properties of this class and build a structured orthogonal parametrization upon it. We then use this parametrization to modify the orthogonal fine-tuning framework, improving parameter and computational efficiency. We empirically validate our method on different domains, including adapting of text-to-image diffusion models and downstream task fine-tuning in language modeling. Additionally, we adapt our construction for orthogonal convolutions and conduct experiments with 1-Lipschitz neural networks.
Authors: Umberto Michelucci, Francesca Venturini
Abstract: Fluorescence spectroscopy is a fundamental tool in life sciences and chemistry, widely used for applications such as environmental monitoring, food quality control, and biomedical diagnostics. However, analysis of spectroscopic data with deep learning, in particular of fluorescence excitation-emission matrices (EEMs), presents significant challenges due mainly to the typically small and sparse datasets available. Furthermore, the analysis of EEMs is difficult due to their high dimensionality and overlapping spectral features. This study proposes a new approach that exploits domain adaptation with pretrained vision models, alongside a novel interpretability algorithm to address these challenges. Thanks to specialised feature engineering of the neural networks described in this work, we are now able to provide deeper and meaningful insights into the physico-chemical processes underlying the data. The proposed approach is demonstrated through the analysis of the oxidation process in extra virgin olive oil (EVOO), showing its effectiveness in predicting quality indicators and identifying relevant spectral bands. This work describes significantly innovative results in the use of deep learning for spectroscopy, transforming it from a black box into a tool for understanding complex biological and chemical processes.
Authors: Tianzi Wang, Xurong Xie, Zhaoqing Li, Shoukang Hu, Zengrui Jing, Jiajun Deng, Mingyu Cui, Shujie Hu, Mengzhe Geng, Guinan Li, Helen Meng, Xunying Liu
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel non-autoregressive (NAR) block-based Attention Mask Decoder (AMD) that flexibly balances performance-efficiency trade-offs for Conformer ASR systems. AMD performs parallel NAR inference within contiguous blocks of output labels that are concealed using attention masks, while conducting left-to-right AR prediction and history context amalgamation between blocks. A beam search algorithm is designed to leverage a dynamic fusion of CTC, AR Decoder, and AMD probabilities. Experiments on the LibriSpeech-100hr corpus suggest the tripartite Decoder incorporating the AMD module produces a maximum decoding speed-up ratio of 1.73x over the baseline CTC+AR decoding, while incurring no statistically significant word error rate (WER) increase on the test sets. When operating with the same decoding real time factors, statistically significant WER reductions of up to 0.7% and 0.3% absolute (5.3% and 6.1% relative) were obtained over the CTC+AR baseline.
Authors: Jin Liu, Steffen Thoma
Abstract: This paper describes the inference system of FZI-WIM at the SemEval-2024 Task 2: Safe Biomedical Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials. Our system utilizes the chain of thought (CoT) paradigm to tackle this complex reasoning problem and further improves the CoT performance with self-consistency. Instead of greedy decoding, we sample multiple reasoning chains with the same prompt and make the final verification with majority voting. The self-consistent CoT system achieves a baseline F1 score of 0.80 (1st), faithfulness score of 0.90 (3rd), and consistency score of 0.73 (12th). We release the code and data publicly https://github.com/jens5588/FZI-WIM-NLI4CT.
Authors: Enming Zhang, Ruobing Yao, Huanyong Liu, Junhui Yu, Jiale Wang
Abstract: With the development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) technology, its general capabilities are increasingly powerful. To evaluate the various abilities of MLLMs, numerous evaluation systems have emerged. But now there is still a lack of a comprehensive method to evaluate MLLMs in the tasks related to flowcharts, which are very important in daily life and work. We propose the first comprehensive method, FlowCE, to assess MLLMs across various dimensions for tasks related to flowcharts. It encompasses evaluating MLLMs' abilities in Reasoning, Localization Recognition, Information Extraction, Logical Verification, and Summarization on flowcharts. However, we find that even the GPT4o model achieves only a score of 56.63. Among open-source models, Phi-3-Vision obtained the highest score of 49.97. We hope that FlowCE can contribute to future research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for tasks based on flowcharts. We are open-sourcing this project: \url{https://github.com/360AILAB-NLP/FlowCE}
Authors: Gengyuan Zhang, Mang Ling Ada Fok, Yan Xia, Yansong Tang, Daniel Cremers, Philip Torr, Volker Tresp, Jindong Gu
Abstract: Video understanding is a pivotal task in the digital era, yet the dynamic and multievent nature of videos makes them labor-intensive and computationally demanding to process. Thus, localizing a specific event given a semantic query has gained importance in both user-oriented applications like video search and academic research into video foundation models. A significant limitation in current research is that semantic queries are typically in natural language that depicts the semantics of the target event. This setting overlooks the potential for multimodal semantic queries composed of images and texts. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, ICQ, for localizing events in videos with multimodal queries, along with a new evaluation dataset ICQ-Highlight. Our new benchmark aims to evaluate how well models can localize an event given a multimodal semantic query that consists of a reference image, which depicts the event, and a refinement text to adjust the images' semantics. To systematically benchmark model performance, we include 4 styles of reference images and 5 types of refinement texts, allowing us to explore model performance across different domains. We propose 3 adaptation methods that tailor existing models to our new setting and evaluate 10 SOTA models, ranging from specialized to large-scale foundation models. We believe this benchmark is an initial step toward investigating multimodal queries in video event localization.
Authors: Chongmin Lee, Jihie Kim
Abstract: Certain cancer types, namely pancreatic cancer is difficult to detect at an early stage; sparking the importance of discovering the causal relationship between biomarkers and cancer to identify cancer efficiently. By allowing for the detection and monitoring of specific biomarkers through a non-invasive method, liquid biopsies enhance the precision and efficacy of medical interventions, advocating the move towards personalized healthcare. Several machine learning algorithms such as Random Forest, SVM are utilized for classification, yet causing inefficiency due to the need for conducting hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a meta-trained Hyperfast model for classifying cancer, accomplishing the highest AUC of 0.9929 and simultaneously achieving robustness especially on highly imbalanced datasets compared to other ML algorithms in several binary classification tasks (e.g. breast invasive carcinoma; BRCA vs. non-BRCA). We also propose a novel ensemble model combining pre-trained Hyperfast model, XGBoost, and LightGBM for multi-class classification tasks, achieving an incremental increase in accuracy (0.9464) while merely using 500 PCA features; distinguishable from previous studies where they used more than 2,000 features for similar results.
Authors: Yupeng Qiang, Xunde Dong, Xiuling Liu, Yang Yang, Yihai Fang, Jianhong Dou
Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal analysis represents a pivotal technique in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Although transformer-based models have made significant progress in ECG classification, they exhibit inefficiencies in the inference phase. The issue is primarily attributable to the secondary computational complexity of Transformer's self-attention mechanism. particularly when processing lengthy sequences. To address this issue, we propose a novel model, ECGMamba, which employs a bidirectional state-space model (BiSSM) to enhance classification efficiency. ECGMamba is based on the innovative Mamba-based block, which incorporates a range of time series modeling techniques to enhance performance while maintaining the efficiency of inference. The experimental results on two publicly available ECG datasets demonstrate that ECGMamba effectively balances the effectiveness and efficiency of classification, achieving competitive performance. This study not only contributes to the body of knowledge in the field of ECG classification but also provides a new research path for efficient and accurate ECG signal analysis. This is of guiding significance for the development of diagnostic models for cardiovascular diseases.
Authors: Junwei Luo, Zhen Pang, Yongjun Zhang, Tingzhu Wang, Linlin Wang, Bo Dang, Jiangwei Lao, Jian Wang, Jingdong Chen, Yihua Tan, Yansheng Li
Abstract: Remote Sensing Large Multi-Modal Models (RSLMMs) are developing rapidly and showcase significant capabilities in remote sensing imagery (RSI) comprehension. However, due to the limitations of existing datasets, RSLMMs have shortcomings in understanding the rich semantic relations among objects in complex remote sensing scenes. To unlock RSLMMs' complex comprehension ability, we propose a large-scale instruction tuning dataset FIT-RS, containing 1,800,851 instruction samples. FIT-RS covers common interpretation tasks and innovatively introduces several complex comprehension tasks of escalating difficulty, ranging from relation reasoning to image-level scene graph generation. Based on FIT-RS, we build the FIT-RSFG benchmark. Furthermore, we establish a new benchmark to evaluate the fine-grained relation comprehension capabilities of LMMs, named FIT-RSRC. Based on combined instruction data, we propose SkySenseGPT, which achieves outstanding performance on both public datasets and FIT-RSFG, surpassing existing RSLMMs. We hope the FIT-RS dataset can enhance the relation comprehension capability of RSLMMs and provide a large-scale fine-grained data source for the remote sensing community. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/Luo-Z13/SkySenseGPT
Authors: Junzhe Yin, Cristian Meo, Ankush Roy, Zeineh Bou Cher, Yanbo Wang, Ruben Imhoff, Remko Uijlenhoet, Justin Dauwels
Abstract: Nowcasting leverages real-time atmospheric conditions to forecast weather over short periods. State-of-the-art models, including PySTEPS, encounter difficulties in accurately forecasting extreme weather events because of their unpredictable distribution patterns. In this study, we design a physics-informed neural network to perform precipitation nowcasting using the precipitation and meteorological data from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). This model draws inspiration from the novel Physics-Informed Discriminator GAN (PID-GAN) formulation, directly integrating physics-based supervision within the adversarial learning framework. The proposed model adopts a GAN structure, featuring a Vector Quantization Generative Adversarial Network (VQ-GAN) and a Transformer as the generator, with a temporal discriminator serving as the discriminator. Our findings demonstrate that the PID-GAN model outperforms numerical and SOTA deep generative models in terms of precipitation nowcasting downstream metrics.
Authors: Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, Aloysius Ochasi, Russ B. Altman
Abstract: Data are essential in developing healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, patient data collection, access, and use raise ethical concerns, including informed consent, data bias, data protection and privacy, data ownership, and benefit sharing. Various ethical frameworks have been proposed to ensure the ethical use of healthcare data and AI, however, these frameworks often align with Western cultural values, social norms, and institutional contexts emphasizing individual autonomy and well-being. Ethical guidelines must reflect political and cultural settings to account for cultural diversity, inclusivity, and historical factors such as colonialism. Thus, this paper discusses healthcare data ethics in the AI era in Africa from the Ubuntu philosophy perspective. It focuses on the contrast between individualistic and communitarian approaches to data ethics. The proposed framework could inform stakeholders, including AI developers, healthcare providers, the public, and policy-makers about healthcare data ethical usage in AI in Africa.
Authors: Nirjhar Das, Gaurav Sinha
Abstract: We study the Linear Contextual Bandit problem in the hybrid reward setting. In this setting every arm's reward model contains arm specific parameters in addition to parameters shared across the reward models of all the arms. We can reduce this setting to two closely related settings (a) Shared - no arm specific parameters, and (b) Disjoint - only arm specific parameters, enabling the application of two popular state of the art algorithms - $\texttt{LinUCB}$ and $\texttt{DisLinUCB}$ (Algorithm 1 in (Li et al. 2010)). When the arm features are stochastic and satisfy a popular diversity condition, we provide new regret analyses for both algorithms, significantly improving on the known regret guarantees of these algorithms. Our novel analysis critically exploits the hybrid reward structure and the diversity condition. Moreover, we introduce a new algorithm $\texttt{HyLinUCB}$ that crucially modifies $\texttt{LinUCB}$ (using a new exploration coefficient) to account for sparsity in the hybrid setting. Under the same diversity assumptions, we prove that $\texttt{HyLinUCB}$ also incurs only $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for $T$ rounds. We perform extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrating strong empirical performance of $\texttt{HyLinUCB}$.For number of arm specific parameters much larger than the number of shared parameters, we observe that $\texttt{DisLinUCB}$ incurs the lowest regret. In this case, regret of $\texttt{HyLinUCB}$ is the second best and extremely competitive to $\texttt{DisLinUCB}$. In all other situations, including our real-world dataset, $\texttt{HyLinUCB}$ has significantly lower regret than $\texttt{LinUCB}$, $\texttt{DisLinUCB}$ and other SOTA baselines we considered. We also empirically observe that the regret of $\texttt{HyLinUCB}$ grows much slower with the number of arms compared to baselines, making it suitable even for very large action spaces.
Authors: Smilla Due, Sneha Das, Marianne Andersen, Berta Plandolit L\'opez, Sniff Andersen Nex{\o}, Line Clemmensen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have an increasing impact on our lives with use cases such as chatbots, study support, coding support, ideation, writing assistance, and more. Previous studies have revealed linguistic biases in pronouns used to describe professions or adjectives used to describe men vs women. These issues have to some degree been addressed in updated LLM versions, at least to pass existing tests. However, biases may still be present in the models, and repeated use of gender stereotypical language may reinforce the underlying assumptions and are therefore important to examine further. This paper investigates gender biases in LLMs in relation to educational choices through an open-ended, true to user-case experimental design and a quantitative analysis. We investigate the biases in the context of four different cultures, languages, and educational systems (English/US/UK, Danish/DK, Catalan/ES, and Hindi/IN) for ages ranging from 10 to 16 years, corresponding to important educational transition points in the different countries. We find that there are significant and large differences in the ratio of STEM to non-STEM suggested education paths provided by chatGPT when using typical girl vs boy names to prompt lists of suggested things to become. There are generally fewer STEM suggestions in the Danish, Spanish, and Indian context compared to the English. We also find subtle differences in the suggested professions, which we categorise and report.
Authors: Antonio Mastropaolo, Camilo Escobar-Vel\'asquez, Mario Linares-V\'asquez
Abstract: Over the last ten years, the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has experienced an explosion of revolutionary breakthroughs, transforming what seemed like a far-off dream into a reality that is now deeply embedded in our everyday lives. AI's widespread impact is revolutionizing virtually all aspects of human life, and software engineering (SE) is no exception. As we explore this changing landscape, we are faced with questions about what the future holds for SE and how AI will reshape the roles, duties, and methodologies within the field. The introduction of these groundbreaking technologies highlights the inevitable shift towards a new paradigm, suggesting a future where AI's capabilities may redefine the boundaries of SE, potentially even more than human input. In this paper, we aim at outlining the key elements that, based on our expertise, are vital for the smooth integration of AI into SE, all while preserving the intrinsic human creativity that has been the driving force behind the field. First, we provide a brief description of SE and AI evolution. Afterward, we delve into the intricate interplay between AI-driven automation and human innovation, exploring how these two components can work together to advance SE practices to new methods and standards.
Authors: Yuri Kuratov, Aydar Bulatov, Petr Anokhin, Ivan Rodkin, Dmitry Sorokin, Artyom Sorokin, Mikhail Burtsev
Abstract: In recent years, the input context sizes of large language models (LLMs) have increased dramatically. However, existing evaluation methods have not kept pace, failing to comprehensively assess the efficiency of models in handling long contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the BABILong benchmark, designed to test language models' ability to reason across facts distributed in extremely long documents. BABILong includes a diverse set of 20 reasoning tasks, including fact chaining, simple induction, deduction, counting, and handling lists/sets. These tasks are challenging on their own, and even more demanding when the required facts are scattered across long natural text. Our evaluations show that popular LLMs effectively utilize only 10-20\% of the context and their performance declines sharply with increased reasoning complexity. Among alternatives to in-context reasoning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation methods achieve a modest 60\% accuracy on single-fact question answering, independent of context length. Among context extension methods, the highest performance is demonstrated by recurrent memory transformers, enabling the processing of lengths up to 11 million tokens. The BABILong benchmark is extendable to any length to support the evaluation of new upcoming models with increased capabilities, and we provide splits up to 1 million token lengths.
Authors: Matthias K\"onig, Xiyue Zhang, Holger H. Hoos, Marta Kwiatkowska, Jan N. van Rijn
Abstract: The ubiquity of deep learning algorithms in various applications has amplified the need for assuring their robustness against small input perturbations such as those occurring in adversarial attacks. Existing complete verification techniques offer provable guarantees for all robustness queries but struggle to scale beyond small neural networks. To overcome this computational intractability, incomplete verification methods often rely on convex relaxation to over-approximate the nonlinearities in neural networks. Progress in tighter approximations has been achieved for piecewise linear functions. However, robustness verification of neural networks for general activation functions (e.g., Sigmoid, Tanh) remains under-explored and poses new challenges. Typically, these networks are verified using convex relaxation techniques, which involve computing linear upper and lower bounds of the nonlinear activation functions. In this work, we propose a novel parameter search method to improve the quality of these linear approximations. Specifically, we show that using a simple search method, carefully adapted to the given verification problem through state-of-the-art algorithm configuration techniques, improves the average global lower bound by 25% on average over the current state of the art on several commonly used local robustness verification benchmarks.
Authors: Hantao Zhou, Tianying Ji, Jianwei Zhang, Fuchun Sun, Huazhe Xu
Abstract: Minigolf, a game with countless court layouts, and complex ball motion, constitutes a compelling real-world testbed for the study of embodied intelligence. As it not only challenges spatial and kinodynamic reasoning but also requires reflective and corrective capacities to address erroneously designed courses. We introduce RoboGolf, a framework that perceives dual-camera visual inputs with nested VLM-empowered closed-loop control and reflective equilibrium loop. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RoboGolf on challenging minigolf courts including those that are impossible to finish.
Authors: Zhaoqing Li, Haoning Xu, Tianzi Wang, Shoukang Hu, Zengrui Jin, Shujie Hu, Jiajun Deng, Mingyu Cui, Mengzhe Geng, Xunying Liu
Abstract: We propose a novel one-pass multiple ASR systems joint compression and quantization approach using an all-in-one neural model. A single compression cycle allows multiple nested systems with varying Encoder depths, widths, and quantization precision settings to be simultaneously constructed without the need to train and store individual target systems separately. Experiments consistently demonstrate the multiple ASR systems compressed in a single all-in-one model produced a word error rate (WER) comparable to, or lower by up to 1.01\% absolute (6.98\% relative) than individually trained systems of equal complexity. A 3.4x overall system compression and training time speed-up was achieved. Maximum model size compression ratios of 12.8x and 3.93x were obtained over the baseline Switchboard-300hr Conformer and LibriSpeech-100hr fine-tuned wav2vec2.0 models, respectively, incurring no statistically significant WER increase.
Authors: Yiwen Chen, Tong He, Di Huang, Weicai Ye, Sijin Chen, Jiaxiang Tang, Xin Chen, Zhongang Cai, Lei Yang, Gang Yu, Guosheng Lin, Chi Zhang
Abstract: Recently, 3D assets created via reconstruction and generation have matched the quality of manually crafted assets, highlighting their potential for replacement. However, this potential is largely unrealized because these assets always need to be converted to meshes for 3D industry applications, and the meshes produced by current mesh extraction methods are significantly inferior to Artist-Created Meshes (AMs), i.e., meshes created by human artists. Specifically, current mesh extraction methods rely on dense faces and ignore geometric features, leading to inefficiencies, complicated post-processing, and lower representation quality. To address these issues, we introduce MeshAnything, a model that treats mesh extraction as a generation problem, producing AMs aligned with specified shapes. By converting 3D assets in any 3D representation into AMs, MeshAnything can be integrated with various 3D asset production methods, thereby enhancing their application across the 3D industry. The architecture of MeshAnything comprises a VQ-VAE and a shape-conditioned decoder-only transformer. We first learn a mesh vocabulary using the VQ-VAE, then train the shape-conditioned decoder-only transformer on this vocabulary for shape-conditioned autoregressive mesh generation. Our extensive experiments show that our method generates AMs with hundreds of times fewer faces, significantly improving storage, rendering, and simulation efficiencies, while achieving precision comparable to previous methods.
Authors: Siyuan Chen, Zelong Guan, Yudong Liu, Phillip B. Gibbons
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) requires significant memory, often exceeding the capacity of a single GPU. A common solution to this memory challenge is offloading compute and data from the GPU to the CPU. However, this approach is hampered by the limited bandwidth of commodity hardware, which constrains communication between the CPU and GPU. In this paper, we present an offloading framework, LSP_Offload, that enables near-native speed LLM fine-tuning on commodity hardware through learned subspace projectors. Our data-driven approach involves learning an efficient sparse compressor that minimizes communication with minimal precision loss. Additionally, we introduce a novel layer-wise communication schedule to maximize parallelism between communication and computation. As a result, our framework can fine-tune a 1.3 billion parameter model on a 4GB laptop GPU and a 7 billion parameter model on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU with 24GB memory, achieving only a 31% slowdown compared to fine-tuning with unlimited memory. Compared to state-of-the-art offloading frameworks, our approach increases fine-tuning throughput by up to 3.33 times and reduces end-to-end fine-tuning time by 33.1%~62.5% when converging to the same accuracy.
Authors: Harsh Rangwani, Aishwarya Agarwal, Kuldeep Kulkarni, R. Venkatesh Babu, Srikrishna Karanam
Abstract: Text-to-image generation from large generative models like Stable Diffusion, DALLE-2, etc., have become a common base for various tasks due to their superior quality and extensive knowledge bases. As image composition and generation are creative processes the artists need control over various parts of the images being generated. We find that just adding details about parts in the base text prompt either leads to an entirely different image (e.g., missing/incorrect identity) or the extra part details simply being ignored. To mitigate these issues, we introduce PartCraft, which enables image generation based on fine-grained part-level details specified for objects in the base text prompt. This allows more control for artists and enables novel object compositions by combining distinctive object parts. PartCraft first localizes object parts by denoising the object region from a specific diffusion process. This enables each part token to be localized to the right object region. After obtaining part masks, we run a localized diffusion process in each of the part regions based on fine-grained part descriptions and combine them to produce the final image. All the stages of PartCraft are based on repurposing a pre-trained diffusion model, which enables it to generalize across various domains without training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of part-level control provided by PartCraft qualitatively through visual examples and quantitatively in comparison to the contemporary baselines.
Authors: Ziang Xu, Jens Rittscher, Sharib Ali
Abstract: Polyps are early cancer indicators, so assessing occurrences of polyps and their removal is critical. They are observed through a colonoscopy screening procedure that generates a stream of video frames. Segmenting polyps in their natural video screening procedure has several challenges, such as the co-existence of imaging artefacts, motion blur, and floating debris. Most existing polyp segmentation algorithms are developed on curated still image datasets that do not represent real-world colonoscopy. Their performance often degrades on video data. We propose a video polyp segmentation method that performs self-supervised learning as an auxiliary task and a spatial-temporal self-attention mechanism for improved representation learning. Our end-to-end configuration and joint optimisation of losses enable the network to learn more discriminative contextual features in videos. Our experimental results demonstrate an improvement with respect to several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our ablation study also confirms that the choice of the proposed joint end-to-end training improves network accuracy by over 3% and nearly 10% on both the Dice similarity coefficient and intersection-over-union compared to the recently proposed method PNS+ and Polyp-PVT, respectively. Results on previously unseen video data indicate that the proposed method generalises.
Authors: Lital Binyamin, Yoad Tewel, Hilit Segev, Eran Hirsch, Royi Rassin, Gal Chechik
Abstract: Despite the unprecedented success of text-to-image diffusion models, controlling the number of depicted objects using text is surprisingly hard. This is important for various applications from technical documents, to children's books to illustrating cooking recipes. Generating object-correct counts is fundamentally challenging because the generative model needs to keep a sense of separate identity for every instance of the object, even if several objects look identical or overlap, and then carry out a global computation implicitly during generation. It is still unknown if such representations exist. To address count-correct generation, we first identify features within the diffusion model that can carry the object identity information. We then use them to separate and count instances of objects during the denoising process and detect over-generation and under-generation. We fix the latter by training a model that predicts both the shape and location of a missing object, based on the layout of existing ones, and show how it can be used to guide denoising with correct object count. Our approach, CountGen, does not depend on external source to determine object layout, but rather uses the prior from the diffusion model itself, creating prompt-dependent and seed-dependent layouts. Evaluated on two benchmark datasets, we find that CountGen strongly outperforms the count-accuracy of existing baselines.
Authors: Rui Yang, Ruomeng Ding, Yong Lin, Huan Zhang, Tong Zhang
Abstract: Reward models trained on human preference data have been proven to be effective for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent within the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) framework. However, the generalization capabilities of current reward models to unseen prompts and responses are limited. This limitation can lead to an unexpected phenomenon known as reward over-optimization, where excessive optimization of rewards results in a decline in actual performance. While previous research has advocated for constraining policy optimization, our study proposes a novel approach to enhance the reward model's generalization ability against distribution shifts by regularizing the hidden states. Specifically, we retain the base model's language model head and incorporate a suite of text-generation losses to preserve the hidden states' text generation capabilities, while concurrently learning a reward head behind the same hidden states. Our experimental results demonstrate that the introduced regularization technique markedly improves the accuracy of learned reward models across a variety of out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks and effectively alleviate the over-optimization issue in RLHF, offering a more reliable and robust preference learning paradigm.
Authors: Ridouane Ghermi, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton, Ivan Laptev
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models have significantly propelled video understanding. Existing datasets and tasks, however, have notable limitations. Most datasets are confined to short videos with limited events and narrow narratives. For example, datasets with instructional and egocentric videos often document the activities of one person in a single scene. Although some movie datasets offer richer content, they are often limited to short-term tasks, lack publicly available videos and frequently encounter data leakage given the use of movie forums and other resources in LLM training. To address the above limitations, we propose the Short Film Dataset (SFD) with 1,078 publicly available amateur movies, a wide variety of genres and minimal data leakage issues. SFD offers long-term story-oriented video tasks in the form of multiple-choice and open-ended question answering. Our extensive experiments emphasize the need for long-term reasoning to solve SFD tasks. Notably, we find strong signals in movie transcripts leading to the on-par performance of people and LLMs. We also show significantly lower performance of current models compared to people when using vision data alone.
Authors: Kevin Qinghong Lin, Linjie Li, Difei Gao, Qinchen WU, Mingyi Yan, Zhengyuan Yang, Lijuan Wang, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for enhancing human productivity by assisting with computer tasks. Existing task formulations primarily focus on simple tasks that can be specified by a single, language-only instruction, such as "Insert a new slide." In this work, we introduce VideoGUI, a novel multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate GUI assistants on visual-centric GUI tasks. Sourced from high-quality web instructional videos, our benchmark focuses on tasks involving professional and novel software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop or Stable Diffusion WebUI) and complex activities (e.g., video editing). VideoGUI evaluates GUI assistants through a hierarchical process, allowing for identification of the specific levels at which they may fail: (i) high-level planning: reconstruct procedural subtasks from visual conditions without language descriptions; (ii) middle-level planning: generate sequences of precise action narrations based on visual state (i.e., screenshot) and goals; (iii) atomic action execution: perform specific actions such as accurately clicking designated elements. For each level, we design evaluation metrics across individual dimensions to provide clear signals, such as individual performance in clicking, dragging, typing, and scrolling for atomic action execution. Our evaluation on VideoGUI reveals that even the SoTA large multimodal model GPT4o performs poorly on visual-centric GUI tasks, especially for high-level planning.
Authors: Chenyu Zhou, Mengdan Zhang, Peixian Chen, Chaoyou Fu, Yunhang Shen, Xiawu Zheng, Xing Sun, Rongrong Ji
Abstract: The swift progress of Multi-modal Large Models (MLLMs) has showcased their impressive ability to tackle tasks blending vision and language. Yet, most current models and benchmarks cater to scenarios with a narrow scope of visual and textual contexts. These models often fall short when faced with complex comprehension tasks, which involve navigating through a plethora of irrelevant and potentially misleading information in both text and image forms. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new, more demanding task known as Interleaved Image-Text Comprehension (IITC). This task challenges models to discern and disregard superfluous elements in both images and text to accurately answer questions and to follow intricate instructions to pinpoint the relevant image. In support of this task, we further craft a new VEGA dataset, tailored for the IITC task on scientific content, and devised a subtask, Image-Text Association (ITA), to refine image-text correlation skills. Our evaluation of four leading closed-source models, as well as various open-source models using VEGA, underscores the rigorous nature of IITC. Even the most advanced models, such as Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT4V, only achieved modest success. By employing a multi-task, multi-scale post-training strategy, we have set a robust baseline for MLLMs on the IITC task, attaining an $85.8\%$ accuracy rate in image association and a $0.508$ Rouge score. These results validate the effectiveness of our dataset in improving MLLMs capabilities for nuanced image-text comprehension.
Authors: Lovish Madaan, Aaditya K. Singh, Rylan Schaeffer, Andrew Poulton, Sanmi Koyejo, Pontus Stenetorp, Sharan Narang, Dieuwke Hupkes
Abstract: Evaluation benchmarks are the cornerstone of measuring capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as well as driving progress in said capabilities. Originally designed to make claims about capabilities (or lack thereof) in fully pretrained models, evaluation benchmarks are now also extensively used to decide between various training choices. Despite this widespread usage, we rarely quantify the variance in our evaluation benchmarks, which dictates whether differences in performance are meaningful. Here, we define and measure a range of metrics geared towards measuring variance in evaluation benchmarks, including seed variance across initialisations, and monotonicity during training. By studying a large number of models -- both openly available and pretrained from scratch -- we provide empirical estimates for a variety of variance metrics, with considerations and recommendations for practitioners. We also evaluate the utility and tradeoffs of continuous versus discrete performance measures and explore options for better understanding and reducing this variance. We find that simple changes, such as framing choice tasks (like MMLU) as completion tasks, can often reduce variance for smaller scale ($\sim$7B) models, while more involved methods inspired from human testing literature (such as item analysis and item response theory) struggle to meaningfully reduce variance. Overall, our work provides insights into variance in evaluation benchmarks, suggests LM-specific techniques to reduce variance, and more generally encourages practitioners to carefully factor in variance when comparing models.
Authors: Yuanhong Wang, Juhua Pu, Yuyi Wang, Ond\v{r}ej Ku\v{z}elka
Abstract: Weighted model counting (WMC) is the task of computing the weighted sum of all satisfying assignments (i.e., models) of a propositional formula. Similarly, weighted model sampling (WMS) aims to randomly generate models with probability proportional to their respective weights. Both WMC and WMS are hard to solve exactly, falling under the $\#\mathsf{P}$-hard complexity class. However, it is known that the counting problem may sometimes be tractable, if the propositional formula can be compactly represented and expressed in first-order logic. In such cases, model counting problems can be solved in time polynomial in the domain size, and are known as domain-liftable. The following question then arises: Is it also the case for weighted model sampling? This paper addresses this question and answers it affirmatively. Specifically, we prove the domain-liftability under sampling for the two-variables fragment of first-order logic with counting quantifiers in this paper, by devising an efficient sampling algorithm for this fragment that runs in time polynomial in the domain size. We then further show that this result continues to hold even in the presence of cardinality constraints. To empirically verify our approach, we conduct experiments over various first-order formulas designed for the uniform generation of combinatorial structures and sampling in statistical-relational models. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms a start-of-the-art WMS sampler by a substantial margin, confirming the theoretical results.
Authors: Huanhuan Ma, Weizhi Xu, Yifan Wei, Liuji Chen, Liang Wang, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang
Abstract: Fact verification aims to automatically probe the veracity of a claim based on several pieces of evidence. Existing works are always engaging in accuracy improvement, let alone explainability, a critical capability of fact verification systems. Constructing an explainable fact verification system in a complex multi-hop scenario is consistently impeded by the absence of a relevant, high-quality dataset. Previous datasets either suffer from excessive simplification or fail to incorporate essential considerations for explainability. To address this, we present EXFEVER, a pioneering dataset for multi-hop explainable fact verification. With over 60,000 claims involving 2-hop and 3-hop reasoning, each is created by summarizing and modifying information from hyperlinked Wikipedia documents. Each instance is accompanied by a veracity label and an explanation that outlines the reasoning path supporting the veracity classification. Additionally, we demonstrate a novel baseline system on our EX-FEVER dataset, showcasing document retrieval, explanation generation, and claim verification, and validate the significance of our dataset. Furthermore, we highlight the potential of utilizing Large Language Models in the fact verification task. We hope our dataset could make a significant contribution by providing ample opportunities to explore the integration of natural language explanations in the domain of fact verification.
Authors: Jiaxin Bai, Chen Luo, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Yangqiu Song
Abstract: Understanding user intentions is essential for improving product recommendations, navigation suggestions, and query reformulations. However, user intentions can be intricate, involving multiple sessions and attribute requirements connected by logical operators such as And, Or, and Not. For instance, a user may search for Nike or Adidas running shoes across various sessions, with a preference for purple. In another example, a user may have purchased a mattress in a previous session and is now looking for a matching bed frame without intending to buy another mattress. Existing research on session understanding has not adequately addressed making product or attribute recommendations for such complex intentions. In this paper, we present the task of logical session complex query answering (LS-CQA), where sessions are treated as hyperedges of items, and we frame the problem of complex intention understanding as an LS-CQA task on an aggregated hypergraph of sessions, items, and attributes. This is a unique complex query answering task with sessions as ordered hyperedges. We also introduce a new model, the Logical Session Graph Transformer (LSGT), which captures interactions among items across different sessions and their logical connections using a transformer structure. We analyze the expressiveness of LSGT and prove the permutation invariance of the inputs for the logical operators. By evaluating LSGT on three datasets, we demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art results.
Authors: Timotheus Kampik, Nico Potyka, Xiang Yin, Kristijonas \v{C}yras, Francesca Toni
Abstract: We present a principle-based analysis of contribution functions for quantitative bipolar argumentation graphs that quantify the contribution of one argument to another. The introduced principles formalise the intuitions underlying different contribution functions as well as expectations one would have regarding the behaviour of contribution functions in general. As none of the covered contribution functions satisfies all principles, our analysis can serve as a tool that enables the selection of the most suitable function based on the requirements of a given use case.
Authors: Cheng Wang, Chuwen Wang, Wang Zhang, Shirong Zeng, Yu Zhao, Ronghui Ning, Changjun Jiang
Abstract: As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly prevalent in scientific research, data-driven methodologies appear to overshadow traditional approaches in resolving scientific problems. In this Perspective, we revisit a classic classification of scientific problems and acknowledge that a series of unresolved problems remain. Throughout the history of researching scientific problems, scientists have continuously formed new paradigms facilitated by advances in data, algorithms, and computational power. To better tackle unresolved problems, especially those of organised complexity, a novel paradigm is necessitated. While recognising that the strengths of new paradigms have expanded the scope of resolvable scientific problems, we aware that the continued advancement of data, algorithms, and computational power alone is hardly to bring a new paradigm. We posit that the integration of paradigms, which capitalises on the strengths of each, represents a promising approach. Specifically, we focus on next-generation simulation (NGS), which can serve as a platform to integrate methods from different paradigms. We propose a methodology, sophisticated behavioural simulation (SBS), to realise it. SBS represents a higher level of paradigms integration based on foundational models to simulate complex systems, such as social systems involving sophisticated human strategies and behaviours. NGS extends beyond the capabilities of traditional mathematical modelling simulations and agent-based modelling simulations, and therefore, positions itself as a potential solution to problems of organised complexity in complex systems.
Authors: Xiujie Song, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu, Chunhao Zhang, Yanyi Chen
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their recent success, are hardly comprehensively tested for their cognitive abilities. Inspired by the prevalent use of the "Cookie Theft" task in human cognition test, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark to evaluate high-level cognitive ability of LVLMs using images with rich semantics. It defines eight reasoning capabilities and consists of an image description task and a visual question answering task. Our evaluation on well-known LVLMs shows that there is still a large gap in cognitive ability between LVLMs and humans.
Authors: Gyubok Lee, Woosog Chay, Seonhee Cho, Edward Choi
Abstract: Text-to-SQL enables users to interact with databases using natural language, simplifying the retrieval and synthesis of information. Despite the remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) in translating natural language questions into SQL queries, widespread deployment remains limited due to two primary challenges. First, the effective use of text-to-SQL models depends on users' understanding of the model's capabilities-the scope of questions the model can correctly answer. Second, the absence of abstention mechanisms can lead to incorrect SQL generation going unnoticed, thereby undermining trust in the model's output. To enable wider deployment, it is crucial to address these challenges in model design and enhance model evaluation to build trust in the model's output. To this end, we introduce TrustSQL, a novel comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate text-to-SQL reliability-defined as a model's ability to correctly handle any type of input question by generating correct SQL queries for feasible questions and abstaining from generating infeasible ones (e.g., due to schema incompatibility or functionalities beyond SQL). We evaluate existing methods using a novel penalty-based scoring metric with two modeling approaches: (1) pipeline-based methods combining SQL generators with infeasible question detectors and SQL error detectors for abstention; and (2) unified methods using a single model for the entire task. Our experimental results reveal that achieving high scores under severe penalties requires significant effort and provide a new perspective on developing text-to-SQL models for safer deployment.
Authors: Wei Zhao, Zhe Li, Yige Li, Ye Zhang, Jun Sun
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in a wide range of real-world applications. Despite their impressive performance, recent studies have shown that LLMs are vulnerable to deliberately crafted adversarial prompts even when aligned via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or supervised fine-tuning. While existing defense methods focus on either detecting harmful prompts or reducing the likelihood of harmful responses through various means, defending LLMs against jailbreak attacks based on the inner mechanisms of LLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate how LLMs response to harmful prompts and propose a novel defense method termed \textbf{L}ayer-specific \textbf{Ed}iting (LED) to enhance the resilience of LLMs against jailbreak attacks. Through LED, we reveal that several critical \textit{safety layers} exist among the early layers of LLMs. We then show that realigning these safety layers (and some selected additional layers) with the decoded safe response from selected target layers can significantly improve the alignment of LLMs against jailbreak attacks. Extensive experiments across various LLMs (e.g., Llama2, Mistral) show the effectiveness of LED, which effectively defends against jailbreak attacks while maintaining performance on benign prompts. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ledllm/ledllm}.
Authors: Javier Naranjo-Alcazar, Jordi Grau-Haro, Pedro Zuccarello, David Almenar, Jesus Lopez-Ballester
Abstract: The analysis of the field traps where the mosquitoes insert their eggs is vital to check that the sterile insect technique (SIT) is working properly. This is because the number of hatched eggs may indicate that the sterile males are not competing with the wild ones. Nowadays, the study of the traps is done manually by microscope and is very time-consuming and prone to human error. This paper presents an automatic trap survey. For this purpose, a device has been designed that automatically scans the slat obtaining different overlapping photos. Subsequently, the images are analyzed by a Mask-RCNN neural network that segments the eggs and classifies them into 2 classes: full or hatch
Authors: Wei Song, Yadong Li, Jianhua Xu, Guowei Wu, Lingfeng Ming, Kexin Yi, Weihua Luo, Houyi Li, Yi Du, Fangda Guo, Kaicheng Yu
Abstract: As recent multi-modality large language models (MLLMs) have shown formidable proficiency on various complex tasks, there has been increasing attention on debating whether these models could eventually mirror human intelligence. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating solely on task performance, such as the accuracy of identifying the attribute of an object. Combining well-developed cognitive science to understand the intelligence of MLLMs beyond superficial achievements remains largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce the first cognitive-driven multi-lingual and multi-modal benchmark to evaluate the general intelligence ability of MLLMs, dubbed M3GIA. Specifically, we identify five key cognitive factors based on the well-recognized Cattell-Horn-Carrol (CHC) model of intelligence and propose a novel evaluation metric. In addition, since most MLLMs are trained to perform in different languages, a natural question arises: is language a key factor influencing the cognitive ability of MLLMs? As such, we go beyond English to encompass other languages based on their popularity, including Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean, to construct our M3GIA. We make sure all the data relevant to the cultural backgrounds are collected from their native context to avoid English-centric bias. We collected a significant corpus of data from human participants, revealing that the most advanced MLLM reaches the lower boundary of human intelligence in English. Yet, there remains a pronounced disparity in the other five languages assessed. We also reveals an interesting winner takes all phenomenon that are aligned with the discovery in cognitive studies. Our benchmark will be open-sourced, with the aspiration of facilitating the enhancement of cognitive capabilities in MLLMs.
Authors: Tristen Pool, Dennis Trujillo
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in the innovation of many disciplines. However, how they can best be developed for oncology remains underdeveloped. State-of-the-art OpenAI models were fine-tuned on a clinical dataset and clinical guidelines text corpus for two important cancer treatment factors, adjuvant radiation therapy and chemotherapy, using a novel Langchain prompt engineering pipeline. A high accuracy (0.85+) was achieved in the classification of adjuvant radiation therapy and chemotherapy for breast cancer patients. Furthermore, a confidence interval was formed from observational data on the quality of treatment from human oncologists to estimate the proportion of scenarios in which the model must outperform the original oncologist in its treatment prediction to be a better solution overall as 8.2% to 13.3%. Due to indeterminacy in the outcomes of cancer treatment decisions, future investigation, potentially a clinical trial, would be required to determine if this threshold was met by the models. Nevertheless, with 85% of U.S. cancer patients receiving treatment at local community facilities, these kinds of models could play an important part in expanding access to quality care with outcomes that lie, at minimum, close to a human oncologist.
Authors: Melvin Wong, Thiago Rios, Stefan Menzel, Yew Soon Ong
Abstract: Engineering design optimization requires an efficient combination of a 3D shape representation, an optimization algorithm, and a design performance evaluation method, which is often computationally expensive. We present a prompt evolution design optimization (PEDO) framework contextualized in a vehicle design scenario that leverages a vision-language model for penalizing impractical car designs synthesized by a generative model. The backbone of our framework is an evolutionary strategy coupled with an optimization objective function that comprises a physics-based solver and a vision-language model for practical or functional guidance in the generated car designs. In the prompt evolutionary search, the optimizer iteratively generates a population of text prompts, which embed user specifications on the aerodynamic performance and visual preferences of the 3D car designs. Then, in addition to the computational fluid dynamics simulations, the pre-trained vision-language model is used to penalize impractical designs and, thus, foster the evolutionary algorithm to seek more viable designs. Our investigations on a car design optimization problem show a wide spread of potential car designs generated at the early phase of the search, which indicates a good diversity of designs in the initial populations, and an increase of over 20\% in the probability of generating practical designs compared to a baseline framework without using a vision-language model. Visual inspection of the designs against the performance results demonstrates prompt evolution as a very promising paradigm for finding novel designs with good optimization performance while providing ease of use in specifying design specifications and preferences via a natural language interface.
Authors: Simon Krogmann, Pascal Lenzner, Louise Molitor, Alexander Skopalik
Abstract: We consider non-cooperative facility location games where both facilities and clients act strategically and heavily influence each other. This contrasts established game-theoretic facility location models with non-strategic clients that simply select the closest opened facility. In our model, every facility location has a set of attracted clients and each client has a set of shopping locations and a weight that corresponds to her spending capacity. Facility agents selfishly select a location for opening their facility to maximize the attracted total spending capacity, whereas clients strategically decide how to distribute their spending capacity among the opened facilities in their shopping range. We focus on a natural client behavior similar to classical load balancing: our selfish clients aim for a distribution that minimizes their maximum waiting times for getting serviced, where a facility's waiting time corresponds to its total attracted client weight. We show that subgame perfect equilibria exist and give almost tight constant bounds on the Price of Anarchy and the Price of Stability, which even hold for a broader class of games with arbitrary client behavior. Since facilities and clients influence each other, it is crucial for the facilities to anticipate the selfish clients' behavior when selecting their location. For this, we provide an efficient algorithm that also implies an efficient check for equilibrium. Finally, we show that computing a socially optimal facility placement is NP-hard and that this result holds for all feasible client weight distributions.
Authors: Milton L. Montero, Jeffrey S. Bowers, Rui Ponte Costa, Casimir J. H. Ludwig, Gaurav Malhotra
Abstract: Recent research has shown that generative models with highly disentangled representations fail to generalise to unseen combination of generative factor values. These findings contradict earlier research which showed improved performance in out-of-training distribution settings when compared to entangled representations. Additionally, it is not clear if the reported failures are due to (a) encoders failing to map novel combinations to the proper regions of the latent space or (b) novel combinations being mapped correctly but the decoder/downstream process is unable to render the correct output for the unseen combinations. We investigate these alternatives by testing several models on a range of datasets and training settings. We find that (i) when models fail, their encoders also fail to map unseen combinations to correct regions of the latent space and (ii) when models succeed, it is either because the test conditions do not exclude enough examples, or because excluded generative factors determine independent parts of the output image. Based on these results, we argue that to generalise properly, models not only need to capture factors of variation, but also understand how to invert the generative process that was used to generate the data.
Authors: Giuseppe Serra, Mathias Niepert
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models. Inspired by the learning to explain (L2X) paradigm, we propose L2XGNN, a framework for explainable GNNs which provides faithful explanations by design. L2XGNN learns a mechanism for selecting explanatory subgraphs (motifs) which are exclusively used in the GNNs message-passing operations. L2XGNN is able to select, for each input graph, a subgraph with specific properties such as being sparse and connected. Imposing such constraints on the motifs often leads to more interpretable and effective explanations. Experiments on several datasets suggest that L2XGNN achieves the same classification accuracy as baseline methods using the entire input graph while ensuring that only the provided explanations are used to make predictions. Moreover, we show that L2XGNN is able to identify motifs responsible for the graph's properties it is intended to predict.
Authors: Malte Hoffmann, Andrew Hoopes, Douglas N. Greve, Bruce Fischl, Adrian V. Dalca
Abstract: Affine image registration is a cornerstone of medical image analysis. While classical algorithms can achieve excellent accuracy, they solve a time-consuming optimization for every image pair. Deep-learning (DL) methods learn a function that maps an image pair to an output transform. Evaluating the function is fast, but capturing large transforms can be challenging, and networks tend to struggle if a test-image characteristic shifts from the training domain, such as resolution. Most affine methods are agnostic to the anatomy the user wishes to align, meaning the registration will be inaccurate if algorithms consider all structures in the image. We address these shortcomings with SynthMorph, a fast, symmetric, diffeomorphic, and easy-to-use DL tool for joint affine-deformable registration of any brain image without preprocessing. First, we leverage a strategy that trains networks with widely varying images synthesized from label maps, yielding robust performance for image types unseen at training. Second, we optimize the spatial overlap of select anatomical labels. This enables networks to distinguish anatomy of interest from irrelevant structures, removing the need for preprocessing that excludes content that may impinge on anatomy-specific registration. Third, we combine the affine model with a deformable hypernetwork that lets users choose the optimal deformation-field regularity for their specific data, at registration time, in a fraction of the time required by classical methods. We analyze how competing architectures learn affine transforms and compare state-of-the-art registration tools across an extremely diverse set of neuroimaging data, aiming to truly capture the behavior of methods in the real world. SynthMorph demonstrates high accuracy and is available at https://w3id.org/synthmorph, as a single complete end-to-end solution for registration of brain MRI.
Authors: Victor J. B. Jung, Arne Symons, Linyan Mei, Marian Verhelst, Luca Benini
Abstract: To meet the growing need for computational power for DNNs, multiple specialized hardware architectures have been proposed. Each DNN layer should be mapped onto the hardware with the most efficient schedule, however, SotA schedulers struggle to consistently provide optimum schedules in a reasonable time across all DNN-HW combinations. This paper proposes SALSA, a fast dual-engine scheduler to generate optimal execution schedules for both even and uneven mapping. We introduce a new strategy, combining exhaustive search with simulated annealing to address the dynamic nature of the loop ordering design space size across layers. SALSA is extensively benchmarked against two SotA schedulers, LOMA and Timeloop on 5 different DNNs, on average SALSA finds schedules with 11.9% and 7.6% lower energy while speeding up the search by 1.7x and 24x compared to LOMA and Timeloop, respectively.
Authors: Stanislav Dereka, Ivan Karpukhin, Maksim Zhdanov, Sergey Kolesnikov
Abstract: Deep ensembles are capable of achieving state-of-the-art results in classification and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. However, their effectiveness is limited due to the homogeneity of learned patterns within ensembles. To overcome this issue, our study introduces Saliency Diversified Deep Ensemble (SDDE), a novel approach that promotes diversity among ensemble members by leveraging saliency maps. Through incorporating saliency map diversification, our method outperforms conventional ensemble techniques and improves calibration in multiple classification and OOD detection tasks. In particular, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art OOD detection quality, calibration, and accuracy on multiple benchmarks, including CIFAR10/100 and large-scale ImageNet datasets.
Authors: Andrew Draganov, Simon Dohn
Abstract: It has become standard to use gradient-based dimensionality reduction (DR) methods like tSNE and UMAP when explaining what AI models have learned. This makes sense: these methods are fast, robust, and have an uncanny ability to find semantic patterns in high-dimensional data without supervision. Despite this, gradient-based DR methods lack the most important quality that an explainability method should possess: themselves being explainable. That is, given a UMAP output, it is currently unclear what one can say about the corresponding input. We work towards closing this question by relating UMAP to classical DR techniques. Specifically, we show that one can fully recover methods like PCA, MDS, and ISOMAP in the modern DR paradigm: by applying attractions and repulsions onto a randomly initialized dataset. We also show that, with a small change, Locally Linear Embeddings (LLE) can indistinguishably reproduce UMAP outputs. This implies that the UMAP effective objective is minimized by this modified version of LLE (and vice versa). Given this, we discuss what must be true of UMAP emebddings and present avenues for future work.
Authors: Yake Wei, Ruoxuan Feng, Zihe Wang, Di Hu
Abstract: One primary topic of multimodal learning is to jointly incorporate heterogeneous information from different modalities. However most models often suffer from unsatisfactory multimodal cooperation which cannot jointly utilize all modalities well. Some methods are proposed to identify and enhance the worse learnt modality but they are often hard to provide the fine-grained observation of multimodal cooperation at sample-level with theoretical support. Hence it is essential to reasonably observe and improve the fine-grained cooperation between modalities especially when facing realistic scenarios where the modality discrepancy could vary across different samples. To this end we introduce a sample-level modality valuation metric to evaluate the contribution of each modality for each sample. Via modality valuation we observe that modality discrepancy indeed could be different at sample-level beyond the global contribution discrepancy at dataset-level. We further analyze this issue and improve cooperation between modalities at sample-level by enhancing the discriminative ability of low-contributing modalities in a targeted manner. Overall our methods reasonably observe the fine-grained uni-modal contribution and achieve considerable improvement. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Valuate-and-Enhance-Multimodal-Cooperation.
URLs: https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Valuate-and-Enhance-Multimodal-Cooperation.
Authors: Rebecca S. Stone, Pedro E. Chavarrias-Solano, Andrew J. Bulpitt, David C. Hogg, Sharib Ali
Abstract: While several previous studies have devised methods for segmentation of polyps, most of these methods are not rigorously assessed on multi-center datasets. Variability due to appearance of polyps from one center to another, difference in endoscopic instrument grades, and acquisition quality result in methods with good performance on in-distribution test data, and poor performance on out-of-distribution or underrepresented samples. Unfair models have serious implications and pose a critical challenge to clinical applications. We adapt an implicit bias mitigation method which leverages Bayesian predictive uncertainties during training to encourage the model to focus on underrepresented sample regions. We demonstrate the potential of this approach to improve generalisability without sacrificing state-of-the-art performance on a challenging multi-center polyp segmentation dataset (PolypGen) with different centers and image modalities.
Authors: Xiaobao Wu, Fengjun Pan, Anh Tuan Luu
Abstract: Topic models have a rich history with various applications and have recently been reinvigorated by neural topic modeling. However, these numerous topic models adopt totally distinct datasets, implementations, and evaluations. This impedes quick utilization and fair comparisons, and thereby hinders their research progress and applications. To tackle this challenge, we in this paper propose a Topic Modeling System Toolkit (TopMost). Compared to existing toolkits, TopMost stands out by supporting more extensive features. It covers a broader spectrum of topic modeling scenarios with their complete lifecycles, including datasets, preprocessing, models, training, and evaluations. Thanks to its highly cohesive and decoupled modular design, TopMost enables rapid utilization, fair comparisons, and flexible extensions of diverse cutting-edge topic models. Our code, tutorials, and documentation are available at https://github.com/bobxwu/topmost.
Authors: Lele Cao, Gustaf Halvardsson, Andrew McCornack, Vilhelm von Ehrenheim, Pawel Herman
Abstract: This paper addresses the growing application of data-driven approaches within the Private Equity (PE) industry, particularly in sourcing investment targets (i.e., companies) for Venture Capital (VC) and Growth Capital (GC). We present a comprehensive review of the relevant approaches and propose a novel approach leveraging a Transformer-based Multivariate Time Series Classifier (TMTSC) for predicting the success likelihood of any candidate company. The objective of our research is to optimize sourcing performance for VC and GC investments by formally defining the sourcing problem as a multivariate time series classification task. We consecutively introduce the key components of our implementation which collectively contribute to the successful application of TMTSC in VC/GC sourcing: input features, model architecture, optimization target, and investor-centric data processing. Our extensive experiments on two real-world investment tasks, benchmarked towards three popular baselines, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving decision making within the VC and GC industry.
Authors: Muhammad Hamza Asad, Saeed Anwar, Abdul Bais
Abstract: Modern agriculture heavily relies on Site-Specific Farm Management practices, necessitating accurate detection, localization, and quantification of crops and weeds in the field, which can be achieved using deep learning techniques. In this regard, crop and weed-specific binary segmentation models have shown promise. However, uncontrolled field conditions limit their performance from one field to the other. To improve semantic model generalization, existing methods augment and synthesize agricultural data to account for uncontrolled field conditions. However, given highly varied field conditions, these methods have limitations. To overcome the challenges of model deterioration in such conditions, we propose utilizing data specific to other crops and weeds for our specific target problem. To achieve this, we propose a novel ensemble framework. Our approach involves utilizing different crop and weed models trained on diverse datasets and employing a teacher-student configuration. By using homogeneous stacking of base models and a trainable meta-architecture to combine their outputs, we achieve significant improvements for Canola crops and Kochia weeds on unseen test data, surpassing the performance of single semantic segmentation models. We identify the UNET meta-architecture as the most effective in this context. Finally, through ablation studies, we demonstrate and validate the effectiveness of our proposed model. We observe that including base models trained on other target crops and weeds can help generalize the model to capture varied field conditions. Lastly, we propose two novel datasets with varied conditions for comparisons.
Authors: Liam Parker, Francois Lanusse, Siavash Golkar, Leopoldo Sarra, Miles Cranmer, Alberto Bietti, Michael Eickenberg, Geraud Krawezik, Michael McCabe, Ruben Ohana, Mariel Pettee, Bruno Regaldo-Saint Blancard, Tiberiu Tesileanu, Kyunghyun Cho, Shirley Ho
Abstract: We present AstroCLIP, a single, versatile model that can embed both galaxy images and spectra into a shared, physically meaningful latent space. These embeddings can then be used - without any model fine-tuning - for a variety of downstream tasks including (1) accurate in-modality and cross-modality semantic similarity search, (2) photometric redshift estimation, (3) galaxy property estimation from both images and spectra, and (4) morphology classification. Our approach to implementing AstroCLIP consists of two parts. First, we embed galaxy images and spectra separately by pretraining separate transformer-based image and spectrum encoders in self-supervised settings. We then align the encoders using a contrastive loss. We apply our method to spectra from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and images from its corresponding Legacy Imaging Survey. Overall, we find remarkable performance on all downstream tasks, even relative to supervised baselines. For example, for a task like photometric redshift prediction, we find similar performance to a specifically-trained ResNet18, and for additional tasks like physical property estimation (stellar mass, age, metallicity, and sSFR), we beat this supervised baseline by 19\% in terms of $R^2$. We also compare our results to a state-of-the-art self-supervised single-modal model for galaxy images, and find that our approach outperforms this benchmark by roughly a factor of two on photometric redshift estimation and physical property prediction in terms of $R^2$, while remaining roughly in-line in terms of morphology classification. Ultimately, our approach represents the first cross-modal self-supervised model for galaxies, and the first self-supervised transformer-based architectures for galaxy images and spectra.
Authors: Alexander Robey, Eric Wong, Hamed Hassani, George J. Pappas
Abstract: Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, and Claude are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks. Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs. Across a range of popular LLMs, SmoothLLM sets the state-of-the-art for robustness against the GCG, PAIR, RandomSearch, and AmpleGCG jailbreaks. SmoothLLM is also resistant against adaptive GCG attacks, exhibits a small, though non-negligible trade-off between robustness and nominal performance, and is compatible with any LLM. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/arobey1/smooth-llm}.
Authors: Wensheng Lin, Yuna Yan, Lixin Li, Zhu Han, Tad Matsumoto
Abstract: This letter proposes a novel anti-interference technique, semantic interference cancellation (SemantIC), for enhancing information quality towards the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. SemantIC only requires the receiver to concatenate the channel decoder with a semantic auto-encoder. This constructs a turbo loop which iteratively and alternately eliminates noise in the signal domain and the semantic domain. From the viewpoint of network information theory, the neural network of the semantic auto-encoder stores side information by training, and provides side information in iterative decoding, as an implementation of the Wyner-Ziv theorem. Simulation results verify the performance improvement by SemantIC without extra channel resource cost.
Authors: Da Song, Xuan Xie, Jiayang Song, Derui Zhu, Yuheng Huang, Felix Juefei-Xu, Lei Ma
Abstract: Over the past decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had great success recently and is being used in a wide range of academic and industrial fields. More recently, LLMs have made rapid advancements that have propelled AI to a new level, enabling even more diverse applications and industrial domains with intelligence, particularly in areas like software engineering and natural language processing. Nevertheless, a number of emerging trustworthiness concerns and issues exhibited in LLMs have already recently received much attention, without properly solving which the widespread adoption of LLMs could be greatly hindered in practice. The distinctive characteristics of LLMs, such as the self-attention mechanism, extremely large model scale, and autoregressive generation schema, differ from classic AI software based on CNNs and RNNs and present new challenges for quality analysis. Up to the present, it still lacks universal and systematic analysis techniques for LLMs despite the urgent industrial demand. Towards bridging this gap, we initiate an early exploratory study and propose a universal analysis framework for LLMs, LUNA, designed to be general and extensible, to enable versatile analysis of LLMs from multiple quality perspectives in a human-interpretable manner. In particular, we first leverage the data from desired trustworthiness perspectives to construct an abstract model as an auxiliary analysis asset, which is empowered by various abstract model construction methods. To assess the quality of the abstract model, we collect and define a number of evaluation metrics, aiming at both abstract model level and the semantics level. Then, the semantics, which is the degree of satisfaction of the LLM w.r.t. the trustworthiness perspective, is bound to and enriches the abstract model with semantics, which enables more detailed analysis applications for diverse purposes.
Authors: Heinrich Peters, Yozen Liu, Francesco Barbieri, Raiyan Abdul Baten, Sandra C. Matz, Maarten W. Bos
Abstract: The success of online social platforms hinges on their ability to predict and understand user behavior at scale. Here, we present data suggesting that context-aware modeling approaches may offer a holistic yet lightweight and potentially privacy-preserving representation of user engagement on online social platforms. Leveraging deep LSTM neural networks to analyze more than 100 million Snapchat sessions from almost 80.000 users, we demonstrate that patterns of active and passive use are predictable from past behavior (R2=0.345) and that the integration of context features substantially improves predictive performance compared to the behavioral baseline model (R2=0.522). Features related to smartphone connectivity status, location, temporal context, and weather were found to capture non-redundant variance in user engagement relative to features derived from histories of in-app behaviors. Further, we show that a large proportion of variance can be accounted for with minimal behavioral histories if momentary context is considered (R2=0.442). These results indicate the potential of context-aware approaches for making models more efficient and privacy-preserving by reducing the need for long data histories. Finally, we employ model explainability techniques to glean preliminary insights into the underlying behavioral mechanisms. Our findings are consistent with the notion of context-contingent, habit-driven patterns of active and passive use, underscoring the value of contextualized representations of user behavior for predicting user engagement on social platforms.
Authors: Jing Pan, Jian Wu, Yashesh Gaur, Sunit Sivasankaran, Zhuo Chen, Shujie Liu, Jinyu Li
Abstract: We present a cost-effective method to integrate speech into a large language model (LLM), resulting in a Contextual Speech Model with Instruction-following/in-context-learning Capabilities (COSMIC) multi-modal LLM. Using GPT-3.5, we generate Speech Comprehension Test Question-Answer (SQA) pairs from speech transcriptions for supervised instruction tuning. With under 30 million trainable parameters and only 450 hours of English speech data, COSMIC demonstrates emerging capabilities in instruction-following and in-context learning. Equipped with such capabilities, COSMIC achieves a maximum 33.18 BLEU score in 0-shot EN-to-X speech to text translation (S2TT) and a significant boost in the 1-shot setting. Additionally, there is an average 25.8\% relative Word Error Rate (WER) reduction for 1-shot cross-domain adaptation. COSMIC exhibits a significant automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy gain in contextual biasing tasks due to its instruction-following capability.
Authors: Dipanjyoti Paul, Arpita Chowdhury, Xinqi Xiong, Feng-Ju Chang, David Carlyn, Samuel Stevens, Kaiya L. Provost, Anuj Karpatne, Bryan Carstens, Daniel Rubenstein, Charles Stewart, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Yu Su, Wei-Lun Chao
Abstract: We present a novel usage of Transformers to make image classification interpretable. Unlike mainstream classifiers that wait until the last fully connected layer to incorporate class information to make predictions, we investigate a proactive approach, asking each class to search for itself in an image. We realize this idea via a Transformer encoder-decoder inspired by DEtection TRansformer (DETR). We learn "class-specific" queries (one for each class) as input to the decoder, enabling each class to localize its patterns in an image via cross-attention. We name our approach INterpretable TRansformer (INTR), which is fairly easy to implement and exhibits several compelling properties. We show that INTR intrinsically encourages each class to attend distinctively; the cross-attention weights thus provide a faithful interpretation of the prediction. Interestingly, via "multi-head" cross-attention, INTR could identify different "attributes" of a class, making it particularly suitable for fine-grained classification and analysis, which we demonstrate on eight datasets. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly accessible at the Imageomics Institute GitHub site: https://github.com/Imageomics/INTR.
Authors: Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Christopher Homan, Lora Aroyo, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Alicia Parrish, Alex Taylor, Mark D\'iaz, Ding Wang, Gregory Serapio-Garc\'ia
Abstract: Human annotation plays a core role in machine learning -- annotations for supervised models, safety guardrails for generative models, and human feedback for reinforcement learning, to cite a few avenues. However, the fact that many of these human annotations are inherently subjective is often overlooked. Recent work has demonstrated that ignoring rater subjectivity (typically resulting in rater disagreement) is problematic within specific tasks and for specific subgroups. Generalizable methods to harness rater disagreement and thus understand the socio-cultural leanings of subjective tasks remain elusive. In this paper, we propose GRASP, a comprehensive disagreement analysis framework to measure group association in perspectives among different rater sub-groups, and demonstrate its utility in assessing the extent of systematic disagreements in two datasets: (1) safety annotations of human-chatbot conversations, and (2) offensiveness annotations of social media posts, both annotated by diverse rater pools across different socio-demographic axes. Our framework (based on disagreement metrics) reveals specific rater groups that have significantly different perspectives than others on certain tasks, and helps identify demographic axes that are crucial to consider in specific task contexts.
Authors: Jacob Penney, Jo\~ao Felipe Pimentel, Igor Steinmacher, Marco A. Gerosa
Abstract: Computational thinking, and by extension, computer programming, is notoriously challenging to learn. Conversational agents and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) have the potential to facilitate this learning process by offering personalized guidance, interactive learning experiences, and code generation. However, current genAI-based chatbots focus on professional developers and may not adequately consider educational needs. Involving educators in conceiving educational tools is critical for ensuring usefulness and usability. We enlisted nine instructors to engage in design fiction sessions in which we elicited abilities such a conversational agent supported by genAI should display. Participants envisioned a conversational agent that guides students stepwise through exercises, tuning its method of guidance with an awareness of the educational background, skills and deficits, and learning preferences. The insights obtained in this paper can guide future implementations of tutoring conversational agents oriented toward teaching computational thinking and computer programming.
Authors: Shivam Aggarwal, Hans Jakob Damsgaard, Alessandro Pappalardo, Giuseppe Franco, Thomas B. Preu{\ss}er, Michaela Blott, Tulika Mitra
Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a powerful technique for model compression, reducing the numerical precision in neural networks without additional training overhead. Recent works have investigated adopting 8-bit floating-point formats(FP8) in the context of PTQ for model inference. However, floating-point formats smaller than 8 bits and their relative comparison in terms of accuracy-hardware cost with integers remains unexplored on FPGAs. In this work, we present minifloats, which are reduced-precision floating-point formats capable of further reducing the memory footprint, latency, and energy cost of a model while approaching full-precision model accuracy. We implement a custom FPGA-based multiply-accumulate operator library and explore the vast design space, comparing minifloat and integer representations across 3 to 8 bits for both weights and activations. We also examine the applicability of various integerbased quantization techniques to minifloats. Our experiments show that minifloats offer a promising alternative for emerging workloads such as vision transformers.
Authors: Zhiyu Qu, Lan Yang, Honggang Zhang, Tao Xiang, Kaiyue Pang, Yi-Zhe Song
Abstract: Creating multi-view wire art (MVWA), a static 3D sculpture with diverse interpretations from different viewpoints, is a complex task even for skilled artists. In response, we present DreamWire, an AI system enabling everyone to craft MVWA easily. Users express their vision through text prompts or scribbles, freeing them from intricate 3D wire organisation. Our approach synergises 3D B\'ezier curves, Prim's algorithm, and knowledge distillation from diffusion models or their variants (e.g., ControlNet). This blend enables the system to represent 3D wire art, ensuring spatial continuity and overcoming data scarcity. Extensive evaluation and analysis are conducted to shed insight on the inner workings of the proposed system, including the trade-off between connectivity and visual aesthetics.
Authors: Da Wu, Jingye Yang, Kai Wang
Abstract: The term "Reversal Curse" refers to the scenario where auto-regressive decoder large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A," assuming that B and A are distinct and can be uniquely identified from each other, demonstrating a basic failure of logical deduction. This raises a red flag in the use of GPT models for certain general tasks such as constructing knowledge graphs, considering their adherence to this symmetric principle. In our study, we examined a bidirectional LLM, BERT, and found that it is immune to the reversal curse. Driven by ongoing efforts to construct biomedical knowledge graphs with LLMs, we also embarked on evaluating more complex but essential deductive reasoning capabilities. This process included first training encoder and decoder language models to master the intersection and union operations on two sets and then moving on to assess their capability to infer different combinations of union and intersection operations on three newly created sets. The findings showed that while both encoder and decoder language models, trained for tasks involving two sets (union/intersection), were proficient in such scenarios, they encountered difficulties when dealing with operations that included three sets (various combinations of union and intersection). Our research highlights the distinct characteristics of encoder and decoder models in simple and complex logical reasoning. In practice, the choice between BERT and GPT should be guided by the specific requirements and nature of the task at hand, leveraging their respective strengths in bidirectional context comprehension and sequence prediction.
Authors: Giovanni Luca Marchetti, Christopher Hillar, Danica Kragic, Sophia Sanborn
Abstract: In this work, we formally prove that, under certain conditions, if a neural network is invariant to a finite group then its weights recover the Fourier transform on that group. This provides a mathematical explanation for the emergence of Fourier features -- a ubiquitous phenomenon in both biological and artificial learning systems. The results hold even for non-commutative groups, in which case the Fourier transform encodes all the irreducible unitary group representations. Our findings have consequences for the problem of symmetry discovery. Specifically, we demonstrate that the algebraic structure of an unknown group can be recovered from the weights of a network that is at least approximately invariant within certain bounds. Overall, this work contributes to a foundation for an algebraic learning theory of invariant neural network representations.
Authors: Viacheslav Sinii, Alexander Nikulin, Vladislav Kurenkov, Ilya Zisman, Sergey Kolesnikov
Abstract: Recently, it has been shown that transformers pre-trained on diverse datasets with multi-episode contexts can generalize to new reinforcement learning tasks in-context. A key limitation of previously proposed models is their reliance on a predefined action space size and structure. The introduction of a new action space often requires data re-collection and model re-training, which can be costly for some applications. In our work, we show that it is possible to mitigate this issue by proposing the Headless-AD model that, despite being trained only once, is capable of generalizing to discrete action spaces of variable size, semantic content and order. By experimenting with Bernoulli and contextual bandits, as well as a gridworld environment, we show that Headless-AD exhibits significant capability to generalize to action spaces it has never encountered, even outperforming specialized models trained for a specific set of actions on several environment configurations.
Authors: Shu Liu, Shangqing Zhao, Chenghao Jia, Xinlin Zhuang, Zhaoguang Long, Jie Zhou, Aimin Zhou, Man Lan, Qingquan Wu, Chong Yang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their proficiency and reliability in the specialized domain of financial data analysis, particularly focusing on data-driven thinking, remain uncertain. To bridge this gap, we introduce \texttt{FinDABench}, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the financial data analysis capabilities of LLMs within this context. \texttt{FinDABench} assesses LLMs across three dimensions: 1) \textbf{Foundational Ability}, evaluating the models' ability to perform financial numerical calculation and corporate sentiment risk assessment; 2) \textbf{Reasoning Ability}, determining the models' ability to quickly comprehend textual information and analyze abnormal financial reports; and 3) \textbf{Technical Skill}, examining the models' use of technical knowledge to address real-world data analysis challenges involving analysis generation and charts visualization from multiple perspectives. We will release \texttt{FinDABench}, and the evaluation scripts at \url{https://github.com/cubenlp/BIBench}. \texttt{FinDABench} aims to provide a measure for in-depth analysis of LLM abilities and foster the advancement of LLMs in the field of financial data analysis.
Authors: Benoit Baudry, Khashayar Etemadi, Sen Fang, Yogya Gamage, Yi Liu, Yuxin Liu, Martin Monperrus, Javier Ron, Andr\'e Silva, Deepika Tiwari
Abstract: Generating fake data is an essential dimension of modern software testing, as demonstrated by the number and significance of data faking libraries. Yet, developers of faking libraries cannot keep up with the wide range of data to be generated for different natural languages and domains. In this paper, we assess the ability of generative AI for generating test data in different domains. We design three types of prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs), which perform test data generation tasks at different levels of integrability: 1) raw test data generation, 2) synthesizing programs in a specific language that generate useful test data, and 3) producing programs that use state-of-the-art faker libraries. We evaluate our approach by prompting LLMs to generate test data for 11 domains. The results show that LLMs can successfully generate realistic test data generators in a wide range of domains at all three levels of integrability.
Authors: Christopher Morris, Fabrizio Frasca, Nadav Dym, Haggai Maron, \.Ismail \.Ilkan Ceylan, Ron Levie, Derek Lim, Michael Bronstein, Martin Grohe, Stefanie Jegelka
Abstract: Machine learning on graphs, especially using graph neural networks (GNNs), has seen a surge in interest due to the wide availability of graph data across a broad spectrum of disciplines, from life to social and engineering sciences. Despite their practical success, our theoretical understanding of the properties of GNNs remains highly incomplete. Recent theoretical advancements primarily focus on elucidating the coarse-grained expressive power of GNNs, predominantly employing combinatorial techniques. However, these studies do not perfectly align with practice, particularly in understanding the generalization behavior of GNNs when trained with stochastic first-order optimization techniques. In this position paper, we argue that the graph machine learning community needs to shift its attention to developing a balanced theory of graph machine learning, focusing on a more thorough understanding of the interplay of expressive power, generalization, and optimization.
Authors: Samuel Garcin, James Doran, Shangmin Guo, Christopher G. Lucas, Stefano V. Albrecht
Abstract: Autonomous agents trained using deep reinforcement learning (RL) often lack the ability to successfully generalise to new environments, even when these environments share characteristics with the ones they have encountered during training. In this work, we investigate how the sampling of individual environment instances, or levels, affects the zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) ability of RL agents. We discover that, for deep actor-critic architectures sharing their base layers, prioritising levels according to their value loss minimises the mutual information between the agent's internal representation and the set of training levels in the generated training data. This provides a novel theoretical justification for the regularisation achieved by certain adaptive sampling strategies. We then turn our attention to unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, which assume control over level generation. We find that existing UED methods can significantly shift the training distribution, which translates to low ZSG performance. To prevent both overfitting and distributional shift, we introduce data-regularised environment design (DRED). DRED generates levels using a generative model trained to approximate the ground truth distribution of an initial set of level parameters. Through its grounding, DRED achieves significant improvements in ZSG over adaptive level sampling strategies and UED methods. Our code and experimental data are available at https://github.com/uoe-agents/dred.
Authors: Yingru Li, Jiawei Xu, Lei Han, Zhi-Quan Luo
Abstract: We propose HyperAgent, a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on the hypermodel framework for exploration in RL. HyperAgent allows for the efficient incremental approximation of posteriors associated with an optimal action-value function ($Q^\star$) without the need for conjugacy and follows the greedy policies w.r.t. these approximate posterior samples. We demonstrate that HyperAgent offers robust performance in large-scale deep RL benchmarks. It can solve Deep Sea hard exploration problems with episodes that optimally scale with problem size and exhibits significant efficiency gains in the Atari suite. Implementing HyperAgent requires minimal code addition to well-established deep RL frameworks like DQN. We theoretically prove that, under tabular assumptions, HyperAgent achieves logarithmic per-step computational complexity while attaining sublinear regret, matching the best known randomized tabular RL algorithm.
Authors: Gagan Bhatia, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Hasan Cavusoglu, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Abstract: We introduce FinTral, a suite of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (LLMs) built upon the Mistral-7b model and tailored for financial analysis. FinTral integrates textual, numerical, tabular, and image data. We enhance FinTral with domain-specific pretraining, instruction fine-tuning, and RLAIF training by exploiting a large collection of textual and visual datasets we curate for this work. We also introduce an extensive benchmark featuring nine tasks and 25 datasets for evaluation, including hallucinations in the financial domain. Our FinTral model trained with direct preference optimization employing advanced Tools and Retrieval methods, dubbed FinTral-DPO-T&R, demonstrates an exceptional zero-shot performance. It outperforms ChatGPT-3.5 in all tasks and surpasses GPT-4 in five out of nine tasks, marking a significant advancement in AI-driven financial technology. We also demonstrate that FinTral has the potential to excel in real-time analysis and decision-making in diverse financial contexts. The GitHub repository for FinTral is available at \url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/fintral}.
Authors: Samuel Teuber, Stefan Mitsch, Andr\'e Platzer
Abstract: While neural networks (NNs) have potential as autonomous controllers for Cyber-Physical Systems, verifying the safety of NN based control systems (NNCSs) poses significant challenges for the practical use of NNs, especially when safety is needed for unbounded time horizons. One reason is the intractability of analyzing NNs, ODEs and hybrid systems. To this end, we introduce VerSAILLE (Verifiably Safe AI via Logically Linked Envelopes): The first general approach that allows reusing control theory results for NNCS verification. By joining forces, we exploit the efficiency of NN verification tools while retaining the rigor of differential dynamic logic (dL). Based on provably safe control envelopes in dL, we derive specifications for the NN which is proven via NN verification. We show that a proof of the NN adhering to the specification is mirrored by a dL proof on the infinite-time safety of the NNCS. The NN verification properties resulting from hybrid systems typically contain nonlinear arithmetic and arbitrary logical structures while efficient NN verification merely supports linear constraints. To overcome this divide, we present Mosaic: An efficient, sound and complete verification approach for polynomial real arithmetic properties on piece-wise linear NNs. Mosaic partitions complex verification queries into simple queries and lifts off-the-shelf linear constraint tools to the nonlinear setting in a completeness-preserving manner by combining approximation with exact reasoning for counterexample regions. Our evaluation demonstrates the versatility of VerSAILLE and Mosaic: We prove infinite-time safety on the classical Vertical Airborne Collision Avoidance NNCS verification benchmark for two scenarios while (exhaustively) enumerating counterexample regions in unsafe scenarios. We also show that our approach significantly outperforms State-of-the-Art tools in closed-loop NNV.
Authors: Wei Han, Hui Chen, Soujanya Poria
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on multi-task instruction-following data has been proven to be a powerful learning paradigm for improving their zero-shot capabilities on new tasks. Recent works about high-quality instruction-following data generation and selection require amounts of human labor to conceive model-understandable instructions for the given tasks and carefully filter the LLM-generated data. In this work, we introduce an automatic instruction augmentation method named INSTRAUG in multimodal tasks. It starts from a handful of basic and straightforward meta instructions but can expand an instruction-following dataset by 30 times. Results on two popular multimodal instructionfollowing benchmarks MULTIINSTRUCT and InstructBLIP show that INSTRAUG can significantly improve the alignment of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) across 12 multimodal tasks, which is even equivalent to the benefits of scaling up training data multiple times.
Authors: Olivier Sala\"un, Fr\'ed\'eric Piedboeuf, Guillaume Le Berre, David Alfonso Hermelo, Philippe Langlais
Abstract: Keyphrase generation has primarily been explored within the context of academic research articles, with a particular focus on scientific domains and the English language. In this work, we present EUROPA, a dataset for multilingual keyphrase generation in the legal domain. It is derived from legal judgments from the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), and contains instances in all 24 EU official languages. We run multilingual models on our corpus and analyze the results, showing room for improvement on a domain-specific multilingual corpus such as the one we present.
Authors: Gemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei, Ryan Burnell, Libin Bai, Anmol Gulati, Garrett Tanzer, Damien Vincent, Zhufeng Pan, Shibo Wang, Soroosh Mariooryad, Yifan Ding, Xinyang Geng, Fred Alcober, Roy Frostig, Mark Omernick, Lexi Walker, Cosmin Paduraru, Christina Sorokin, Andrea Tacchetti, Colin Gaffney, Samira Daruki, Olcan Sercinoglu, Zach Gleicher, Juliette Love, Paul Voigtlaender, Rohan Jain, Gabriela Surita, Kareem Mohamed, Rory Blevins, Junwhan Ahn, Tao Zhu, Kornraphop Kawintiranon, Orhan Firat, Yiming Gu, Yujing Zhang, Matthew Rahtz, Manaal Faruqui, Natalie Clay, Justin Gilmer, JD Co-Reyes, Ivo Penchev, Rui Zhu, Nobuyuki Morioka, Kevin Hui, Krishna Haridasan, Victor Campos, Mahdis Mahdieh, Mandy Guo, Samer Hassan, Kevin Kilgour, Arpi Vezer, Heng-Tze Cheng, Raoul de Liedekerke, Siddharth Goyal, Paul Barham, DJ Strouse, Seb Noury, Jonas Adler, Mukund Sundararajan, Sharad Vikram, Dmitry Lepikhin, Michela Paganini, Xavier Garcia, Fan Yang, Dasha Valter, Maja Trebacz, Kiran Vodrahalli, Chulayuth Asawaroengchai, Roman Ring, Norbert Kalb, Livio Baldini Soares, Siddhartha Brahma, David Steiner, Tianhe Yu, Fabian Mentzer, Antoine He, Lucas Gonzalez, Bibo Xu, Raphael Lopez Kaufman, Laurent El Shafey, Junhyuk Oh, Tom Hennigan, George van den Driessche, Seth Odoom, Mario Lucic, Becca Roelofs, Sid Lall, Amit Marathe, Betty Chan, Santiago Ontanon, Luheng He, Denis Teplyashin, Jonathan Lai, Phil Crone, Bogdan Damoc, Lewis Ho, Sebastian Riedel, Karel Lenc, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Yang Xu, Mehran Kazemi, Ehsan Amid, Anastasia Petrushkina, Kevin Swersky, Ali Khodaei, Gowoon Chen, Chris Larkin, Mario Pinto, Geng Yan, Adria Puigdomenech Badia, Piyush Patil, Steven Hansen, Dave Orr, Sebastien M. R. Arnold, Jordan Grimstad, Andrew Dai, Sholto Douglas, Rishika Sinha, Vikas Yadav, Xi Chen, Elena Gribovskaya, Jacob Austin, Jeffrey Zhao, Kaushal Patel, Paul Komarek, Sophia Austin, Sebastian Borgeaud, Linda Friso, Abhimanyu Goyal, Ben Caine, Kris Cao, Da-Woon Chung, Matthew Lamm, Gabe Barth-Maron, Thais Kagohara, Kate Olszewska, Mia Chen, Kaushik Shivakumar, Rishabh Agarwal, Harshal Godhia, Ravi Rajwar, Javier Snaider, Xerxes Dotiwalla, Yuan Liu, Aditya Barua, Victor Ungureanu, Yuan Zhang, Bat-Orgil Batsaikhan, Mateo Wirth, James Qin, Ivo Danihelka, Tulsee Doshi, Martin Chadwick, Jilin Chen, Sanil Jain, Quoc Le, Arjun Kar, Madhu Gurumurthy, Cheng Li, Ruoxin Sang, Fangyu Liu, Lampros Lamprou, Rich Munoz, Nathan Lintz, Harsh Mehta, Heidi Howard, Malcolm Reynolds, Lora Aroyo, Quan Wang, Lorenzo Blanco, Albin Cassirer, Jordan Griffith, Dipanjan Das, Stephan Lee, Jakub Sygnowski, Zach Fisher, James Besley, Richard Powell, Zafarali Ahmed, Dominik Paulus, David Reitter, Zalan Borsos, Rishabh Joshi, Aedan Pope, Steven Hand, Vittorio Selo, Vihan Jain, Nikhil Sethi, Megha Goel, Takaki Makino, Rhys May, Zhen Yang, Johan Schalkwyk, Christina Butterfield, Anja Hauth, Alex Goldin, Will Hawkins, Evan Senter, Sergey Brin, Oliver Woodman, Marvin Ritter, Eric Noland, Minh Giang, Vijay Bolina, Lisa Lee, Tim Blyth, Ian Mackinnon, Machel Reid, Obaid Sarvana, David Silver, Alexander Chen, Lily Wang, Loren Maggiore, Oscar Chang, Nithya Attaluri, Gregory Thornton, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Oskar Bunyan, Nir Levine, Timothy Chung, Evgenii Eltyshev, Xiance Si, Timothy Lillicrap, Demetra Brady, Vaibhav Aggarwal, Boxi Wu, Yuanzhong Xu, Ross McIlroy, Kartikeya Badola, Paramjit Sandhu, Erica Moreira, Wojciech Stokowiec, Ross Hemsley, Dong Li, Alex Tudor, Pranav Shyam, Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Salem Haykal, Pablo Sprechmann, Xiang Zhou, Diana Mincu, Yujia Li, Ravi Addanki, Kalpesh Krishna, Xiao Wu, Alexandre Frechette, Matan Eyal, Allan Dafoe, Dave Lacey, Jay Whang, Thi Avrahami, Ye Zhang, Emanuel Taropa, Hanzhao Lin, Daniel Toyama, Eliza Rutherford, Motoki Sano, HyunJeong Choe, Alex Tomala, Chalence Safranek-Shrader, Nora Kassner, Mantas Pajarskas, Matt Harvey, Sean Sechrist, Meire Fortunato, Christina Lyu, Gamaleldin Elsayed, Chenkai Kuang, James Lottes, Eric Chu, Chao Jia, Chih-Wei Chen, Peter Humphreys, Kate Baumli, Connie Tao, Rajkumar Samuel, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Anders Andreassen, Nemanja Raki\'cevi\'c, Dominik Grewe, Aviral Kumar, Stephanie Winkler, Jonathan Caton, Andrew Brock, Sid Dalmia, Hannah Sheahan, Iain Barr, Yingjie Miao, Paul Natsev, Jacob Devlin, Feryal Behbahani, Flavien Prost, Yanhua Sun, Artiom Myaskovsky, Thanumalayan Sankaranarayana Pillai, Dan Hurt, Angeliki Lazaridou, Xi Xiong, Ce Zheng, Fabio Pardo, Xiaowei Li, Dan Horgan, Joe Stanton, Moran Ambar, Fei Xia, Alejandro Lince, Mingqiu Wang, Basil Mustafa, Albert Webson, Hyo Lee, Rohan Anil, Martin Wicke, Timothy Dozat, Abhishek Sinha, Enrique Piqueras, Elahe Dabir, Shyam Upadhyay, Anudhyan Boral, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Corey Fry, Josip Djolonga, Yi Su, Jake Walker, Jane Labanowski, Ronny Huang, Vedant Misra, Jeremy Chen, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Avi Singh, Shruti Rijhwani, Dian Yu, Alex Castro-Ros, Beer Changpinyo, Romina Datta, Sumit Bagri, Arnar Mar Hrafnkelsson, Marcello Maggioni, Daniel Zheng, Yury Sulsky, Shaobo Hou, Tom Le Paine, Antoine Yang, Jason Riesa, Dominika Rogozinska, Dror Marcus, Dalia El Badawy, Qiao Zhang, Luyu Wang, Helen Miller, Jeremy Greer, Lars Lowe Sjos, Azade Nova, Heiga Zen, Rahma Chaabouni, Mihaela Rosca, Jiepu Jiang, Charlie Chen, Ruibo Liu, Tara Sainath, Maxim Krikun, Alex Polozov, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Josh Newlan, Zeyncep Cankara, Soo Kwak, Yunhan Xu, Phil Chen, Andy Coenen, Clemens Meyer, Katerina Tsihlas, Ada Ma, Juraj Gottweis, Jinwei Xing, Chenjie Gu, Jin Miao, Christian Frank, Zeynep Cankara, Sanjay Ganapathy, Ishita Dasgupta, Steph Hughes-Fitt, Heng Chen, David Reid, Keran Rong, Hongmin Fan, Joost van Amersfoort, Vincent Zhuang, Aaron Cohen, Shixiang Shane Gu, Anhad Mohananey, Anastasija Ilic, Taylor Tobin, John Wieting, Anna Bortsova, Phoebe Thacker, Emma Wang, Emily Caveness, Justin Chiu, Eren Sezener, Alex Kaskasoli, Steven Baker, Katie Millican, Mohamed Elhawaty, Kostas Aisopos, Carl Lebsack, Nathan Byrd, Hanjun Dai, Wenhao Jia, Matthew Wiethoff, Elnaz Davoodi, Albert Weston, Lakshman Yagati, Arun Ahuja, Isabel Gao, Golan Pundak, Susan Zhang, Michael Azzam, Khe Chai Sim, Sergi Caelles, James Keeling, Abhanshu Sharma, Andy Swing, YaGuang Li, Chenxi Liu, Carrie Grimes Bostock, Yamini Bansal, Zachary Nado, Ankesh Anand, Josh Lipschultz, Abhijit Karmarkar, Lev Proleev, Abe Ittycheriah, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, George Polovets, Aleksandra Faust, Jiao Sun, Alban Rrustemi, Pen Li, Rakesh Shivanna, Jeremiah Liu, Chris Welty, Federico Lebron, Anirudh Baddepudi, Sebastian Krause, Emilio Parisotto, Radu Soricut, Zheng Xu, Dawn Bloxwich, Melvin Johnson, Behnam Neyshabur, Justin Mao-Jones, Renshen Wang, Vinay Ramasesh, Zaheer Abbas, Arthur Guez, Constant Segal, Duc Dung Nguyen, James Svensson, Le Hou, Sarah York, Kieran Milan, Sophie Bridgers, Wiktor Gworek, Marco Tagliasacchi, James Lee-Thorp, Michael Chang, Alexey Guseynov, Ale Jakse Hartman, Michael Kwong, Ruizhe Zhao, Sheleem Kashem, Elizabeth Cole, Antoine Miech, Richard Tanburn, Mary Phuong, Filip Pavetic, Sebastien Cevey, Ramona Comanescu, Richard Ives, Sherry Yang, Cosmo Du, Bo Li, Zizhao Zhang, Mariko Iinuma, Clara Huiyi Hu, Aurko Roy, Shaan Bijwadia, Zhenkai Zhu, Danilo Martins, Rachel Saputro, Anita Gergely, Steven Zheng, Dawei Jia, Ioannis Antonoglou, Adam Sadovsky, Shane Gu, Yingying Bi, Alek Andreev, Sina Samangooei, Mina Khan, Tomas Kocisky, Angelos Filos, Chintu Kumar, Colton Bishop, Adams Yu, Sarah Hodkinson, Sid Mittal, Premal Shah, Alexandre Moufarek, Yong Cheng, Adam Bloniarz, Jaehoon Lee, Pedram Pejman, Paul Michel, Stephen Spencer, Vladimir Feinberg, Xuehan Xiong, Nikolay Savinov, Charlotte Smith, Siamak Shakeri, Dustin Tran, Mary Chesus, Bernd Bohnet, George Tucker, Tamara von Glehn, Carrie Muir, Yiran Mao, Hideto Kazawa, Ambrose Slone, Kedar Soparkar, Disha Shrivastava, James Cobon-Kerr, Michael Sharman, Jay Pavagadhi, Carlos Araya, Karolis Misiunas, Nimesh Ghelani, Michael Laskin, David Barker, Qiujia Li, Anton Briukhov, Neil Houlsby, Mia Glaese, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Nathan Schucher, Yunhao Tang, Eli Collins, Hyeontaek Lim, Fangxiaoyu Feng, Adria Recasens, Guangda Lai, Alberto Magni, Nicola De Cao, Aditya Siddhant, Zoe Ashwood, Jordi Orbay, Mostafa Dehghani, Jenny Brennan, Yifan He, Kelvin Xu, Yang Gao, Carl Saroufim, James Molloy, Xinyi Wu, Seb Arnold, Solomon Chang, Julian Schrittwieser, Elena Buchatskaya, Soroush Radpour, Martin Polacek, Skye Giordano, Ankur Bapna, Simon Tokumine, Vincent Hellendoorn, Thibault Sottiaux, Sarah Cogan, Aliaksei Severyn, Mohammad Saleh, Shantanu Thakoor, Laurent Shefey, Siyuan Qiao, Meenu Gaba, Shuo-yiin Chang, Craig Swanson, Biao Zhang, Benjamin Lee, Paul Kishan Rubenstein, Gan Song, Tom Kwiatkowski, Anna Koop, Ajay Kannan, David Kao, Parker Schuh, Axel Stjerngren, Golnaz Ghiasi, Gena Gibson, Luke Vilnis, Ye Yuan, Felipe Tiengo Ferreira, Aishwarya Kamath, Ted Klimenko, Ken Franko, Kefan Xiao, Indro Bhattacharya, Miteyan Patel, Rui Wang, Alex Morris, Robin Strudel, Vivek Sharma, Peter Choy, Sayed Hadi Hashemi, Jessica Landon, Mara Finkelstein, Priya Jhakra, Justin Frye, Megan Barnes, Matthew Mauger, Dennis Daun, Khuslen Baatarsukh, Matthew Tung, Wael Farhan, Henryk Michalewski, Fabio Viola, Felix de Chaumont Quitry, Charline Le Lan, Tom Hudson, Qingze Wang, Felix Fischer, Ivy Zheng, Elspeth White, Anca Dragan, Jean-baptiste Alayrac, Eric Ni, Alexander Pritzel, Adam Iwanicki, Michael Isard, Anna Bulanova, Lukas Zilka, Ethan Dyer, Devendra Sachan, Srivatsan Srinivasan, Hannah Muckenhirn, Honglong Cai, Amol Mandhane, Mukarram Tariq, Jack W. Rae, Gary Wang, Kareem Ayoub, Nicholas FitzGerald, Yao Zhao, Woohyun Han, Chris Alberti, Dan Garrette, Kashyap Krishnakumar, Mai Gimenez, Anselm Levskaya, Daniel Sohn, Josip Matak, Inaki Iturrate, Michael B. Chang, Jackie Xiang, Yuan Cao, Nishant Ranka, Geoff Brown, Adrian Hutter, Vahab Mirrokni, Nanxin Chen, Kaisheng Yao, Zoltan Egyed, Francois Galilee, Tyler Liechty, Praveen Kallakuri, Evan Palmer, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jasmine Liu, David Tao, Chloe Thornton, Tim Green, Mimi Jasarevic, Sharon Lin, Victor Cotruta, Yi-Xuan Tan, Noah Fiedel, Hongkun Yu, Ed Chi, Alexander Neitz, Jens Heitkaemper, Anu Sinha, Denny Zhou, Yi Sun, Charbel Kaed, Brice Hulse, Swaroop Mishra, Maria Georgaki, Sneha Kudugunta, Clement Farabet, Izhak Shafran, Daniel Vlasic, Anton Tsitsulin, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Alen Carin, Guolong Su, Pei Sun, Shashank V, Gabriel Carvajal, Josef Broder, Iulia Comsa, Alena Repina, William Wong, Warren Weilun Chen, Peter Hawkins, Egor Filonov, Lucia Loher, Christoph Hirnschall, Weiyi Wang, Jingchen Ye, Andrea Burns, Hardie Cate, Diana Gage Wright, Federico Piccinini, Lei Zhang, Chu-Cheng Lin, Ionel Gog, Yana Kulizhskaya, Ashwin Sreevatsa, Shuang Song, Luis C. Cobo, Anand Iyer, Chetan Tekur, Guillermo Garrido, Zhuyun Xiao, Rupert Kemp, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Hui Li, Ananth Agarwal, Christel Ngani, Kati Goshvadi, Rebeca Santamaria-Fernandez, Wojciech Fica, Xinyun Chen, Chris Gorgolewski, Sean Sun, Roopal Garg, Xinyu Ye, S. M. Ali Eslami, Nan Hua, Jon Simon, Pratik Joshi, Yelin Kim, Ian Tenney, Sahitya Potluri, Lam Nguyen Thiet, Quan Yuan, Florian Luisier, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Salvatore Scellato, Praveen Srinivasan, Minmin Chen, Vinod Koverkathu, Valentin Dalibard, Yaming Xu, Brennan Saeta, Keith Anderson, Thibault Sellam, Nick Fernando, Fantine Huot, Junehyuk Jung, Mani Varadarajan, Michael Quinn, Amit Raul, Maigo Le, Ruslan Habalov, Jon Clark, Komal Jalan, Kalesha Bullard, Achintya Singhal, Thang Luong, Boyu Wang, Sujeevan Rajayogam, Julian Eisenschlos, Johnson Jia, Daniel Finchelstein, Alex Yakubovich, Daniel Balle, Michael Fink, Sameer Agarwal, Jing Li, Dj Dvijotham, Shalini Pal, Kai Kang, Jaclyn Konzelmann, Jennifer Beattie, Olivier Dousse, Diane Wu, Remi Crocker, Chen Elkind, Siddhartha Reddy Jonnalagadda, Jong Lee, Dan Holtmann-Rice, Krystal Kallarackal, Rosanne Liu, Denis Vnukov, Neera Vats, Luca Invernizzi, Mohsen Jafari, Huanjie Zhou, Lilly Taylor, Jennifer Prendki, Marcus Wu, Tom Eccles, Tianqi Liu, Kavya Kopparapu, Francoise Beaufays, Christof Angermueller, Andreea Marzoca, Shourya Sarcar, Hilal Dib, Jeff Stanway, Frank Perbet, Nejc Trdin, Rachel Sterneck, Andrey Khorlin, Dinghua Li, Xihui Wu, Sonam Goenka, David Madras, Sasha Goldshtein, Willi Gierke, Tong Zhou, Yaxin Liu, Yannie Liang, Anais White, Yunjie Li, Shreya Singh, Sanaz Bahargam, Mark Epstein, Sujoy Basu, Li Lao, Adnan Ozturel, Carl Crous, Alex Zhai, Han Lu, Zora Tung, Neeraj Gaur, Alanna Walton, Lucas Dixon, Ming Zhang, Amir Globerson, Grant Uy, Andrew Bolt, Olivia Wiles, Milad Nasr, Ilia Shumailov, Marco Selvi, Francesco Piccinno, Ricardo Aguilar, Sara McCarthy, Misha Khalman, Mrinal Shukla, Vlado Galic, John Carpenter, Kevin Villela, Haibin Zhang, Harry Richardson, James Martens, Matko Bosnjak, Shreyas Rammohan Belle, Jeff Seibert, Mahmoud Alnahlawi, Brian McWilliams, Sankalp Singh, Annie Louis, Wen Ding, Dan Popovici, Lenin Simicich, Laura Knight, Pulkit Mehta, Nishesh Gupta, Chongyang Shi, Saaber Fatehi, Jovana Mitrovic, Alex Grills, Joseph Pagadora, Dessie Petrova, Danielle Eisenbud, Zhishuai Zhang, Damion Yates, Bhavishya Mittal, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Yannis Assael, Thomas Brovelli, Prateek Jain, Mihajlo Velimirovic, Canfer Akbulut, Jiaqi Mu, Wolfgang Macherey, Ravin Kumar, Jun Xu, Haroon Qureshi, Gheorghe Comanici, Jeremy Wiesner, Zhitao Gong, Anton Ruddock, Matthias Bauer, Nick Felt, Anirudh GP, Anurag Arnab, Dustin Zelle, Jonas Rothfuss, Bill Rosgen, Ashish Shenoy, Bryan Seybold, Xinjian Li, Jayaram Mudigonda, Goker Erdogan, Jiawei Xia, Jiri Simsa, Andrea Michi, Yi Yao, Christopher Yew, Steven Kan, Isaac Caswell, Carey Radebaugh, Andre Elisseeff, Pedro Valenzuela, Kay McKinney, Kim Paterson, Albert Cui, Eri Latorre-Chimoto, Solomon Kim, William Zeng, Ken Durden, Priya Ponnapalli, Tiberiu Sosea, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, James Manyika, Brona Robenek, Harsha Vashisht, Sebastien Pereira, Hoi Lam, Marko Velic, Denese Owusu-Afriyie, Katherine Lee, Tolga Bolukbasi, Alicia Parrish, Shawn Lu, Jane Park, Balaji Venkatraman, Alice Talbert, Lambert Rosique, Yuchung Cheng, Andrei Sozanschi, Adam Paszke, Praveen Kumar, Jessica Austin, Lu Li, Khalid Salama, Wooyeol Kim, Nandita Dukkipati, Anthony Baryshnikov, Christos Kaplanis, XiangHai Sheng, Yuri Chervonyi, Caglar Unlu, Diego de Las Casas, Harry Askham, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Felix Gimeno, Siim Poder, Chester Kwak, Matt Miecnikowski, Vahab Mirrokni, Alek Dimitriev, Aaron Parisi, Dangyi Liu, Tomy Tsai, Toby Shevlane, Christina Kouridi, Drew Garmon, Adrian Goedeckemeyer, Adam R. Brown, Anitha Vijayakumar, Ali Elqursh, Sadegh Jazayeri, Jin Huang, Sara Mc Carthy, Jay Hoover, Lucy Kim, Sandeep Kumar, Wei Chen, Courtney Biles, Garrett Bingham, Evan Rosen, Lisa Wang, Qijun Tan, David Engel, Francesco Pongetti, Dario de Cesare, Dongseong Hwang, Lily Yu, Jennifer Pullman, Srini Narayanan, Kyle Levin, Siddharth Gopal, Megan Li, Asaf Aharoni, Trieu Trinh, Jessica Lo, Norman Casagrande, Roopali Vij, Loic Matthey, Bramandia Ramadhana, Austin Matthews, CJ Carey, Matthew Johnson, Kremena Goranova, Rohin Shah, Shereen Ashraf, Kingshuk Dasgupta, Rasmus Larsen, Yicheng Wang, Manish Reddy Vuyyuru, Chong Jiang, Joana Ijazi, Kazuki Osawa, Celine Smith, Ramya Sree Boppana, Taylan Bilal, Yuma Koizumi, Ying Xu, Yasemin Altun, Nir Shabat, Ben Bariach, Alex Korchemniy, Kiam Choo, Olaf Ronneberger, Chimezie Iwuanyanwu, Shubin Zhao, David Soergel, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Irene Cai, Shariq Iqbal, Martin Sundermeyer, Zhe Chen, Elie Bursztein, Chaitanya Malaviya, Fadi Biadsy, Prakash Shroff, Inderjit Dhillon, Tejasi Latkar, Chris Dyer, Hannah Forbes, Massimo Nicosia, Vitaly Nikolaev, Somer Greene, Marin Georgiev, Pidong Wang, Nina Martin, Hanie Sedghi, John Zhang, Praseem Banzal, Doug Fritz, Vikram Rao, Xuezhi Wang, Jiageng Zhang, Viorica Patraucean, Dayou Du, Igor Mordatch, Ivan Jurin, Lewis Liu, Ayush Dubey, Abhi Mohan, Janek Nowakowski, Vlad-Doru Ion, Nan Wei, Reiko Tojo, Maria Abi Raad, Drew A. Hudson, Vaishakh Keshava, Shubham Agrawal, Kevin Ramirez, Zhichun Wu, Hoang Nguyen, Ji Liu, Madhavi Sewak, Bryce Petrini, DongHyun Choi, Ivan Philips, Ziyue Wang, Ioana Bica, Ankush Garg, Jarek Wilkiewicz, Priyanka Agrawal, Xiaowei Li, Danhao Guo, Emily Xue, Naseer Shaik, Andrew Leach, Sadh MNM Khan, Julia Wiesinger, Sammy Jerome, Abhishek Chakladar, Alek Wenjiao Wang, Tina Ornduff, Folake Abu, Alireza Ghaffarkhah, Marcus Wainwright, Mario Cortes, Frederick Liu, Joshua Maynez, Slav Petrov, Yonghui Wu, Demis Hassabis, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Jeffrey Dean, Oriol Vinyals
Abstract: In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75% time savings across 10 different job categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.
Authors: Qiuyu Liang, Weihua Wang, Feilong Bao, Guanglai Gao
Abstract: Linear Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are used to classify the node in the graph data. However, we note that most existing linear GCN models perform neural network operations in Euclidean space, which do not explicitly capture the tree-like hierarchical structure exhibited in real-world datasets that modeled as graphs. In this paper, we attempt to introduce hyperbolic space into linear GCN and propose a novel framework for Lorentzian linear GCN. Specifically, we map the learned features of graph nodes into hyperbolic space, and then perform a Lorentzian linear feature transformation to capture the underlying tree-like structure of data. Experimental results on standard citation networks datasets with semi-supervised learning show that our approach yields new state-of-the-art results of accuracy 74.7$\%$ on Citeseer and 81.3$\%$ on PubMed datasets. Furthermore, we observe that our approach can be trained up to two orders of magnitude faster than other nonlinear GCN models on PubMed dataset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/llqy123/LLGC-master.
Authors: Chongyu Fan, Jiancheng Liu, Alfred Hero, Sijia Liu
Abstract: The trustworthy machine learning (ML) community is increasingly recognizing the crucial need for models capable of selectively 'unlearning' data points after training. This leads to the problem of machine unlearning (MU), aiming to eliminate the influence of chosen data points on model performance, while still maintaining the model's utility post-unlearning. Despite various MU methods for data influence erasure, evaluations have largely focused on random data forgetting, ignoring the vital inquiry into which subset should be chosen to truly gauge the authenticity of unlearning performance. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new evaluative angle for MU from an adversarial viewpoint. We propose identifying the data subset that presents the most significant challenge for influence erasure, i.e., pinpointing the worst-case forget set. Utilizing a bi-level optimization principle, we amplify unlearning challenges at the upper optimization level to emulate worst-case scenarios, while simultaneously engaging in standard training and unlearning at the lower level, achieving a balance between data influence erasure and model utility. Our proposal offers a worst-case evaluation of MU's resilience and effectiveness. Through extensive experiments across different datasets (including CIFAR-10, 100, CelebA, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet) and models (including both image classifiers and generative models), we expose critical pros and cons in existing (approximate) unlearning strategies. Our results illuminate the complex challenges of MU in practice, guiding the future development of more accurate and robust unlearning algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-WorstCase.
Authors: Abdur Rahman Bin Md Faizullah, Ashok Urlana, Rahul Mishra
Abstract: Examining limitations is a crucial step in the scholarly research reviewing process, revealing aspects where a study might lack decisiveness or require enhancement. This aids readers in considering broader implications for further research. In this article, we present a novel and challenging task of Suggestive Limitation Generation (SLG) for research papers. We compile a dataset called \textbf{\textit{LimGen}}, encompassing 4068 research papers and their associated limitations from the ACL anthology. We investigate several approaches to harness large language models (LLMs) for producing suggestive limitations, by thoroughly examining the related challenges, practical insights, and potential opportunities. Our LimGen dataset and code can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/arbmf/LimGen}.
Authors: Mutlu Cukurova
Abstract: This paper presents a multi-dimensional view of AI's role in learning and education, emphasizing the intricate interplay between AI, analytics, and the learning processes. Here, I challenge the prevalent narrow conceptualization of AI as stochastic tools, as exemplified in generative AI, and argue for the importance of alternative conceptualizations of AI. I highlight the differences between human intelligence and artificial information processing, the cognitive diversity inherent in AI algorithms, and posit that AI can also serve as an instrument for understanding human learning. Early learning sciences and AI in Education research, which saw AI as an analogy for human intelligence, have diverged from this perspective, prompting a need to rekindle this connection. The paper presents three unique conceptualizations of AI in education: the externalization of human cognition, the internalization of AI models to influence human mental models, and the extension of human cognition via tightly integrated human-AI systems. Examples from current research and practice are examined as instances of the three conceptualizations, highlighting the potential value and limitations of each conceptualization for education, as well as the perils of overemphasis on externalizing human cognition. It is argued that AI models can be useful as objects to think about learning, even though some aspects of learning might just come through the slow experience of living those learning moments and cannot be fully explained with AI models to be hacked with predictions. The paper concludes with advocacy for a broader approach to AI in Education that goes beyond considerations on the design and development of AI solutions in education, but also includes educating people about AI and innovating educational systems to remain relevant in an AI-ubiquitous world.
Authors: Puyuan Peng, Po-Yao Huang, Shang-Wen Li, Abdelrahman Mohamed, David Harwath
Abstract: We introduce VoiceCraft, a token infilling neural codec language model, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both speech editing and zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) on audiobooks, internet videos, and podcasts. VoiceCraft employs a Transformer decoder architecture and introduces a token rearrangement procedure that combines causal masking and delayed stacking to enable generation within an existing sequence. On speech editing tasks, VoiceCraft produces edited speech that is nearly indistinguishable from unedited recordings in terms of naturalness, as evaluated by humans; for zero-shot TTS, our model outperforms prior SotA models including VALLE and the popular commercial model XTTS-v2. Crucially, the models are evaluated on challenging and realistic datasets, that consist of diverse accents, speaking styles, recording conditions, and background noise and music, and our model performs consistently well compared to other models and real recordings. In particular, for speech editing evaluation, we introduce a high quality, challenging, and realistic dataset named RealEdit. We encourage readers to listen to the demos at https://jasonppy.github.io/VoiceCraft_web.
Authors: Paritosh Parmar, Eric Peh, Ruirui Chen, Ting En Lam, Yuhan Chen, Elston Tan, Basura Fernando
Abstract: Causal video question answering (QA) has garnered increasing interest, yet existing datasets often lack depth in causal reasoning. To address this gap, we capitalize on the unique properties of cartoons and construct CausalChaos!, a novel, challenging causal Why-QA dataset built upon the iconic "Tom and Jerry" cartoon series. Cartoons use the principles of animation that allow animators to create expressive, unambiguous causal relationships between events to form a coherent storyline. Utilizing these properties, along with thought-provoking questions and multi-level answers (answer and detailed causal explanation), our questions involve causal chains that interconnect multiple dynamic interactions between characters and visual scenes. These factors demand models to solve more challenging, yet well-defined causal relationships. We also introduce hard incorrect answer mining, including a causally confusing version that is even more challenging. While models perform well, there is much room for improvement, especially, on open-ended answers. We identify more advanced/explicit causal relationship modeling & joint modeling of vision and language as the immediate areas for future efforts to focus upon. Along with the other complementary datasets, our new challenging dataset will pave the way for these developments in the field.
Authors: Ehsan Pajouheshgar, Yitao Xu, Sabine S\"usstrunk
Abstract: Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) is a class of Cellular Automata where the update rule is parameterized by a neural network that can be trained using gradient descent. In this paper, we focus on NCA models used for texture synthesis, where the update rule is inspired by partial differential equations (PDEs) describing reaction-diffusion systems. To train the NCA model, the spatio-temporal domain is discretized, and Euler integration is used to numerically simulate the PDE. However, whether a trained NCA truly learns the continuous dynamic described by the corresponding PDE or merely overfits the discretization used in training remains an open question. We study NCA models at the limit where space-time discretization approaches continuity. We find that existing NCA models tend to overfit the training discretization, especially in the proximity of the initial condition, also called "seed". To address this, we propose a solution that utilizes uniform noise as the initial condition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in preserving the consistency of NCA dynamics across a wide range of spatio-temporal granularities. Our improved NCA model enables two new test-time interactions by allowing continuous control over the speed of pattern formation and the scale of the synthesized patterns. We demonstrate this new NCA feature in our interactive online demo. Our work reveals that NCA models can learn continuous dynamics and opens new venues for NCA research from a dynamical system's perspective.
Authors: Yue Wu, Zhiqing Sun, Huizhuo Yuan, Kaixuan Ji, Yiming Yang, Quanquan Gu
Abstract: Traditional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches relying on parametric models like the Bradley-Terry model fall short in capturing the intransitivity and irrationality in human preferences. Recent advancements suggest that directly working with preference probabilities can yield a more accurate reflection of human preferences, enabling more flexible and accurate language model alignment. In this paper, we propose a self-play-based method for language model alignment, which treats the problem as a constant-sum two-player game aimed at identifying the Nash equilibrium policy. Our approach, dubbed Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), approximates the Nash equilibrium through iterative policy updates and enjoys a theoretical convergence guarantee. Our method can effectively increase the log-likelihood of the chosen response and decrease that of the rejected response, which cannot be trivially achieved by symmetric pairwise loss such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Identity Preference Optimization (IPO). In our experiments, using only 60k prompts (without responses) from the UltraFeedback dataset and without any prompt augmentation, by leveraging a pre-trained preference model PairRM with only 0.4B parameters, SPPO can obtain a model from fine-tuning Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 that achieves the state-of-the-art length-controlled win-rate of 28.53% against GPT-4-Turbo on AlpacaEval 2.0. It also outperforms the (iterative) DPO and IPO on MT-Bench and the Open LLM Leaderboard. Starting from a stronger base model Llama-3-8B-Instruct, we are able to achieve a length-controlled win rate of 38.77%. Notably, the strong performance of SPPO is achieved without additional external supervision (e.g., responses, preferences, etc.) from GPT-4 or other stronger language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/uclaml/SPPO.
Authors: Wenqi Fan, Yujuan Ding, Liangbo Ning, Shijie Wang, Hengyun Li, Dawei Yin, Tat-Seng Chua, Qing Li
Abstract: As one of the most advanced techniques in AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can offer reliable and up-to-date external knowledge, providing huge convenience for numerous tasks. Particularly in the era of AI-Generated Content (AIGC), the powerful capacity of retrieval in providing additional knowledge enables RAG to assist existing generative AI in producing high-quality outputs. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary abilities in language understanding and generation, while still facing inherent limitations, such as hallucinations and out-of-date internal knowledge. Given the powerful abilities of RAG in providing the latest and helpful auxiliary information, Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RA-LLMs) have emerged to harness external and authoritative knowledge bases, rather than solely relying on the model's internal knowledge, to augment the generation quality of LLMs. In this survey, we comprehensively review existing research studies in RA-LLMs, covering three primary technical perspectives: architectures, training strategies, and applications. As the preliminary knowledge, we briefly introduce the foundations and recent advances of LLMs. Then, to illustrate the practical significance of RAG for LLMs, we systematically review mainstream relevant work by their architectures, training strategies, and application areas, detailing specifically the challenges of each and the corresponding capabilities of RA-LLMs. Finally, to deliver deeper insights, we discuss current limitations and several promising directions for future research. Updated information about this survey can be found at https://advanced-recommender-systems.github.io/RAG-Meets-LLMs/
URLs: https://advanced-recommender-systems.github.io/RAG-Meets-LLMs/
Authors: Hyejeong Jo, Yiqian Yang, Juhyeok Han, Yiqun Duan, Hui Xiong, Won Hee Lee
Abstract: This work critically analyzes existing models for open-vocabulary EEG-to-Text translation. We identify a crucial limitation: previous studies often employed implicit teacher-forcing during evaluation, artificially inflating performance metrics. Additionally, they lacked a critical benchmark - comparing model performance on pure noise inputs. We propose a methodology to differentiate between models that truly learn from EEG signals and those that simply memorize training data. Our analysis reveals that model performance on noise data can be comparable to that on EEG data. These findings highlight the need for stricter evaluation practices in EEG-to-Text research, emphasizing transparent reporting and rigorous benchmarking with noise inputs. This approach will lead to more reliable assessments of model capabilities and pave the way for robust EEG-to-Text communication systems.
Authors: Sidharth SS, Keerthana AR, Gokul R, Anas KP
Abstract: Accurate approximation of complex nonlinear functions is a fundamental challenge across many scientific and engineering domains. Traditional neural network architectures, such as Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), often struggle to efficiently capture intricate patterns and irregularities present in high-dimensional functions. This paper presents the Chebyshev Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (Chebyshev KAN), a new neural network architecture inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, incorporating the powerful approximation capabilities of Chebyshev polynomials. By utilizing learnable functions parametrized by Chebyshev polynomials on the network's edges, Chebyshev KANs enhance flexibility, efficiency, and interpretability in function approximation tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of Chebyshev KANs through experiments on digit classification, synthetic function approximation, and fractal function generation, highlighting their superiority over traditional MLPs in terms of parameter efficiency and interpretability. Our comprehensive evaluation, including ablation studies, confirms the potential of Chebyshev KANs to address longstanding challenges in nonlinear function approximation, paving the way for further advancements in various scientific and engineering applications.
Authors: Malika Nisal Ratnayake, Lex Gallon, Adel N. Toosi, Alan Dorin
Abstract: Field-captured video allows for detailed studies of spatiotemporal aspects of animal locomotion, decision-making, and environmental interactions. However, despite the affordability of data capture with mass-produced hardware, storage, processing, and transmission overheads pose a significant hurdle to acquiring high-resolution video from field-deployed camera traps. Therefore, efficient compression algorithms are crucial for monitoring with camera traps that have limited access to power, storage, and bandwidth. In this article, we introduce a new motion analysis-based video compression algorithm designed to run on camera trap devices. We implemented and tested this algorithm using a case study of insect-pollinator motion tracking. The algorithm identifies and stores only image regions depicting motion relevant to pollination monitoring, reducing the overall data size by an average of 84% across a diverse set of test datasets while retaining the information necessary for relevant behavioural analysis. The methods outlined in this paper facilitate the broader application of computer vision-enabled, low-powered camera trap devices for remote, in-situ video-based animal motion monitoring.
Authors: Mohammad Mozaffari, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Zhao Zhang, Maryam Mehri Dehnavi
Abstract: We propose SLoPe, a Double-Pruned Sparse Plus Lazy Low-rank Adapter Pretraining method for LLMs that improves the accuracy of sparse LLMs while accelerating their pretraining and inference and reducing their memory footprint. Sparse pretraining of LLMs reduces the accuracy of the model, to overcome this, prior work uses dense models during fine-tuning. SLoPe improves the accuracy of sparsely pretrained models by adding low-rank adapters in the final 1% iterations of pretraining without adding significant overheads to the model pretraining and inference. In addition, SLoPe uses a double-pruned backward pass formulation that prunes the transposed weight matrix using N:M sparsity structures to enable an accelerated sparse backward pass. SLoPe accelerates the training and inference of models with billions of parameters up to $1.14\times$ and $1.34\times$ respectively (OPT-33B and OPT-66B) while reducing their memory usage by up to $0.77\times$ and $0.51\times$ for training and inference respectively.
Authors: Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Zhongyuan Wu, Hongsheng Li
Abstract: In infilling tasks, sub-tokens, representing instances where a complete token is segmented into two parts, often emerge at the boundaries of prefixes, middles, and suffixes. Traditional methods focused on training models at the token level, leading to sub-optimal performance in character-level infilling tasks during the inference stage. Alternately, some approaches considered character-level infilling, but they relied on predicting sub-tokens in inference, yet this strategy diminished ability in character-level infilling tasks due to the large perplexity of the model on sub-tokens. In this paper, we introduce FIM-SE, which stands for Fill-In-the-Middle with both Starting and Ending character constraints. The proposed method addresses character-level infilling tasks by utilizing a line-level format to avoid predicting any sub-token in inference. In addition, we incorporate two special tokens to signify the rest of the incomplete lines, thereby enhancing generation guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses previous methods, offering a significant advantage. Code is available at https://github.com/SenseLLM/FIM-SE.
Authors: S. Mostafa Mousavi, Marc Stogaitis, Tajinder Gadh, Richard M Allen, Alexei Barski, Robert Bosch, Patrick Robertson, Nivetha Thiruverahan, Youngmin Cho, Aman Raj
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to extract scientifically valuable information about Earth's physical phenomena from unconventional sources, such as multi-modal social media posts. Employing a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), Gemini 1.5 Pro (Reid et al. 2024), we estimate earthquake ground shaking intensity from these unstructured posts. The model's output, in the form of Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) values, aligns well with independent observational data. Furthermore, our results suggest that LLMs, trained on vast internet data, may have developed a unique understanding of physical phenomena. Specifically, Google's Gemini models demonstrate a simplified understanding of the general relationship between earthquake magnitude, distance, and MMI intensity, accurately describing observational data even though it's not identical to established models. These findings raise intriguing questions about the extent to which Gemini's training has led to a broader understanding of the physical world and its phenomena. The ability of Generative AI models like Gemini to generate results consistent with established scientific knowledge highlights their potential to augment our understanding of complex physical phenomena like earthquakes. The flexible and effective approach proposed in this study holds immense potential for enriching our understanding of the impact of physical phenomena and improving resilience during natural disasters. This research is a significant step toward harnessing the power of social media and AI for natural disaster mitigation, opening new avenues for understanding the emerging capabilities of Generative AI and LLMs for scientific applications.
Authors: Renato M. Silva, Greg\'orio F. Azevedo, Matheus V. V. Berto, Jean R. Rocha, Eduardo C. Fidelis, Matheus V. Nogueira, Pedro H. Lisboa, Tiago A. Almeida
Abstract: Traffic incidents involving vulnerable road users (VRUs) constitute a significant proportion of global road accidents. Advances in traffic communication ecosystems, coupled with sophisticated signal processing and machine learning techniques, have facilitated the utilization of data from diverse sensors. Despite these advancements and the availability of extensive datasets, substantial progress is required to mitigate traffic casualties. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art technologies and methodologies to enhance the safety of VRUs. The study delves into the communication networks between vehicles and VRUs, emphasizing the integration of advanced sensors and the availability of relevant datasets. It explores preprocessing techniques and data fusion methods to enhance sensor data quality. Furthermore, our study assesses critical simulation environments essential for developing and testing VRU safety systems. Our research also highlights recent advances in VRU detection and classification algorithms, addressing challenges such as variable environmental conditions. Additionally, we cover cutting-edge research in predicting VRU intentions and behaviors, which is crucial for proactive collision avoidance strategies. Through this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape of VRU safety technologies, identifying areas of progress and areas needing further research and development.
Authors: Chenxi Liu, Qianxiong Xu, Hao Miao, Sun Yang, Lingzheng Zhang, Cheng Long, Ziyue Li, Rui Zhao
Abstract: The widespread adoption of scalable mobile sensing has led to large amounts of time series data for real-world applications. A fundamental application is multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF), which aims to predict future time series values based on historical observations. Existing MTSF methods suffer from limited parameterization and small-scale training data. Recently, Large language models (LLMs) have been introduced in time series, which achieve promising forecasting performance but incur heavy computational costs. To solve these challenges, we propose TimeCMA, an LLM-empowered framework for time series forecasting with cross-modality alignment. We design a dual-modality encoding module with two branches, where the time series encoding branch extracts relatively low-quality yet pure embeddings of time series through an inverted Transformer. In addition, the LLM-empowered encoding branch wraps the same time series as prompts to obtain high-quality yet entangled prompt embeddings via a Pre-trained LLM. Then, we design a cross-modality alignment module to retrieve high-quality and pure time series embeddings from the prompt embeddings. Moreover, we develop a time series forecasting module to decode the aligned embeddings while capturing dependencies among multiple variables for forecasting. Notably, we tailor the prompt to encode sufficient temporal information into a last token and design the last token embedding storage to reduce computational costs. Extensive experiments on real data offer insight into the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed framework.
Authors: Anke Tang, Li Shen, Yong Luo, Han Hu, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Deep model fusion is an emerging technique that unifies the predictions or parameters of several deep neural networks into a single model in a cost-effective and data-efficient manner. This enables the unified model to take advantage of the original models' strengths, potentially exceeding their performance. Although a variety of deep model fusion techniques have been introduced, their evaluations tend to be inconsistent and often inadequate to validate their effectiveness and robustness against distribution shifts. To address this issue, we introduce FusionBench, which is the first comprehensive benchmark dedicated to deep model fusion. FusionBench covers a wide range of tasks, including open-vocabulary image classification, text classification, and text-to-text generation. Each category includes up to eight tasks with corresponding task-specific models, featuring both full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning, as well as models of different sizes, to ensure fair and balanced comparisons of various multi-task model fusion techniques across different tasks, model scales, and fine-tuning strategies. We implement and evaluate a broad spectrum of deep model fusion techniques. These techniques range from model ensemble methods, which combine the predictions to improve the overall performance, to model merging, which integrates different models into a single one, and model mixing methods, which upscale or recombine the components of the original models. FusionBench now contains 26 distinct tasks, 74 fine-tuned models, and 16 fusion techniques, and we are committed to consistently expanding the benchmark with more tasks, models, and fusion techniques. In addition, we offer a well-documented set of resources and guidelines to aid researchers in understanding and replicating the benchmark results. Homepage https://github.com/tanganke/fusion_bench
Authors: Ruiyang Qin, Dancheng Liu, Zheyu Yan, Zhaoxuan Tan, Zixuan Pan, Zhenge Jia, Meng Jiang, Ahmed Abbasi, Jinjun Xiong, Yiyu Shi
Abstract: The scaling laws have become the de facto guidelines for designing large language models (LLMs), but they were studied under the assumption of unlimited computing resources for both training and inference. As LLMs are increasingly used as personalized intelligent assistants, their customization (i.e., learning through fine-tuning) and deployment onto resource-constrained edge devices will become more and more prevalent. An urging but open question is how a resource-constrained computing environment would affect the design choices for a personalized LLM. We study this problem empirically in this work. In particular, we consider the tradeoffs among a number of key design factors and their intertwined impacts on learning efficiency and accuracy. The factors include the learning methods for LLM customization, the amount of personalized data used for learning customization, the types and sizes of LLMs, the compression methods of LLMs, the amount of time afforded to learn, and the difficulty levels of the target use cases. Through extensive experimentation and benchmarking, we draw a number of surprisingly insightful guidelines for deploying LLMs onto resource-constrained devices. For example, an optimal choice between parameter learning and RAG may vary depending on the difficulty of the downstream task, the longer fine-tuning time does not necessarily help the model, and a compressed LLM may be a better choice than an uncompressed LLM to learn from limited personalized data.
Authors: Jianben He, Xingbo Wang, Shiyi Liu, Guande Wu, Claudio Silva, Huamin Qu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive abilities for multimodal content comprehension and reasoning with proper prompting in zero- or few-shot settings. Despite the proliferation of interactive systems developed to support prompt engineering for LLMs across various tasks, most have primarily focused on textual or visual inputs, thus neglecting the complex interplay between modalities within multimodal inputs. This oversight hinders the development of effective prompts that guide model multimodal reasoning processes by fully exploiting the rich context provided by multiple modalities. In this paper, we present POEM, a visual analytics system to facilitate efficient prompt engineering for enhancing the multimodal reasoning performance of LLMs. The system enables users to explore the interaction patterns across modalities at varying levels of detail for a comprehensive understanding of the multimodal knowledge elicited by various prompts. Through diverse recommendations of demonstration examples and instructional principles, POEM supports users in iteratively crafting and refining prompts to better align and enhance model knowledge with human insights. The effectiveness and efficiency of our system are validated through two case studies and interviews with experts.
Authors: Salvatore Esposito, Qingshan Xu, Kacper Kania, Charlie Hewitt, Octave Mariotti, Lohit Petikam, Julien Valentin, Arno Onken, Oisin Mac Aodha
Abstract: We introduce a new generative approach for synthesizing 3D geometry and images from single-view collections. Most existing approaches predict volumetric density to render multi-view consistent images. By employing volumetric rendering using neural radiance fields, they inherit a key limitation: the generated geometry is noisy and unconstrained, limiting the quality and utility of the output meshes. To address this issue, we propose GeoGen, a new SDF-based 3D generative model trained in an end-to-end manner. Initially, we reinterpret the volumetric density as a Signed Distance Function (SDF). This allows us to introduce useful priors to generate valid meshes. However, those priors prevent the generative model from learning details, limiting the applicability of the method to real-world scenarios. To alleviate that problem, we make the transformation learnable and constrain the rendered depth map to be consistent with the zero-level set of the SDF. Through the lens of adversarial training, we encourage the network to produce higher fidelity details on the output meshes. For evaluation, we introduce a synthetic dataset of human avatars captured from 360-degree camera angles, to overcome the challenges presented by real-world datasets, which often lack 3D consistency and do not cover all camera angles. Our experiments on multiple datasets show that GeoGen produces visually and quantitatively better geometry than the previous generative models based on neural radiance fields.
Authors: Sojung An, Tae-Jin Oh, Eunha Sohn, Donghyun Kim
Abstract: Deep learning-based time series forecasting has dominated the short-term precipitation forecasting field with the help of its ability to estimate motion flow in high-resolution datasets. The growing interest in precipitation nowcasting offers substantial opportunities for the advancement of current forecasting technologies. Nevertheless, there has been a scarcity of in-depth surveys of time series precipitation forecasting using deep learning. Thus, this paper systemically reviews recent progress in time series precipitation forecasting models. Specifically, we investigate the following key points within background components, covering: i) preprocessing, ii) objective functions, and iii) evaluation metrics. We then categorize forecasting models into \textit{recursive} and \textit{multiple} strategies based on their approaches to predict future frames, investigate the impacts of models using the strategies, and performance assessments. Finally, we evaluate current deep learning-based models for precipitation forecasting on a public benchmark, discuss their limitations and challenges, and present some promising research directions. Our contribution lies in providing insights for a better understanding of time series precipitation forecasting and in aiding the development of robust AI solutions for the future.
Authors: Jee-weon Jung, Xin Wang, Nicholas Evans, Shinji Watanabe, Hye-jin Shim, Hemlata Tak, Sidhhant Arora, Junichi Yamagishi, Joon Son Chung
Abstract: The current automatic speaker verification (ASV) task involves making binary decisions on two types of trials: target and non-target. However, emerging advancements in speech generation technology pose significant threats to the reliability of ASV systems. This study investigates whether ASV effortlessly acquires robustness against spoofing attacks (i.e., zero-shot capability) by systematically exploring diverse ASV systems and spoofing attacks, ranging from traditional to cutting-edge techniques. Through extensive analyses conducted on eight distinct ASV systems and 29 spoofing attack systems, we demonstrate that the evolution of ASV inherently incorporates defense mechanisms against spoofing attacks. Nevertheless, our findings also underscore that the advancement of spoofing attacks far outpaces that of ASV systems, hence necessitating further research on spoofing-robust ASV methodologies.
Authors: Peiye Zhuang, Songfang Han, Chaoyang Wang, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Jiaxu Zou, Michael Vasilkovsky, Vladislav Shakhrai, Sergey Korolev, Sergey Tulyakov, Hsin-Ying Lee
Abstract: We propose a novel approach for 3D mesh reconstruction from multi-view images. Our method takes inspiration from large reconstruction models like LRM that use a transformer-based triplane generator and a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) model trained on multi-view images. However, in our method, we introduce several important modifications that allow us to significantly enhance 3D reconstruction quality. First of all, we examine the original LRM architecture and find several shortcomings. Subsequently, we introduce respective modifications to the LRM architecture, which lead to improved multi-view image representation and more computationally efficient training. Second, in order to improve geometry reconstruction and enable supervision at full image resolution, we extract meshes from the NeRF field in a differentiable manner and fine-tune the NeRF model through mesh rendering. These modifications allow us to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both 2D and 3D evaluation metrics, such as a PSNR of 28.67 on Google Scanned Objects (GSO) dataset. Despite these superior results, our feed-forward model still struggles to reconstruct complex textures, such as text and portraits on assets. To address this, we introduce a lightweight per-instance texture refinement procedure. This procedure fine-tunes the triplane representation and the NeRF color estimation model on the mesh surface using the input multi-view images in just 4 seconds. This refinement improves the PSNR to 29.79 and achieves faithful reconstruction of complex textures, such as text. Additionally, our approach enables various downstream applications, including text- or image-to-3D generation.
Authors: Xinshu Li, Mingming Gong, Lina Yao
Abstract: The advancements in disentangled representation learning significantly enhance the accuracy of counterfactual predictions by granting precise control over instrumental variables, confounders, and adjustable variables. An appealing method for achieving the independent separation of these factors is mutual information minimization, a task that presents challenges in numerous machine learning scenarios, especially within high-dimensional spaces. To circumvent this challenge, we propose the Self-Distilled Disentanglement framework, referred to as $SD^2$. Grounded in information theory, it ensures theoretically sound independent disentangled representations without intricate mutual information estimator designs for high-dimensional representations. Our comprehensive experiments, conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets, confirms the effectiveness of our approach in facilitating counterfactual inference in the presence of both observed and unobserved confounders.
Authors: Hao Sun, Yu Song
Abstract: Large models have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities in computer vision and natural language processing. Recent efforts have focused on enhancing these models with multimodal processing abilities. However, addressing the challenges posed by scenarios where one modality is absent remains a significant hurdle. In response to this issue, we propose a robust latent representation tuning method for large models. Specifically, our approach introduces a modality latent translation module to maximize the correlation between modalities, resulting in a robust representation. Following this, a newly designed fusion module is employed to facilitate information interaction between the modalities. Within this framework, common semantics are refined during training, and robust performance is achieved even in the absence of one modality. Importantly, our method maintains the frozen state of the image and text foundation models to preserve their capabilities acquired through large-scale pretraining. We conduct experiments on several public datasets, and the results underscore the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors: June-Woo Kim, Miika Toikkanen, Yera Choi, Seoung-Eun Moon, Ho-Young Jung
Abstract: Respiratory sound classification (RSC) is challenging due to varied acoustic signatures, primarily influenced by patient demographics and recording environments. To address this issue, we introduce a text-audio multimodal model that utilizes metadata of respiratory sounds, which provides useful complementary information for RSC. Specifically, we fine-tune a pretrained text-audio multimodal model using free-text descriptions derived from the sound samples' metadata which includes the gender and age of patients, type of recording devices, and recording location on the patient's body. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ICBHI dataset, surpassing the previous best result by a notable margin of 1.17%. This result validates the effectiveness of leveraging metadata and respiratory sound samples in enhancing RSC performance. Additionally, we investigate the model performance in the case where metadata is partially unavailable, which may occur in real-world clinical setting.
Authors: Dingrong Wang, Hitesh Sapkota, Zhiqiang Tao, Qi Yu
Abstract: Prior neural architecture search (NAS) for adversarial robustness works have discovered that a lightweight and adversarially robust neural network architecture could exist in a non-robust large teacher network, generally disclosed by heuristic rules through statistical analysis and neural architecture search, generally disclosed by heuristic rules from neural architecture search. However, heuristic methods cannot uniformly handle different adversarial attacks and "teacher" network capacity. To solve this challenge, we propose a Reinforced Compressive Neural Architecture Search (RC-NAS) for Versatile Adversarial Robustness. Specifically, we define task settings that compose datasets, adversarial attacks, and teacher network information. Given diverse tasks, we conduct a novel dual-level training paradigm that consists of a meta-training and a fine-tuning phase to effectively expose the RL agent to diverse attack scenarios (in meta-training), and making it adapt quickly to locate a sub-network (in fine-tuning) for any previously unseen scenarios. Experiments show that our framework could achieve adaptive compression towards different initial teacher networks, datasets, and adversarial attacks, resulting in more lightweight and adversarially robust architectures.
Authors: Yu Liu, Lang Gao, 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: 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: 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, Zhenxiang Li, Pei Chu, Yi Wang, Min Dou, Changyao Tian, Xizhou Zhu, Lewei Lu, Yushi Chen, Junjun He, Zhongying Tu, 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: Swapnil Bhosale, Haosen Yang, Diptesh Kanojia, Jiankang Deng, Xiatian Zhu
Abstract: Novel view acoustic synthesis (NVAS) aims to render binaural audio at any target viewpoint, given a mono audio emitted by a sound source at a 3D scene. Existing methods have proposed NeRF-based implicit models to exploit visual cues as a condition for synthesizing binaural audio. However, in addition to low efficiency originating from heavy NeRF rendering, these methods all have a limited ability of characterizing the entire scene environment such as room geometry, material properties, and the spatial relation between the listener and sound source. To address these issues, we propose a novel Audio-Visual Gaussian Splatting (AV-GS) model. To obtain a material-aware and geometry-aware condition for audio synthesis, we learn an explicit point-based scene representation with an audio-guidance parameter on locally initialized Gaussian points, taking into account the space relation from the listener and sound source. To make the visual scene model audio adaptive, we propose a point densification and pruning strategy to optimally distribute the Gaussian points, with the per-point contribution in sound propagation (e.g., more points needed for texture-less wall surfaces as they affect sound path diversion). Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our AV-GS over existing alternatives on the real-world RWAS and simulation-based SoundSpaces datasets.
Authors: Xihao Piao, Zheng Chen, Taichi Murayama, Yasuko Matsubara, Yasushi Sakurai
Abstract: The Transformer model has shown leading performance in time series forecasting. Nevertheless, in some complex scenarios, it tends to learn low-frequency features in the data and overlook high-frequency features, showing a frequency bias. This bias prevents the model from accurately capturing important high-frequency data features. In this paper, we undertook empirical analyses to understand this bias and discovered that frequency bias results from the model disproportionately focusing on frequency features with higher energy. Based on our analysis, we formulate this bias and propose Fredformer, a Transformer-based framework designed to mitigate frequency bias by learning features equally across different frequency bands. This approach prevents the model from overlooking lower amplitude features important for accurate forecasting. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which can outperform other baselines in different real-world time-series datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight variant of the Fredformer with an attention matrix approximation, which achieves comparable performance but with much fewer parameters and lower computation costs. The code is available at: https://github.com/chenzRG/Fredformer
Authors: Tomas Kulvicius, Dajie Zhang, Luise Poustka, Sven B\"olte, Lennart Jahn, Sarah Fl\"ugge, Marc Kraft, Markus Zweckstetter, Karin Nielsen-Saines, Florentin W\"org\"otter, Peter B Marschik
Abstract: There is a recent boom in the development of AI solutions to facilitate and enhance diagnostic procedures for established clinical tools. To assess the integrity of the developing nervous system, the Prechtl general movement assessment (GMA) is recognized for its clinical value in diagnosing neurological impairments in early infancy. GMA has been increasingly augmented through machine learning approaches intending to scale-up its application, circumvent costs in the training of human assessors and further standardize classification of spontaneous motor patterns. Available deep learning tools, all of which are based on single sensor modalities, are however still considerably inferior to that of well-trained human assessors. These approaches are hardly comparable as all models are designed, trained and evaluated on proprietary/silo-data sets. With this study we propose a sensor fusion approach for assessing fidgety movements (FMs) comparing three different sensor modalities (pressure, inertial, and visual sensors). Various combinations and two sensor fusion approaches (late and early fusion) for infant movement classification were tested to evaluate whether a multi-sensor system outperforms single modality assessments. The performance of the three-sensor fusion (classification accuracy of 94.5\%) was significantly higher than that of any single modality evaluated, suggesting the sensor fusion approach is a promising avenue for automated classification of infant motor patterns. The development of a robust sensor fusion system may significantly enhance AI-based early recognition of neurofunctions, ultimately facilitating automated early detection of neurodevelopmental conditions.
Authors: Yijun Bei, Hengrui Lou, Jinsong Geng, Erteng Liu, Lechao Cheng, Jie Song, Mingli Song, Zunlei Feng
Abstract: With the rapid development of AI-generated content (AIGC) technology, the production of realistic fake facial images and videos that deceive human visual perception has become possible. Consequently, various face forgery detection techniques have been proposed to identify such fake facial content. However, evaluating the effectiveness and generalizability of these detection techniques remains a significant challenge. To address this, we have constructed a large-scale evaluation benchmark called DeepFaceGen, aimed at quantitatively assessing the effectiveness of face forgery detection and facilitating the iterative development of forgery detection technology. DeepFaceGen consists of 776,990 real face image/video samples and 773,812 face forgery image/video samples, generated using 34 mainstream face generation techniques. During the construction process, we carefully consider important factors such as content diversity, fairness across ethnicities, and availability of comprehensive labels, in order to ensure the versatility and convenience of DeepFaceGen. Subsequently, DeepFaceGen is employed in this study to evaluate and analyze the performance of 13 mainstream face forgery detection techniques from various perspectives. Through extensive experimental analysis, we derive significant findings and propose potential directions for future research. The code and dataset for DeepFaceGen are available at https://github.com/HengruiLou/DeepFaceGen.
Authors: Yuxin Chen, Junfei Tan, An Zhang, Zhengyi Yang, Leheng Sheng, Enzhi Zhang, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: Recommender systems aim to predict personalized rankings based on user preference data. With the rise of Language Models (LMs), LM-based recommenders have been widely explored due to their extensive world knowledge and powerful reasoning abilities. Most of the LM-based recommenders convert historical interactions into language prompts, pairing with a positive item as the target response and fine-tuning LM with a language modeling loss. However, the current objective fails to fully leverage preference data and is not optimized for personalized ranking tasks, which hinders the performance of LM-based recommenders. Inspired by the current advancement of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in human preference alignment and the success of softmax loss in recommendations, we propose Softmax-DPO (S-DPO) to instill ranking information into the LM to help LM-based recommenders distinguish preferred items from negatives, rather than solely focusing on positives. Specifically, we incorporate multiple negatives in user preference data and devise an alternative version of DPO loss tailored for LM-based recommenders, connected to softmax sampling strategies. Theoretically, we bridge S-DPO with the softmax loss over negative sampling and find that it has a side effect of mining hard negatives, which assures its exceptional capabilities in recommendation tasks. Empirically, extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of S-DPO to effectively model user preference and further boost recommendation performance while mitigating the data likelihood decline issue of DPO. Our codes are available at https://github.com/chenyuxin1999/S-DPO.
Authors: Athmanarayanan Lakshmi Narayanan, Ranganath Krishnan, Amrutha Machireddy, Mahesh Subedar
Abstract: Foundational vision transformer models have shown impressive few shot performance on many vision tasks. This research presents a novel investigation into the application of parameter efficient fine-tuning methods within an active learning (AL) framework, to advance the sampling selection process in extremely budget constrained classification tasks. The focus on image datasets, known for their out-of-distribution characteristics, adds a layer of complexity and relevance to our study. Through a detailed evaluation, we illustrate the improved AL performance on these challenging datasets, highlighting the strategic advantage of merging parameter efficient fine tuning methods with foundation models. This contributes to the broader discourse on optimizing AL strategies, presenting a promising avenue for future exploration in leveraging foundation models for efficient and effective data annotation in specialized domains.
Authors: Roman Bachmann, O\u{g}uzhan Fatih Kar, David Mizrahi, Ali Garjani, Mingfei Gao, David Griffiths, Jiaming Hu, Afshin Dehghan, Amir Zamir
Abstract: Current multimodal and multitask foundation models like 4M or UnifiedIO show promising results, but in practice their out-of-the-box abilities to accept diverse inputs and perform diverse tasks are limited by the (usually rather small) number of modalities and tasks they are trained on. In this paper, we expand upon the capabilities of them by training a single model on tens of highly diverse modalities and by performing co-training on large-scale multimodal datasets and text corpora. This includes training on several semantic and geometric modalities, feature maps from recent state of the art models like DINOv2 and ImageBind, pseudo labels of specialist models like SAM and 4DHumans, and a range of new modalities that allow for novel ways to interact with the model and steer the generation, for example image metadata or color palettes. A crucial step in this process is performing discrete tokenization on various modalities, whether they are image-like, neural network feature maps, vectors, structured data like instance segmentation or human poses, or data that can be represented as text. Through this, we expand on the out-of-the-box capabilities of multimodal models and specifically show the possibility of training one model to solve at least 3x more tasks/modalities than existing ones and doing so without a loss in performance. This enables more fine-grained and controllable multimodal generation capabilities and allows us to study the distillation of models trained on diverse data and objectives into a unified model. We successfully scale the training to a three billion parameter model using tens of modalities and different datasets. The resulting models and training code are open sourced at 4m.epfl.ch.