Authors: Ruochen Wang, Si Si, Felix Yu, Dorothea Wiesmann, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Inderjit Dhillon
Abstract: The trade-off between expressiveness and interpretability remains a core challenge when building human-centric predictive models for classification and decision-making. While symbolic rules offer interpretability, they often lack expressiveness, whereas neural networks excel in performance but are known for being black boxes. In this paper, we show a combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and symbolic programs can bridge this gap. In the proposed LLM-based Symbolic Programs (LSPs), the pretrained LLM with natural language prompts provides a massive set of interpretable modules that can transform raw input into natural language concepts. Symbolic programs then integrate these modules into an interpretable decision rule. To train LSPs, we develop a divide-and-conquer approach to incrementally build the program from scratch, where the learning process of each step is guided by LLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of LSPs in extracting interpretable and accurate knowledge from data, we introduce IL-Bench, a collection of diverse tasks, including both synthetic and real-world scenarios across different modalities. Empirical results demonstrate LSP's superior performance compared to traditional neurosymbolic programs and vanilla automatic prompt tuning methods. Moreover, as the knowledge learned by LSP is a combination of natural language descriptions and symbolic rules, it is easily transferable to humans (interpretable), and other LLMs, and generalizes well to out-of-distribution samples.
Authors: Lanyu Yang, Dongchun Jiang, Fuqiang Guo, Mingjian Fu
Abstract: Cooperative behavior is prevalent in both human society and nature. Understanding the emergence and maintenance of cooperation among self-interested individuals remains a significant challenge in evolutionary biology and social sciences. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a suitable framework for studying evolutionary game theory as it can adapt to environmental changes and maximize expected benefits. In this study, we employ the State-Action-Reward-State-Action (SARSA) algorithm as the decision-making mechanism for individuals in evolutionary game theory. Initially, we apply SARSA to imitation learning, where agents select neighbors to imitate based on rewards. This approach allows us to observe behavioral changes in agents without independent decision-making abilities. Subsequently, SARSA is utilized for primary agents to independently choose cooperation or betrayal with their neighbors. We evaluate the impact of SARSA on cooperation rates by analyzing variations in rewards and the distribution of cooperators and defectors within the network.
Authors: Yuang Wei, Yizhou Zhou, Yuan-Hao Jiang, Bo Jiang
Abstract: A reliable knowledge structure is a prerequisite for building effective adaptive learning systems and intelligent tutoring systems. Pursuing an explainable and trustworthy knowledge structure, we propose a method for constructing causal knowledge networks. This approach leverages Bayesian networks as a foundation and incorporates causal relationship analysis to derive a causal network. Additionally, we introduce a dependable knowledge-learning path recommendationHuman-Centric eXplainable AI in Education technique built upon this framework, improving teaching and learning quality while maintaining transparency in the decision-making process.
Authors: Keyu Wang, Guilin Qi, Jiaqi Li, Songlin Zhai
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant achievements in solving a wide range of tasks. Recently, LLMs' capability to store, retrieve and infer with symbolic knowledge has drawn a great deal of attention, showing their potential to understand structured information. However, it is not yet known whether LLMs can understand Description Logic (DL) ontologies. In this work, we empirically analyze the LLMs' capability of understanding DL-Lite ontologies covering 6 representative tasks from syntactic and semantic aspects. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate both the effectiveness and limitations of LLMs in understanding DL-Lite ontologies. We find that LLMs can understand formal syntax and model-theoretic semantics of concepts and roles. However, LLMs struggle with understanding TBox NI transitivity and handling ontologies with large ABoxes. We hope that our experiments and analyses provide more insights into LLMs and inspire to build more faithful knowledge engineering solutions.
Authors: Sean Tull, Robin Lorenz, Stephen Clark, Ilyas Khan, Bob Coecke
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently based largely on black-box machine learning models which lack interpretability. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) strives to address this major concern, being critical in high-stakes areas such as the finance, legal and health sectors. We present an approach to defining AI models and their interpretability based on category theory. For this we employ the notion of a compositional model, which sees a model in terms of formal string diagrams which capture its abstract structure together with its concrete implementation. This comprehensive view incorporates deterministic, probabilistic and quantum models. We compare a wide range of AI models as compositional models, including linear and rule-based models, (recurrent) neural networks, transformers, VAEs, and causal and DisCoCirc models. Next we give a definition of interpretation of a model in terms of its compositional structure, demonstrating how to analyse the interpretability of a model, and using this to clarify common themes in XAI. We find that what makes the standard 'intrinsically interpretable' models so transparent is brought out most clearly diagrammatically. This leads us to the more general notion of compositionally-interpretable (CI) models, which additionally include, for instance, causal, conceptual space, and DisCoCirc models. We next demonstrate the explainability benefits of CI models. Firstly, their compositional structure may allow the computation of other quantities of interest, and may facilitate inference from the model to the modelled phenomenon by matching its structure. Secondly, they allow for diagrammatic explanations for their behaviour, based on influence constraints, diagram surgery and rewrite explanations. Finally, we discuss many future directions for the approach, raising the question of how to learn such meaningfully structured models in practice.
Authors: Jeff Shrager
Abstract: ELIZA, often considered the world's first chatbot, was written by Joseph Weizenbaum in the early 1960s. Weizenbaum did not intend to invent the chatbot, but rather to build a platform for research into human-machine conversation and the important cognitive processes of interpretation and misinterpretation. His purpose was obscured by ELIZA's fame, resulting in large part from the fortuitous timing of it's creation, and it's escape into the wild. In this paper I provide a rich historical context for ELIZA's creation, demonstrating that ELIZA arose from the intersection of some of the central threads in the technical history of AI. I also briefly discuss how ELIZA escaped into the world, and how its accidental escape, along with several coincidental turns of the programming language screws, led both to the misapprehension that ELIZA was intended as a chatbot, and to the loss of the original ELIZA to history for over 50 years.
Authors: Xiaohan Zhang, Zainab Altaweel, Yohei Hayamizu, Yan Ding, Saeid Amiri, Hao Yang, Andy Kaminski, Chad Esselink, Shiqi Zhang
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have been applied to robot task planning problems, where the robot receives a task in natural language and generates plans based on visual inputs. While current VLMs have demonstrated strong vision-language understanding capabilities, their performance is still far from being satisfactory in planning tasks. At the same time, although classical task planners, such as PDDL-based, are strong in planning for long-horizon tasks, they do not work well in open worlds where unforeseen situations are common. In this paper, we propose a novel task planning and execution framework, called DKPROMPT, which automates VLM prompting using domain knowledge in PDDL for classical planning in open worlds. Results from quantitative experiments show that DKPROMPT outperforms classical planning, pure VLM-based and a few other competitive baselines in task completion rate.
Authors: Purva Pruthi, David Jensen
Abstract: Many real-world systems can be represented as sets of interacting components. Examples of such systems include computational systems such as query processors, natural systems such as cells, and social systems such as families. Many approaches have been proposed in traditional (associational) machine learning to model such structured systems, including statistical relational models and graph neural networks. Despite this prior work, existing approaches to estimating causal effects typically treat such systems as single units, represent them with a fixed set of variables and assume a homogeneous data-generating process. We study a compositional approach for estimating individual treatment effects (ITE) in structured systems, where each unit is represented by the composition of multiple heterogeneous components. This approach uses a modular architecture to model potential outcomes at each component and aggregates component-level potential outcomes to obtain the unit-level potential outcomes. We discover novel benefits of the compositional approach in causal inference - systematic generalization to estimate counterfactual outcomes of unseen combinations of components and improved overlap guarantees between treatment and control groups compared to the classical methods for causal effect estimation. We also introduce a set of novel environments for empirically evaluating the compositional approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using both simulated and real-world data.
Authors: Jan Jakub\r{u}v, Mikol\'a\v{s} Janota, Josef Urban
Abstract: In this work, we prove over 3000 previously ATP-unproved Mizar/MPTP problems by using several ATP and AI methods, raising the number of ATP-solved Mizar problems from 75\% to above 80\%. First, we start to experiment with the cvc5 SMT solver which uses several instantiation-based heuristics that differ from the superposition-based systems, that were previously applied to Mizar,and add many new solutions. Then we use automated strategy invention to develop cvc5 strategies that largely improve cvc5's performance on the hard problems. In particular, the best invented strategy solves over 14\% more problems than the best previously available cvc5 strategy. We also show that different clausification methods have a high impact on such instantiation-based methods, again producing many new solutions. In total, the methods solve 3021 (21.3\%) of the 14163 previously unsolved hard Mizar problems. This is a new milestone over the Mizar large-theory benchmark and a large strengthening of the hammer methods for Mizar.
Authors: Felix Taubner, Prashant Raina, Mathieu Tuli, Eu Wern Teh, Chul Lee, Jinmiao Huang
Abstract: When working with 3D facial data, improving fidelity and avoiding the uncanny valley effect is critically dependent on accurate 3D facial performance capture. Because such methods are expensive and due to the widespread availability of 2D videos, recent methods have focused on how to perform monocular 3D face tracking. However, these methods often fall short in capturing precise facial movements due to limitations in their network architecture, training, and evaluation processes. Addressing these challenges, we propose a novel face tracker, FlowFace, that introduces an innovative 2D alignment network for dense per-vertex alignment. Unlike prior work, FlowFace is trained on high-quality 3D scan annotations rather than weak supervision or synthetic data. Our 3D model fitting module jointly fits a 3D face model from one or many observations, integrating existing neutral shape priors for enhanced identity and expression disentanglement and per-vertex deformations for detailed facial feature reconstruction. Additionally, we propose a novel metric and benchmark for assessing tracking accuracy. Our method exhibits superior performance on both custom and publicly available benchmarks. We further validate the effectiveness of our tracker by generating high-quality 3D data from 2D videos, which leads to performance gains on downstream tasks.
Authors: Jiarui Xu, Karim Said, Lizhong Zheng, Lingjia Liu
Abstract: Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is a promising modulation scheme for wireless communication in high-mobility scenarios. Recently, a reservoir computing (RC) based approach has been introduced for online subframe-based symbol detection in the OTFS system, where only the limited over-the-air (OTA) pilot symbols are utilized for training. However, the previous RC-based approach does not design the RC architecture based on the properties of the OTFS system to fully unlock the potential of RC. This paper introduces a novel two-dimensional RC (2D-RC) approach for online symbol detection on a subframe basis in the OTFS system. The 2D-RC is designed to have a two-dimensional (2D) filtering structure to equalize the 2D circular channel effect in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain of the OTFS system. With the introduced architecture, the 2D-RC can operate in the DD domain with only a single neural network, unlike our previous work which requires multiple RCs to track channel variations in the time domain. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the 2D-RC approach over the previous RC-based approach and the compared model-based methods across different modulation orders.
Authors: Jianguo Pan, Zhengxin Hu, Lingdun Zhang, Xia Cai
Abstract: Sensor-based human activity recognition is important in daily scenarios such as smart healthcare and homes due to its non-intrusive privacy and low cost advantages, but the problem of out-of-domain generalization caused by differences in focusing individuals and operating environments can lead to significant accuracy degradation on cross-person behavior recognition due to the inconsistent distributions of training and test data. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a new method, Multi-channel Time Series Decomposition Network (MTSDNet). Firstly, MTSDNet decomposes the original signal into a combination of multiple polynomials and trigonometric functions by the trainable parameterized temporal decomposition to learn the low-rank representation of the original signal for improving the extraterritorial generalization ability of the model. Then, the different components obtained by the decomposition are classified layer by layer and the layer attention is used to aggregate components to obtain the final classification result. Extensive evaluation on DSADS, OPPORTUNITY, PAMAP2, UCIHAR and UniMib public datasets shows the advantages in predicting accuracy and stability of our method compared with other competing strategies, including the state-of-the-art ones. And the visualization is conducted to reveal MTSDNet's interpretability and layer-by-layer characteristics.
Authors: Adyasha Mohanty, Grace Gao
Abstract: Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-based positioning plays a crucial role in various applications, including navigation, transportation, logistics, mapping, and emergency services. Traditional GNSS positioning methods are model-based and they utilize satellite geometry and the known properties of satellite signals. However, model-based methods have limitations in challenging environments and often lack adaptability to uncertain noise models. This paper highlights recent advances in Machine Learning (ML) and its potential to address these limitations. It covers a broad range of ML methods, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning, deep learning, and hybrid approaches. The survey provides insights into positioning applications related to GNSS such as signal analysis, anomaly detection, multi-sensor integration, prediction, and accuracy enhancement using ML. It discusses the strengths, limitations, and challenges of current ML-based approaches for GNSS positioning, providing a comprehensive overview of the field.
Authors: Thakshila Wimalajeewa Wewelwala, Thomas W. Tedesso, Tony Davis
Abstract: Reliable detection, localization and identification of small drones is essential to promote safe, secure and privacy-respecting operation of Unmanned-Aerial Systems (UAS), or simply, drones. This is an increasingly challenging problem with only single modality sensing, especially, to detect and identify small drones. In this work, a multi-stage fusion architecture using passive radio frequency (RF) and electro-optic (EO) imagery data is developed to leverage the synergies of the modalities to improve the overall tracking and classification capabilities. For detection with EO-imagery, supervised deep learning based techniques as well as unsupervised foreground/background separation techniques are explored to cope with challenging environments. Using real collected data for Group 1 and 2 drones, the capability of each algorithm is quantified. In order to compensate for any performance gaps in detection with only EO imagery as well as to provide a unique device identifier for the drones, passive RF is integrated with EO imagery whenever available. In particular, drone detections in the image plane are combined with passive RF location estimates via detection-to-detection association after 3D to 2D transformation. Final tracking is performed on the composite detections in the 2D image plane. Each track centroid is given a unique identification obtained via RF fingerprinting. The proposed fusion architecture is tested and the tracking and performance is quantified over the range to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches using simultaneously collected passive RF and EO data at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) through ESCAPE-21 (Experiments, Scenarios, Concept of Operations, and Prototype Engineering) data collect
Authors: Yanhu Wang, Shuaishuai Guo, Anming Dong, Hui Zhao
Abstract: Semantic communications offer promising prospects for enhancing data transmission efficiency. However, existing schemes have predominantly concentrated on point-to-point transmissions. In this paper, we aim to investigate the validity of this claim in interference scenarios compared to baseline approaches. Specifically, our focus is on general multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels, where we propose an interference-robust semantic communication (IRSC) scheme. This scheme involves the development of transceivers based on neural networks (NNs), which integrate channel state information (CSI) either solely at the receiver or at both transmitter and receiver ends. Moreover, we establish a composite loss function for training IRSC transceivers, along with a dynamic mechanism for updating the weights of various components in the loss function to enhance system fairness among users. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IRSC scheme effectively learns to mitigate interference and outperforms baseline approaches, particularly in low signal-to-noise (SNR) regimes.
Authors: Michael Ackerman
Abstract: This research paper discusses the advances made in the past decade in biomedicine and Large Language Models. To understand how the advances have been made hand-in-hand with one another, the paper also discusses the integration of Natural Language Processing techniques and tools into biomedicine. Finally, the goal of this paper is to expand on a survey conducted last year (2023) by introducing a new list of questions and prompts for the top two language models. Through this survey, this paper seeks to quantify the improvement made in the reasoning abilities in LLMs and to what extent those improvements are felt by the average user. Additionally, this paper seeks to extend research on retrieval of biological literature by prompting the LLM to answer open-ended questions in great depth.
Authors: Wazib Ansar, Saptarsi Goswami, Amlan Chakrabarti
Abstract: The advent of transformers with attention mechanisms and associated pre-trained models have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, such models are resource-intensive due to highly complex architecture. This limits their application to resource-constrained environments. While choosing an appropriate NLP model, a major trade-off exists over choosing accuracy over efficiency and vice versa. This paper presents a commentary on the evolution of NLP and its applications with emphasis on their accuracy as-well-as efficiency. Following this, a survey of research contributions towards enhancing the efficiency of transformer-based models at various stages of model development along with hardware considerations has been conducted. The goal of this survey is to determine how current NLP techniques contribute towards a sustainable society and to establish a foundation for future research.
Authors: Atitaya Phoemsuk, Vahid Abolghasemi
Abstract: Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) diagnostic to be a major global cause of death, necessitating innovative solutions. Addressing the critical importance of early CAD detection and its impact on the mortality rate, we propose the potential of one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNN) to enhance detection accuracy and reduce network complexity. This study goes beyond traditional diagnostic methodologies, leveraging the remarkable ability of 1D-CNN to interpret complex patterns within Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals without depending on feature extraction techniques. We explore the impact of varying sample lengths on model performance and conduct experiments involving layers reduction. The ECG data employed were obtained from the PhysioNet databases, namely the MIMIC III and Fantasia datasets, with respective sampling frequencies of 125 Hz and 250 Hz. The highest accuracy for unseen data obtained with a sample length of 250. These initial findings demonstrate the potential of 1D-CNNs in CAD diagnosis using ECG signals and highlight the sample size's role in achieving high accuracy.
Authors: Yuni Susanti, Nina Holsmoelle
Abstract: This work aims toward an application of natural language processing (NLP) technology for automatic verification of causal graphs using text sources. A causal graph is often derived from unsupervised causal discovery methods and requires manual evaluation from human experts. NLP technologies, i.e., Large Language Models (LLMs) such as BERT and ChatGPT, can potentially be used to verify the resulted causal graph by predicting if causal relation can be observed between node pairs based on the textual context. In this work, we compare the performance of two types of NLP models: (1) Pre-trained language models fine-tuned for causal relation classification task and, (2) prompt-based LLMs. Contrasted to previous studies where prompt-based LLMs work relatively well over a set of diverse tasks, preliminary experiments on biomedical and open-domain datasets suggest that the fine-tuned models far outperform the prompt-based LLMs, up to 20.5 points improvement of F1 score. We shared the code and the pre-processed datasets in our repository.
Authors: Changyu Du, Stavros Nousias, Andr\'e Borrmann
Abstract: Facing increasingly complex BIM authoring software and the accompanying expensive learning costs, designers often seek to interact with the software in a more intelligent and lightweight manner. They aim to automate modeling workflows, avoiding obstacles and difficulties caused by software usage, thereby focusing on the design process itself. To address this issue, we proposed an LLM-based autonomous agent framework that can function as a copilot in the BIM authoring tool, answering software usage questions, understanding the user's design intentions from natural language, and autonomously executing modeling tasks by invoking the appropriate tools. In a case study based on the BIM authoring software Vectorworks, we implemented a software prototype to integrate the proposed framework seamlessly into the BIM authoring scenario. We evaluated the planning and reasoning capabilities of different LLMs within this framework when faced with complex instructions. Our work demonstrates the significant potential of LLM-based agents in design automation and intelligent interaction.
Authors: Xirui Tang (College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA), Feiyang Li (Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA), Zinan Cao (Department of General Systems Studies, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan), Qixuan Yu (College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA), Yulu Gong (School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA)
Abstract: In this paper, an improved method for VR user experience prediction is investigated by introducing a sparrow search algorithm and a random forest algorithm improved by an iterative local search-optimised sparrow search algorithm. The study firstly conducted a statistical analysis of the data, and then trained and tested using the traditional random forest model, the random forest model improved by the sparrow search algorithm, and the random forest algorithm improved based on the iterative local search-sparrow search algorithm, respectively. The results show that the traditional random forest model has a prediction accuracy of 93% on the training set but only 73.3% on the test set, which is poor in generalisation; whereas the model improved by the sparrow search algorithm has a prediction accuracy of 94% on the test set, which is improved compared with the traditional model. What is more noteworthy is that the improved model based on the iterative local search-sparrow search algorithm achieves 100% accuracy on both the training and test sets, which is significantly better than the other two methods. These research results provide new ideas and methods for VR user experience prediction, especially the improved model based on the iterative local search-sparrow search algorithm performs well and is able to more accurately predict and classify the user's VR experience. In the future, the application of this method in other fields can be further explored, and its effectiveness can be verified through real cases to promote the development of AI technology in the field of user experience.
Authors: Arshia Afzal, Grigorios Chrysos, Volkan Cevher, Mahsa Shoaran
Abstract: EEG-based seizure detection models face challenges in terms of inference speed and memory efficiency, limiting their real-time implementation in clinical devices. This paper introduces a novel graph-based residual state update mechanism (REST) for real-time EEG signal analysis in applications such as epileptic seizure detection. By leveraging a combination of graph neural networks and recurrent structures, REST efficiently captures both non-Euclidean geometry and temporal dependencies within EEG data. Our model demonstrates high accuracy in both seizure detection and classification tasks. Notably, REST achieves a remarkable 9-fold acceleration in inference speed compared to state-of-the-art models, while simultaneously demanding substantially less memory than the smallest model employed for this task. These attributes position REST as a promising candidate for real-time implementation in clinical devices, such as Responsive Neurostimulation or seizure alert systems.
Authors: Dinuka Sandun Udayantha, Kavindu Weerasinghe, Nima Wickramasinghe, Akila Abeyratne, Kithmin Wickremasinghe, Jithangi Wanigasinghe, Anjula De Silva, Chamira Edussooriya
Abstract: The neonatal period is the most vulnerable time for the development of seizures. Seizures in the immature brain lead to detrimental consequences, therefore require early diagnosis. The gold-standard for neonatal seizure detection currently relies on continuous video-EEG monitoring; which involves recording multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) alongside real-time video monitoring within a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). However, video-EEG monitoring technology requires clinical expertise and is often limited to technologically advanced and resourceful settings. Cost-effective new techniques could help the medical fraternity make an accurate diagnosis and advocate treatment without delay. In this work, a novel explainable deep learning model to automate the neonatal seizure detection process with a reduced EEG montage is proposed, which employs convolutional nets, graph attention layers, and fully connected layers. Beyond its ability to detect seizures in real-time with a reduced montage, this model offers the unique advantage of real-time interpretability. By evaluating the performance on the Zenodo dataset with 10-fold cross-validation, the presented model achieves an absolute improvement of 8.31% and 42.86% in area under curve (AUC) and recall, respectively.
Authors: Igor Carrara (UniCA, CRONOS), Theodore Papadopoulo (UniCA, CRONOS)
Abstract: Electroencephalographic signals are represented as multidimensional datasets. We introduce an enhancement to the augmented covariance method (ACM), exploiting more thoroughly its mathematical properties, in order to improve motor imagery classification.Standard ACM emerges as a combination of phase space reconstruction of dynamical systems and of Riemannian geometry. Indeed, it is based on the construction of a Symmetric Positive Definite matrix to improve classification. But this matrix also has a Block-Toeplitz structure that was previously ignored. This work treats such matrices in the real manifold to which they belong: the set of Block-Toeplitz SPD matrices. After some manipulation, this set is can be seen as the product of an SPD manifold and a Siegel Disk Space.The proposed methodology was tested using the MOABB framework with a within-session evaluation procedure. It achieves a similar classification performance to ACM, which is typically better than -- or at worse comparable to -- state-of-the-art methods. But, it also improves consequently the computational efficiency over ACM, making it even more suitable for real time experiments.
Authors: Chi-Sheng Chen, Chun-Shu Wei
Abstract: Decoding images from non-invasive electroencephalographic (EEG) signals has been a grand challenge in understanding how the human brain process visual information in real-world scenarios. To cope with the issues of signal-to-noise ratio and nonstationarity, this paper introduces a MUltimodal Similarity-keeping contrastivE learning (MUSE) framework for zero-shot EEG-based image classification. We develop a series of multivariate time-series encoders tailored for EEG signals and assess the efficacy of regularized contrastive EEG-Image pretraining using an extensive visual EEG dataset. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a top-1 accuracy of 19.3% and a top-5 accuracy of 48.8% in 200-way zero-shot image classification. Furthermore, we visualize neural patterns via model interpretation, shedding light on the visual processing dynamics in the human brain. The code repository for this work is available at: https://github.com/ChiShengChen/MUSE_EEG.
Authors: Javier Garc\'ia Ciudad, Morten M{\o}rup, Birgitte Rahbek Kornum, Alexander Neergaard Zahid
Abstract: In human sleep staging models, augmenting the temporal context of the input to the range of tens of minutes has recently demonstrated performance improvement. In contrast, the temporal context of mouse sleep staging models is typically in the order of tens of seconds. While long-term time patterns are less clear in mouse sleep, increasing the temporal context further than that of the current mouse sleep staging models might still result in a performance increase, given that the current methods only model very short term patterns. In this study, we examine the influence of increasing the temporal context in mouse sleep staging up to 15 minutes in three mouse cohorts using two recent and high-performing human sleep staging models that account for long-term dependencies. These are compared to two prominent mouse sleep staging models that use a local context of 12 s and 20 s, respectively. An increase in context up to 28 s is observed to have a positive impact on sleep stage classification performance, especially in REM sleep. However, the impact is limited for longer context windows. One of the human sleep scoring models, L-SeqSleepNet, outperforms both mouse models in all cohorts. This suggests that mouse sleep staging can benefit from more temporal context than currently used.
Authors: Thomas Kite, Uzair Tahamid Siam, Brian Ayers, Nicholas Houstis, Aaron D Aguirre
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) applied to routine patient monitoring within intensive care units (ICUs) has the potential to improve care by providing clinicians with novel insights into each patient's health and expected response to interventions. This paper applies deep learning to a large volume of unlabeled electrocardiogram (ECG) telemetry signals, which are commonly used for continuous patient monitoring in hospitals but have important differences from the standard, single time-point 12-lead ECG used in many prior machine learning studies. We applied self-supervised learning to pretrain a spectrum of deep networks on approximately 147,000 hours of ECG telemetry data. Our approach leverages this dataset to train models that significantly improve performance on four distinct downstream tasks compared with direct supervised learning using labeled data. These pretrained models enable medically useful predictions and estimates in smaller patient cohorts that are typically limited by the scarcity of labels. Notably, we demonstrate that our pretrained networks can continuously annotate ECG telemetry signals, thereby providing monitoring capabilities that are often unavailable due to the requirement for specialized expertise and time-consuming professional annotations.
Authors: Jingwei Wang
Abstract: This project investigates the behavior of multi-head attention in Transformer models, specifically focusing on the differences between benign and trojan models in the context of sentiment analysis. Trojan attacks cause models to perform normally on clean inputs but exhibit misclassifications when presented with inputs containing predefined triggers. We characterize attention head functions in trojan and benign models, identifying specific 'trojan' heads and analyzing their behavior.
Authors: Tingwei Chen, Yantao Wang, Hanzhi Chen, Zijian Zhao, Xinhao Li, Nicola Piovesan, Guangxu Zhu, Qingjiang Shi
Abstract: The introduction of fifth-generation (5G) radio technology has revolutionized communications, bringing unprecedented automation, capacity, connectivity, and ultra-fast, reliable communications. However, this technological leap comes with a substantial increase in energy consumption, presenting a significant challenge. To improve the energy efficiency of 5G networks, it is imperative to develop sophisticated models that accurately reflect the influence of base station (BS) attributes and operational conditions on energy usage.Importantly, addressing the complexity and interdependencies of these diverse features is particularly challenging, both in terms of data processing and model architecture design. This paper proposes a novel 5G base stations energy consumption modelling method by learning from a real-world dataset used in the ITU 5G Base Station Energy Consumption Modelling Challenge in which our model ranked second. Unlike existing methods that omit the Base Station Identifier (BSID) information and thus fail to capture the unique energy fingerprint in different base stations, we incorporate the BSID into the input features and encoding it with an embedding layer for precise representation. Additionally, we introduce a novel masked training method alongside an attention mechanism to further boost the model's generalization capabilities and accuracy. After evaluation, our method demonstrates significant improvements over existing models, reducing Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) from 12.75% to 4.98%, leading to a performance gain of more than 60%.
Authors: Tianjian Yang, Hao Zhou, Shuo Liu, Kaiwen Guo, Yiwen Hou, Haohua Du, Zhi Liu, Xiang-Yang Li
Abstract: The significance of intelligent sensing systems is growing in the realm of smart services. These systems extract relevant signal features and generate informative representations for particular tasks. However, building the feature extraction component for such systems requires extensive domain-specific expertise or data. The exceptionally rapid development of foundation models is likely to usher in newfound abilities in such intelligent sensing. We propose a new scheme for sensing model, which we refer to as semi-generalist sensing model (SGSM). SGSM is able to semiautomatically solve various tasks using relatively less task-specific labeled data compared to traditional systems. Built through the analysis of the common theoretical model, SGSM can depict different modalities, such as the acoustic and Wi-Fi signal. Experimental results on such two heterogeneous sensors illustrate that SGSM functions across a wide range of scenarios, thereby establishing its broad applicability. In some cases, SGSM even achieves better performance than sensor-specific specialized solutions. Wi-Fi evaluations indicate a 20\% accuracy improvement when applying SGSM to an existing sensing model.
Authors: Spandan Madan, Will Xiao, Mingran Cao, Hanspeter Pfister, Margaret Livingstone, Gabriel Kreiman
Abstract: We characterized the generalization capabilities of DNN-based encoding models when predicting neuronal responses from the visual cortex. We collected \textit{MacaqueITBench}, a large-scale dataset of neural population responses from the macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex to over $300,000$ images, comprising $8,233$ unique natural images presented to seven monkeys over $109$ sessions. Using \textit{MacaqueITBench}, we investigated the impact of distribution shifts on models predicting neural activity by dividing the images into Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) train and test splits. The OOD splits included several different image-computable types including image contrast, hue, intensity, temperature, and saturation. Compared to the performance on in-distribution test images -- the conventional way these models have been evaluated -- models performed worse at predicting neuronal responses to out-of-distribution images, retaining as little as $20\%$ of the performance on in-distribution test images. The generalization performance under OOD shifts can be well accounted by a simple image similarity metric -- the cosine distance between image representations extracted from a pre-trained object recognition model is a strong predictor of neural predictivity under different distribution shifts. The dataset of images, neuronal firing rate recordings, and computational benchmarks are hosted publicly at: https://bit.ly/3zeutVd.
URLs: https://bit.ly/3zeutVd.
Authors: Sumit Kumar Dam, Choong Seon Hong, Yu Qiao, Chaoning Zhang
Abstract: The past few decades have witnessed an upsurge in data, forming the foundation for data-hungry, learning-based AI technology. Conversational agents, often referred to as AI chatbots, rely heavily on such data to train large language models (LLMs) and generate new content (knowledge) in response to user prompts. With the advent of OpenAI's ChatGPT, LLM-based chatbots have set new standards in the AI community. This paper presents a complete survey of the evolution and deployment of LLM-based chatbots in various sectors. We first summarize the development of foundational chatbots, followed by the evolution of LLMs, and then provide an overview of LLM-based chatbots currently in use and those in the development phase. Recognizing AI chatbots as tools for generating new knowledge, we explore their diverse applications across various industries. We then discuss the open challenges, considering how the data used to train the LLMs and the misuse of the generated knowledge can cause several issues. Finally, we explore the future outlook to augment their efficiency and reliability in numerous applications. By addressing key milestones and the present-day context of LLM-based chatbots, our survey invites readers to delve deeper into this realm, reflecting on how their next generation will reshape conversational AI.
Authors: Yuanyuan Peng, Aidi Lin, Meng Wang, Tian Lin, Ke Zou, Yinglin Cheng, Tingkun Shi, Xulong Liao, Lixia Feng, Zhen Liang, Xinjian Chen, Huazhu Fu, Haoyu Chen
Abstract: Inability to express the confidence level and detect unseen classes has limited the clinical implementation of artificial intelligence in the real-world. We developed a foundation model with uncertainty estimation (FMUE) to detect 11 retinal conditions on optical coherence tomography (OCT). In the internal test set, FMUE achieved a higher F1 score of 96.76% than two state-of-the-art algorithms, RETFound and UIOS, and got further improvement with thresholding strategy to 98.44%. In the external test sets obtained from other OCT devices, FMUE achieved an accuracy of 88.75% and 92.73% before and after thresholding. Our model is superior to two ophthalmologists with a higher F1 score (95.17% vs. 61.93% &71.72%). Besides, our model correctly predicts high uncertainty scores for samples with ambiguous features, of non-target-category diseases, or with low-quality to prompt manual checks and prevent misdiagnosis. FMUE provides a trustworthy method for automatic retinal anomalies detection in the real-world clinical open set environment.
Authors: Shengzhe Lyu, Yongliang Chen, Di Duan, Renqi Jia, Weitao Xu
Abstract: In the realm of smart sensing with the Internet of Things, earable devices are empowered with the capability of multi-modality sensing and intelligence of context-aware computing, leading to its wide usage in Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Nonetheless, unlike the movements captured by Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors placed on the upper or lower body, those motion signals obtained from earable devices show significant changes in amplitudes and patterns, especially in the presence of dynamic and unpredictable head movements, posing a significant challenge for activity classification. In this work, we present EarDA, an adversarial-based domain adaptation system to extract the domain-independent features across different sensor locations. Moreover, while most deep learning methods commonly rely on training with substantial amounts of labeled data to offer good accuracy, the proposed scheme can release the potential usage of publicly available smartphone-based IMU datasets. Furthermore, we explore the feasibility of applying a filter-based data processing method to mitigate the impact of head movement. EarDA, the proposed system, enables more data-efficient and accurate activity sensing. It achieves an accuracy of 88.8% under HAR task, demonstrating a significant 43% improvement over methods without domain adaptation. This clearly showcases its effectiveness in mitigating domain gaps.
Authors: Jes\'us Armenta-Segura, Grigori Sidorov
Abstract: In the japanese anime industry, predicting whether an upcoming product will be popular is crucial. This paper presents a dataset and methods on predicting anime popularity using a multimodal textimage dataset constructed exclusively from freely available internet sources. The dataset was built following rigorous standards based on real-life investment experiences. A deep neural network architecture leveraging GPT-2 and ResNet-50 to embed the data was employed to investigate the correlation between the multimodal text-image input and a popularity score, discovering relevant strengths and weaknesses in the dataset. To measure the accuracy of the model, mean squared error (MSE) was used, obtaining a best result of 0.011 when considering all inputs and the full version of the deep neural network, compared to the benchmark MSE 0.412 obtained with traditional TF-IDF and PILtotensor vectorizations. This is the first proposal to address such task with multimodal datasets, revealing the substantial benefit of incorporating image information, even when a relatively small model (ResNet-50) was used to embed them.
Authors: Shubhabrata Mukherjee, Cory Beard, Sejun Song
Abstract: Semantic Communication can transform the way we transmit information, prioritizing meaningful and effective content over individual symbols or bits. This evolution promises significant benefits, including reduced latency, lower bandwidth usage, and higher throughput compared to traditional communication. However, the development of Semantic Communication faces a crucial challenge: the need for universal metrics to benchmark the joint effects of semantic information loss and energy consumption. This research introduces an innovative solution: the ``Energy-Optimized Semantic Loss'' (EOSL) function, a novel multi-objective loss function that effectively balances semantic information loss and energy consumption. Through comprehensive experiments on transformer models, including energy benchmarking, we demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of EOSL-based model selection. We have established that EOSL-based transformer model selection achieves up to 83\% better similarity-to-power ratio (SPR) compared to BLEU score-based selection and 67\% better SPR compared to solely lowest power usage-based selection. Furthermore, we extend the applicability of EOSL to diverse and varying contexts, inspired by the principles of Meta-Learning. By cumulatively applying EOSL, we enable the model selection system to adapt to this change, leveraging historical EOSL values to guide the learning process. This work lays the foundation for energy-efficient model selection and the development of green semantic communication.
Authors: Faqian Guan, Tianqing Zhu, Hui Sun, Wanlei Zhou, Philip S. Yu
Abstract: Graph data contains rich node features and unique edge information, which have been applied across various domains, such as citation networks or recommendation systems. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are specialized for handling such data and have shown impressive performance in many applications. However, GNNs may contain of sensitive information and susceptible to privacy attacks. For example, link stealing is a type of attack in which attackers infer whether two nodes are linked or not. Previous link stealing attacks primarily relied on posterior probabilities from the target GNN model, neglecting the significance of node features. Additionally, variations in node classes across different datasets lead to different dimensions of posterior probabilities. The handling of these varying data dimensions posed a challenge in using a single model to effectively conduct link stealing attacks on different datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform link stealing attacks on GNNs. LLMs can effectively integrate textual features and exhibit strong generalizability, enabling attacks to handle diverse data dimensions across various datasets. We design two distinct LLM prompts to effectively combine textual features and posterior probabilities of graph nodes. Through these designed prompts, we fine-tune the LLM to adapt to the link stealing attack task. Furthermore, we fine-tune the LLM using multiple datasets and enable the LLM to learn features from different datasets simultaneously. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances the performance of existing link stealing attack tasks in both white-box and black-box scenarios. Our method can execute link stealing attacks across different datasets using only a single model, making link stealing attacks more applicable to real-world scenarios.
Authors: Mingtian Tan, Mike A. Merrill, Vinayak Gupta, Tim Althoff, Thomas Hartvigsen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are being applied to time series tasks, particularly time series forecasting. However, are language models actually useful for time series? After a series of ablation studies on three recent and popular LLM-based time series forecasting methods, we find that removing the LLM component or replacing it with a basic attention layer does not degrade the forecasting results -- in most cases the results even improved. We also find that despite their significant computational cost, pretrained LLMs do no better than models trained from scratch, do not represent the sequential dependencies in time series, and do not assist in few-shot settings. Additionally, we explore time series encoders and reveal that patching and attention structures perform similarly to state-of-the-art LLM-based forecasters.
Authors: Abdur Rashid, Parag Biswas, Angona Biswas, MD Abdullah Al Nasim, Kishor Datta Gupta, Roy George
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a crucial instrument for streamlining processes in various industries, including electrical power systems, as a result of recent digitalization. Algorithms for artificial intelligence are data-driven models that are based on statistical learning theory and are used as a tool to take use of the data that the power system and its users generate. Initially, we perform a thorough literature analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) applications related to renewable energy (RE). Next, we present a thorough analysis of renewable energy factories and assess their suitability, along with a list of the most widely used and appropriate AI algorithms. Nine AI-based strategies are identified here to assist Renewable Energy (RE) in contemporary power systems. This survey paper comprises an extensive review of the several AI techniques used for renewable energy as well as a methodical analysis of the literature for the study of various intelligent system application domains across different disciplines of renewable energy. This literature review identifies the performance and outcomes of nine different research methods by assessing them, and it aims to distill valuable insights into their strengths and limitations. This study also addressed three main topics: using AI technology for renewable power generation, utilizing AI for renewable energy forecasting, and optimizing energy systems. Additionally, it explored AI's superiority over conventional models in controllability, data handling, cyberattack prevention, smart grid implementation, robotics- AI's significance in shaping the future of the energy industry. Furthermore, this article outlines future directions in the integration of AI for renewable energy.
Authors: Kai Shao, Rui Wang, Yixue Hao, Long Hu, Min Chen
Abstract: Depression recognition based on physiological signals such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalogram (EEG) has made considerable progress. However, most existing studies ignore the complementarity and semantic consistency of multimodal physiological signals under the same stimulation task in complex spatio-temporal patterns. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal physiological signals representation learning framework using Siamese architecture via multiscale contrasting for depression recognition (MRLMC). First, fNIRS and EEG are transformed into different but correlated data based on a time-domain data augmentation strategy. Then, we design a spatio-temporal contrasting module to learn the representation of fNIRS and EEG through weight-sharing multiscale spatio-temporal convolution. Furthermore, to enhance the learning of semantic representation associated with stimulation tasks, a semantic consistency contrast module is proposed, aiming to maximize the semantic similarity of fNIRS and EEG. Extensive experiments on publicly available and self-collected multimodal physiological signals datasets indicate that MRLMC outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Moreover, our proposed framework is capable of transferring to multimodal time series downstream tasks.
Authors: Zhiwei Yao
Abstract: Class imbalance is a common issue in real-world data distributions, negatively impacting the training of accurate classifiers. Traditional approaches to mitigate this problem fall into three main categories: class re-balancing, information transfer, and representation learning. This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance performance on long-tailed datasets by optimizing the backbone architecture through neural architecture search (NAS). Our research shows that an architecture's accuracy on a balanced dataset does not reliably predict its performance on imbalanced datasets. This necessitates a complete NAS run on long-tailed datasets, which can be computationally expensive. To address this computational challenge, we focus on existing work, called IMB-NAS, which proposes efficiently adapting a NAS super-network trained on a balanced source dataset to an imbalanced target dataset. A detailed description of the fundamental techniques for IMB-NAS is provided in this paper, including NAS and architecture transfer. Among various adaptation strategies, we find that the most effective approach is to retrain the linear classification head with reweighted loss while keeping the backbone NAS super-network trained on the balanced source dataset frozen. Finally, we conducted a series of experiments on the imbalanced CIFAR dataset for performance evaluation. Our conclusions are the same as those proposed in the IMB-NAS paper.
Authors: Zahra Sadeghi, Stan Matwin
Abstract: Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) aims to detect influential input factors that lead a model to arrive at a certain decision and is a significant approach for mitigating the computational burden of processing high dimensional data. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and a comparison on global sensitivity analysis methods. Additionally, we propose a methodology for evaluating the efficacy of these methods by conducting a case study on MNIST digit dataset. Our study goes through the underlying mechanism of widely used GSA methods and highlights their efficacy through a comprehensive methodology.
Authors: Haorui Wang, Marta Skreta, Cher-Tian Ser, Wenhao Gao, Lingkai Kong, Felix Streith-Kalthoff, Chenru Duan, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu, Yanqiao Zhu, Yuanqi Du, Al\'an Aspuru-Guzik, Kirill Neklyudov, Chao Zhang
Abstract: Molecular discovery, when formulated as an optimization problem, presents significant computational challenges because optimization objectives can be non-differentiable. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), often used to optimize black-box objectives in molecular discovery, traverse chemical space by performing random mutations and crossovers, leading to a large number of expensive objective evaluations. In this work, we ameliorate this shortcoming by incorporating chemistry-aware Large Language Models (LLMs) into EAs. Namely, we redesign crossover and mutation operations in EAs using LLMs trained on large corpora of chemical information. We perform extensive empirical studies on both commercial and open-source models on multiple tasks involving property optimization, molecular rediscovery, and structure-based drug design, demonstrating that the joint usage of LLMs with EAs yields superior performance over all baseline models across single- and multi-objective settings. We demonstrate that our algorithm improves both the quality of the final solution and convergence speed, thereby reducing the number of required objective evaluations. Our code is available at http://github.com/zoom-wang112358/MOLLEO
Authors: Xianda Chen (Frank), Kehua Chen (Frank), Meixin Zhu (Frank), Hao (Frank), Yang, Shaojie Shen, Xuesong Wang, Yinhai Wang
Abstract: Car-following (CF) modeling, a fundamental component in microscopic traffic simulation, has attracted increasing interest of researchers in the past decades. In this study, we propose an adaptable personalized car-following framework -MetaFollower, by leveraging the power of meta-learning. Specifically, we first utilize Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) to extract common driving knowledge from various CF events. Afterward, the pre-trained model can be fine-tuned on new drivers with only a few CF trajectories to achieve personalized CF adaptation. We additionally combine Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) to reflect temporal heterogeneity with high interpretability. Unlike conventional adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems that rely on predefined settings and constant parameters without considering heterogeneous driving characteristics, MetaFollower can accurately capture and simulate the intricate dynamics of car-following behavior while considering the unique driving styles of individual drivers. We demonstrate the versatility and adaptability of MetaFollower by showcasing its ability to adapt to new drivers with limited training data quickly. To evaluate the performance of MetaFollower, we conduct rigorous experiments comparing it with both data-driven and physics-based models. The results reveal that our proposed framework outperforms baseline models in predicting car-following behavior with higher accuracy and safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first car-following model aiming to achieve fast adaptation by considering both driver and temporal heterogeneity based on meta-learning.
Authors: Ezgi Korkmaz
Abstract: Deep neural policies have recently been installed in a diverse range of settings, from biotechnology to automated financial systems. However, the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the value function leads to concerns on the decision boundary stability, in particular, with regard to the sensitivity of policy decision making to indiscernible, non-robust features due to highly non-convex and complex deep neural manifolds. These concerns constitute an obstruction to understanding the reasoning made by deep neural policies, and their foundational limitations. Hence, it is crucial to develop techniques that aim to understand the sensitivities in the learnt representations of neural network policies. To achieve this we introduce a theoretically founded method that provides a systematic analysis of the unstable directions in the deep neural policy decision boundary across both time and space. Through experiments in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique for identifying correlated directions of instability, and for measuring how sample shifts remold the set of sensitive directions in the neural policy landscape. Most importantly, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art robust training techniques yield learning of disjoint unstable directions, with dramatically larger oscillations over time, when compared to standard training. We believe our results reveal the fundamental properties of the decision process made by reinforcement learning policies, and can help in constructing reliable and robust deep neural policies.
Authors: Lingxi Xiao, Jinxin Hu, Yutian Yang, Yinqiu Feng, Zichao Li, Zexi Chen
Abstract: Most of the existing wavelet image processing techniques are carried out in the form of single-scale reconstruction and multiple iterations. However, processing high-quality fMRI data presents problems such as mixed noise and excessive computation time. This project proposes the use of matrix operations by combining mixed noise elimination methods with wavelet analysis to replace traditional iterative algorithms. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the auditory cortex of a single subject is analyzed and compared to the wavelet domain signal processing technology based on repeated times and the world's most influential SPM8. Experiments show that this algorithm is the fastest in computing time, and its detection effect is comparable to the traditional iterative algorithm. However, this has a higher practical value for the processing of FMRI data. In addition, the wavelet analysis method proposed signal processing to speed up the calculation rate.
Authors: Yang Lin, Muqing Li, Ziyi Zhu, Yinqiu Feng, Lingxi Xiao, Zexi Chen
Abstract: The prediction of disease risk factors can screen vulnerable groups for effective prevention and treatment, so as to reduce their morbidity and mortality. Machine learning has a great demand for high-quality labeling information, and labeling noise in medical big data poses a great challenge to efficient disease risk warning methods. Therefore, this project intends to study the robust learning algorithm and apply it to the early warning of infectious disease risk. A dynamic truncated loss model is proposed, which combines the traditional mutual entropy implicit weight feature with the mean variation feature. It is robust to label noise. A lower bound on training loss is constructed, and a method based on sampling rate is proposed to reduce the gradient of suspected samples to reduce the influence of noise on training results. The effectiveness of this method under different types of noise was verified by using a stroke screening data set as an example. This method enables robust learning of data containing label noise.
Authors: Tianyu Han, Sven Nebelung, Firas Khader, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Daniel Truhn
Abstract: Denoising diffusion models offer a promising approach to accelerating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and producing diagnostic-level images in an unsupervised manner. However, our study demonstrates that even tiny worst-case potential perturbations transferred from a surrogate model can cause these models to generate fake tissue structures that may mislead clinicians. The transferability of such worst-case perturbations indicates that the robustness of image reconstruction may be compromised due to MR system imperfections or other sources of noise. Moreover, at larger perturbation strengths, diffusion models exhibit Gaussian noise-like artifacts that are distinct from those observed in supervised models and are more challenging to detect. Our results highlight the vulnerability of current state-of-the-art diffusion-based reconstruction models to possible worst-case perturbations and underscore the need for further research to improve their robustness and reliability in clinical settings.
Authors: Yukun Zhang
Abstract: This study presents a novel approach that leverages Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) to unravel the intricate relationships between inputs and outputs in Large Language Models (LLMs), and employs robust control to fine-tune outputs to meet predefined standards. Central to our methodology is the transformation of LLM inputs and outputs into a lower-dimensional latent space, facilitating a detailed examination of the information processing pathways within LLMs. Neural ODEs play a pivotal role in this investigation by providing a dynamic model that captures the continuous evolution of data within the LLMs. Additionally, robust control mechanisms are applied to strategically adjust the model's outputs, ensuring they not only maintain high quality and reliability but also adhere to specific performance criteria. This fusion of Neural ODEs and robust control represents a significant advancement in LLM interpretability, offering a comprehensive framework that elucidates the previously opaque mechanisms of these complex models. Our empirical results validate the effectiveness of this integrated approach, making a substantial contribution to the field of explainable AI by merging advanced machine learning techniques with the critical need for transparency and control in AI outputs.
Authors: Tao Huang, Ziyang Chen, Jiayang Meng, Qingyu Huang, Xu Yang, Xun Yi, Ibrahim Khalil
Abstract: In the context of machine unlearning, the primary challenge lies in effectively removing traces of private data from trained models while maintaining model performance and security against privacy attacks like membership inference attacks. Traditional gradient-based unlearning methods often rely on extensive historical gradients, which becomes impractical with high unlearning ratios and may reduce the effectiveness of unlearning. Addressing these limitations, we introduce Mini-Unlearning, a novel approach that capitalizes on a critical observation: unlearned parameters correlate with retrained parameters through contraction mapping. Our method, Mini-Unlearning, utilizes a minimal subset of historical gradients and leverages this contraction mapping to facilitate scalable, efficient unlearning. This lightweight, scalable method significantly enhances model accuracy and strengthens resistance to membership inference attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that Mini-Unlearning not only works under higher unlearning ratios but also outperforms existing techniques in both accuracy and security, offering a promising solution for applications requiring robust unlearning capabilities.
Authors: Ziyu Zhao, Leilei Gan, Guoyin Wang, Yuwei Hu, Tao Shen, Hongxia Yang, Kun Kuang, Fei Wu
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers an efficient way to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). Its modular and plug-and-play nature allows the integration of various domain-specific LoRAs, enhancing LLM capabilities. Open-source platforms like Huggingface and Modelscope have introduced a new computational paradigm, Uploadable Machine Learning (UML). In UML, contributors use decentralized data to train specialized adapters, which are then uploaded to a central platform to improve LLMs. This platform uses these domain-specific adapters to handle mixed-task requests requiring personalized service. Previous research on LoRA composition either focuses on specific tasks or fixes the LoRA selection during training. However, in UML, the pool of LoRAs is dynamically updated with new uploads, requiring a generalizable selection mechanism for unseen LoRAs. Additionally, the mixed-task nature of downstream requests necessitates personalized services. To address these challenges, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Mixture of LoRA Experts (RAMoLE), a framework that adaptively retrieves and composes multiple LoRAs based on input prompts. RAMoLE has three main components: LoraRetriever for identifying and retrieving relevant LoRAs, an on-the-fly MoLE mechanism for coordinating the retrieved LoRAs, and efficient batch inference for handling heterogeneous requests. Experimental results show that RAMoLE consistently outperforms baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and scalability.
Authors: Tung-Yu Wu, Yu-Xiang Lin, Tsui-Wei Weng
Abstract: Neuron-level interpretations aim to explain network behaviors and properties by investigating neurons responsive to specific perceptual or structural input patterns. Although there is emerging work in the vision and language domains, none is explored for acoustic models. To bridge the gap, we introduce $\textit{AND}$, the first $\textbf{A}$udio $\textbf{N}$etwork $\textbf{D}$issection framework that automatically establishes natural language explanations of acoustic neurons based on highly-responsive audio. $\textit{AND}$ features the use of LLMs to summarize mutual acoustic features and identities among audio. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify $\textit{AND}$'s precise and informative descriptions. In addition, we demonstrate a potential use of $\textit{AND}$ for audio machine unlearning by conducting concept-specific pruning based on the generated descriptions. Finally, we highlight two acoustic model behaviors with analysis by $\textit{AND}$: (i) models discriminate audio with a combination of basic acoustic features rather than high-level abstract concepts; (ii) training strategies affect model behaviors and neuron interpretability -- supervised training guides neurons to gradually narrow their attention, while self-supervised learning encourages neurons to be polysemantic for exploring high-level features.
Authors: Yicheng Zhou, Pengfei Wang, Hao Dong, Denghui Zhang, Dingqi Yang, Yanjie Fu, Pengyang Wang
Abstract: Urban traffic speed prediction aims to estimate the future traffic speed for improving urban transportation services. Enormous efforts have been made to exploit Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for modeling spatial correlations and temporal dependencies of traffic speed evolving patterns, regularized by graph topology.While achieving promising results, current traffic speed prediction methods still suffer from ignoring topology-free patterns, which cannot be captured by GNNs. To tackle this challenge, we propose a generic model for enabling the current GNN-based methods to preserve topology-free patterns. Specifically, we first develop a Dual Cross-Scale Transformer (DCST) architecture, including a Spatial Transformer and a Temporal Transformer, to preserve the cross-scale topology-free patterns and associated dynamics, respectively. Then, to further integrate both topology-regularized/-free patterns, we propose a distillation-style learning framework, in which the existing GNN-based methods are considered as the teacher model, and the proposed DCST architecture is considered as the student model. The teacher model would inject the learned topology-regularized patterns into the student model for integrating topology-free patterns. The extensive experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our methods.
Authors: Gyu Seon Kim, Yeryeong Cho, Jaehyun Chung, Soohyun Park, Soyi Jung, Zhu Han, Joongheon Kim
Abstract: Achieving global space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) access only with CubeSats presents significant challenges such as the access sustainability limitations in specific regions (e.g., polar regions) and the energy efficiency limitations in CubeSats. To tackle these problems, high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (HALE-UAVs) can complement these CubeSat shortcomings for providing cooperatively global access sustainability and energy efficiency. However, as the number of CubeSats and HALE-UAVs, increases, the scheduling dimension of each ground station (GS) increases. As a result, each GS can fall into the curse of dimensionality, and this challenge becomes one major hurdle for efficient global access. Therefore, this paper provides a quantum multi-agent reinforcement Learning (QMARL)-based method for scheduling between GSs and CubeSats/HALE-UAVs in order to improve global access availability and energy efficiency. The main reason why the QMARL-based scheduler can be beneficial is that the algorithm facilitates a logarithmic-scale reduction in scheduling action dimensions, which is one critical feature as the number of CubeSats and HALE-UAVs expands. Additionally, individual GSs have different traffic demands depending on their locations and characteristics, thus it is essential to provide differentiated access services. The superiority of the proposed scheduler is validated through data-intensive experiments in realistic CubeSat/HALE-UAV settings.
Authors: Xing Fang, Chenpeng Yu, Shiye Tian, Hui Liu
Abstract: The human immune response depends on the binding of T-cell receptors (TCRs) to antigens (pTCR), which elicits the T cells to eliminate viruses, tumor cells, and other pathogens. The ability of human immunity system responding to unknown viruses and bacteria stems from the TCR diversity. However, this vast diversity poses challenges on the TCR-antigen binding prediction methods. In this study, we propose a Masked Language Model (MLM), referred to as tcrLM, to overcome limitations in model generalization. Specifically, we randomly masked sequence segments and train tcrLM to infer the masked segment, thereby extract expressive feature from TCR sequences. Meanwhile, we introduced virtual adversarial training techniques to enhance the model's robustness. We built the largest TCR CDR3 sequence dataset to date (comprising 2,277,773,840 residuals), and pre-trained tcrLM on this dataset. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that tcrLM achieved AUC values of 0.937 and 0.933 on independent test sets and external validation sets, respectively, which remarkably outperformed four previously published prediction methods. On a large-scale COVID-19 pTCR binding test set, our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art method by at least 8%, highlighting the generalizability of our method. Furthermore, we validated that our approach effectively predicts immunotherapy response and clinical outcomes on a clinical cohorts. These findings clearly indicate that tcrLM exhibits significant potential in predicting antigenic immunogenicity.
Authors: Ding Wang
Abstract: Gas recognition technology has received considerable attention from researchers in recent years. Nevertheless, the gas recognition area has faced obstacles in implementing deep learning-based recognition solutions due to the absence of standardized protocols. To tackle this problem, we suggest using two sets of specialized evaluation measures for gas recognition algorithms. These metrics will make it easier to examine the performance of these algorithms on various datasets. In addition, we provide a new model called the Wavelet Attention GRU (WAG), which is based on the wavelet attention mechanism. This method facilitates the more efficient retrieval of sensor signals. Compared to other models, WAG significantly decreases the number of sensors needed by 75% while obtaining an identification accuracy of 98.33%. This suggests that WAG is a potential approach for advancing gas recognition algorithms.
Authors: Ryan Liu, Jiayi Geng, Joshua C. Peterson, Ilia Sucholutsky, Thomas L. Griffiths
Abstract: In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence seems to suggest that these implicit models are accurate -- LLMs offer believable proxies of human behavior, acting how we expect humans would in everyday interactions. However, by comparing LLM behavior and predictions to a large dataset of human decisions, we find that this is actually not the case: when both simulating and predicting people's choices, a suite of cutting-edge LLMs (GPT-4o & 4-Turbo, Llama-3-8B & 70B, Claude 3 Opus) assume that people are more rational than we really are. Specifically, these models deviate from human behavior and align more closely with a classic model of rational choice -- expected value theory. Interestingly, people also tend to assume that other people are rational when interpreting their behavior. As a consequence, when we compare the inferences that LLMs and people draw from the decisions of others using another psychological dataset, we find that these inferences are highly correlated. Thus, the implicit decision-making models of LLMs appear to be aligned with the human expectation that other people will act rationally, rather than with how people actually act.
Authors: Dimitrios Tanoglidis, Bhuvnesh Jain
Abstract: Vision-Language multimodal Models (VLMs) offer the possibility for zero-shot classification in astronomy: i.e. classification via natural language prompts, with no training. We investigate two models, GPT-4o and LLaVA-NeXT, for zero-shot classification of low-surface brightness galaxies and artifacts, as well as morphological classification of galaxies. We show that with natural language prompts these models achieved significant accuracy (above 80 percent typically) without additional training/fine tuning. We discuss areas that require improvement, especially for LLaVA-NeXT, which is an open source model. Our findings aim to motivate the astronomical community to consider VLMs as a powerful tool for both research and pedagogy, with the prospect that future custom-built or fine-tuned models could perform better.
Authors: Changjian Zhang, Parv Kapoor, Eunsuk Kang, Romulo Meira-Goes, David Garlan, Akila Ganlath, Shatadal Mishra, Nejib Ammar
Abstract: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) with reinforcement learning (RL)-based controllers are increasingly being deployed in complex physical environments such as autonomous vehicles, the Internet-of-Things(IoT), and smart cities. An important property of a CPS is tolerance; i.e., its ability to function safely under possible disturbances and uncertainties in the actual operation. In this paper, we introduce a new, expressive notion of tolerance that describes how well a controller is capable of satisfying a desired system requirement, specified using Signal Temporal Logic (STL), under possible deviations in the system. Based on this definition, we propose a novel analysis problem, called the tolerance falsification problem, which involves finding small deviations that result in a violation of the given requirement. We present a novel, two-layer simulation-based analysis framework and a novel search heuristic for finding small tolerance violations. To evaluate our approach, we construct a set of benchmark problems where system parameters can be configured to represent different types of uncertainties and disturbancesin the system. Our evaluation shows that our falsification approach and heuristic can effectively find small tolerance violations.
Authors: Mahdi Mohammadizadeh, Arash Mozhdehi, Yani Ioannou, Xin Wang
Abstract: Although many real-world applications, such as disease prediction, and fault detection suffer from class imbalance, most existing graph-based classification methods ignore the skewness of the distribution of classes; therefore, tend to be biased towards the majority class(es). Conventional methods typically tackle this problem through the assignment of weights to each one of the class samples based on a function of their loss, which can lead to over-fitting on outliers. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning algorithm, named Meta-GCN, for adaptively learning the example weights by simultaneously minimizing the unbiased meta-data set loss and optimizing the model weights through the use of a small unbiased meta-data set. Through experiments, we have shown that Meta-GCN outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks and other baselines in terms of accuracy, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUC-ROC) curve, and macro F1-Score for classification tasks on two different datasets.
Authors: Yuyang Sun, Jingyu Lei, Panagiotis Kosmas
Abstract: Understanding the complex relationships of biomarkers in diabetes is pivotal for advancing treatment strategies, a pressing need in diabetes research. This study applies Bayesian network structure learning to analyze the Shanghai Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes mellitus datasets, revealing complex relationships among key diabetes-related biomarkers. The constructed Bayesian network presented notable predictive accuracy, particularly for Type 2 diabetes mellitus, with root mean squared error (RMSE) of 18.23 mg/dL, as validated through leave-one-domain experiments and Clarke error grid analysis. This study not only elucidates the intricate dynamics of diabetes through a deeper understanding of biomarker interplay but also underscores the significant potential of integrating data-driven and knowledge-driven methodologies in the realm of personalized diabetes management. Such an approach paves the way for more custom and effective treatment strategies, marking a notable advancement in the field.
Authors: Yi Zeng, Weiyu Sun, Tran Ngoc Huynh, Dawn Song, Bo Li, Ruoxi Jia
Abstract: Safety backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) enable the stealthy triggering of unsafe behaviors while evading detection during normal interactions. The high dimensionality of potential triggers in the token space and the diverse range of malicious behaviors make this a critical challenge. We present BEEAR, a mitigation approach leveraging the insight that backdoor triggers induce relatively uniform drifts in the model's embedding space. Our bi-level optimization method identifies universal embedding perturbations that elicit unwanted behaviors and adjusts the model parameters to reinforce safe behaviors against these perturbations. Experiments show BEEAR reduces the success rate of RLHF time backdoor attacks from >95% to <1% and from 47% to 0% for instruction-tuning time backdoors targeting malicious code generation, without compromising model utility. Requiring only defender-defined safe and unwanted behaviors, BEEAR represents a step towards practical defenses against safety backdoors in LLMs, providing a foundation for further advancements in AI safety and security.
Authors: Yudan Wang, Shaofeng Zou, Yue Wang
Abstract: Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning (DR-RL) aims to derive a policy optimizing the worst-case performance within a predefined uncertainty set. Despite extensive research, previous DR-RL algorithms have predominantly favored model-based approaches, with limited availability of model-free methods offering convergence guarantees or sample complexities. This paper proposes a model-free DR-RL algorithm leveraging the Multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) technique to close such a gap. Our innovative approach integrates a threshold mechanism that ensures finite sample requirements for algorithmic implementation, a significant improvement than previous model-free algorithms. We develop algorithms for uncertainty sets defined by total variation, Chi-square divergence, and KL divergence, and provide finite sample analyses under all three cases. Remarkably, our algorithms represent the first model-free DR-RL approach featuring finite sample complexity for total variation and Chi-square divergence uncertainty sets, while also offering an improved sample complexity and broader applicability compared to existing model-free DR-RL algorithms for the KL divergence model. The complexities of our method establish the tightest results for all three uncertainty models in model-free DR-RL, underscoring the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm, and highlighting its potential for practical applications.
Authors: Vivek Myers, Chongyi Zheng, Anca Dragan, Sergey Levine, Benjamin Eysenbach
Abstract: Temporal distances lie at the heart of many algorithms for planning, control, and reinforcement learning that involve reaching goals, allowing one to estimate the transit time between two states. However, prior attempts to define such temporal distances in stochastic settings have been stymied by an important limitation: these prior approaches do not satisfy the triangle inequality. This is not merely a definitional concern, but translates to an inability to generalize and find shortest paths. In this paper, we build on prior work in contrastive learning and quasimetrics to show how successor features learned by contrastive learning (after a change of variables) form a temporal distance that does satisfy the triangle inequality, even in stochastic settings. Importantly, this temporal distance is computationally efficient to estimate, even in high-dimensional and stochastic settings. Experiments in controlled settings and benchmark suites demonstrate that an RL algorithm based on these new temporal distances exhibits combinatorial generalization (i.e., "stitching") and can sometimes learn more quickly than prior methods, including those based on quasimetrics.
Authors: Bei Yan, Jie Zhang, Zheng Yuan, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Abstract: Despite the rapid progress and outstanding performance of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in recent years, LVLMs have been plagued by the issue of hallucination, i.e., LVLMs tend to generate responses that are inconsistent with the corresponding visual inputs. To evaluate the degree of hallucination in LVLMs, previous works have proposed a series of benchmarks featuring different types of tasks and evaluation metrics. However, we find that the quality of the existing hallucination benchmarks varies, with some suffering from problems, e.g., inconsistent evaluation results under repeated tests, and misalignment with human evaluation. To this end, we propose a Hallucination benchmark Quality Measurement framework (HQM), which leverages various indicators to assess the reliability and validity of existing hallucination benchmarks separately. Specifically, for reliability we explore test-retest reliability and parallel-forms reliability, while for validity we examine criterion validity and coverage of hallucination types. Furthermore, based on the results of our quality measurement, we construct a High-Quality Hallucination Benchmark (HQH) for LVLMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of over 10 representative LVLMs, including GPT-4o and Gemini-Vision-Pro, to provide an in-depth analysis of the hallucination issues in existing models. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/HQHBench/HQHBench.
Authors: Byungsoo Jeon, Mengdi Wu, Shiyi Cao, Sunghyun Kim, Sunghyun Park, Neeraj Aggarwal, Colin Unger, Daiyaan Arfeen, Peiyuan Liao, Xupeng Miao, Mohammad Alizadeh, Gregory R. Ganger, Tianqi Chen, Zhihao Jia
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) continue to grow rapidly in size, making them infeasible to train on a single device. Pipeline parallelism is commonly used in existing DNN systems to support large-scale DNN training by partitioning a DNN into multiple stages, which concurrently perform DNN training for different micro-batches in a pipeline fashion. However, existing pipeline-parallel approaches only consider sequential pipeline stages and thus ignore the topology of a DNN, resulting in missed model-parallel opportunities. This paper presents graph pipeline parallelism (GPP), a new pipeline-parallel scheme that partitions a DNN into pipeline stages whose dependencies are identified by a directed acyclic graph. GPP generalizes existing sequential pipeline parallelism and preserves the inherent topology of a DNN to enable concurrent execution of computationally-independent operators, resulting in reduced memory requirement and improved GPU performance. In addition, we develop GraphPipe, a distributed system that exploits GPP strategies to enable performant and scalable DNN training. GraphPipe partitions a DNN into a graph of stages, optimizes micro-batch schedules for these stages, and parallelizes DNN training using the discovered GPP strategies. Evaluation on a variety of DNNs shows that GraphPipe outperforms existing pipeline-parallel systems such as PipeDream and Piper by up to 1.6X. GraphPipe also reduces the search time by 9-21X compared to PipeDream and Piper.
Authors: Zhihui Tian, John Upchurch, G. Austin Simon, Jos\'e Dubeux, Alina Zare, Chang Zhao, Joel B. Harley
Abstract: Understanding and quantifying ecosystem services are crucial for sustainable environmental management, conservation efforts, and policy-making. The advancement of remote sensing technology and machine learning techniques has greatly facilitated this process. Yet, ground truth labels, such as biodiversity, are very difficult and expensive to measure. In addition, more easily obtainable proxy labels, such as land use, often fail to capture the complex heterogeneity of the ecosystem. In this paper, we demonstrate how land use proxy labels can be implemented with a soft, multi-label classifier to predict ecosystem services with complex heterogeneity.
Authors: Bruce Rushing
Abstract: Mixture of experts is a prediction aggregation method in machine learning that aggregates the predictions of specialized experts. This method often outperforms Bayesian methods despite the Bayesian having stronger inductive guarantees. We argue that this is due to the greater functional capacity of mixture of experts. We prove that in a limiting case of mixture of experts will have greater capacity than equivalent Bayesian methods, which we vouchsafe through experiments on non-limiting cases. Finally, we conclude that mixture of experts is a type of abductive reasoning in the Peircian sense of hypothesis construction.
Authors: Muhammad Mohsin, Stefano Rovetta, Francesco Masulli, Alberto Cabri
Abstract: This contribution gives an overview of an ongoing project using machine learning and computer vision components for improving the electronic waste recycling process. In circular economy, the "virtual mines" concept refers to production cycles where interesting raw materials are reclaimed in an efficient and cost-effective manner from end-of-life items. In particular, the growth of e-waste, due to the increasingly shorter life cycle of hi-tech goods, is a global problem. In this paper, we describe a pipeline based on deep learning model to recycle printed circuit boards at the component level. A pre-trained YOLOv5 model is used to analyze the results of the locally developed dataset. With a different distribution of class instances, YOLOv5 managed to achieve satisfactory precision and recall, with the ability to optimize with large component instances.
Authors: Vikas Yadav, Zheng Tang, Vijay Srinivasan
Abstract: Large language models (LLM) have achieved remarkable success in natural language generation but lesser focus has been given to their applicability in decision making tasks such as classification. We show that LLMs like LLaMa can achieve high performance on large multi-class classification tasks but still make classification errors and worse, generate out-of-vocabulary class labels. To address these critical issues, we introduce Paraphrase and AGgregate (PAG)-LLM approach wherein an LLM generates multiple paraphrases of the input query (parallel queries), performs multi-class classification for the original query and each paraphrase, and at the end aggregate all the classification labels based on their confidence scores. We evaluate PAG-LLM on two large multi-class classication datasets: CLINC, and Banking and show 22.7% and 15.1% error reduction. We show that PAG-LLM is especially effective for hard examples where LLM is uncertain, and reduces the critical misclassification and hallucinated label generation errors
Authors: Abhinav Narayan Harish, Larry Heck, Josiah P. Hanna, Zsolt Kira, Andrew Szot
Abstract: We present Reinforcement Learning via Auxiliary Task Distillation (AuxDistill), a new method that enables reinforcement learning (RL) to perform long-horizon robot control problems by distilling behaviors from auxiliary RL tasks. AuxDistill achieves this by concurrently carrying out multi-task RL with auxiliary tasks, which are easier to learn and relevant to the main task. A weighted distillation loss transfers behaviors from these auxiliary tasks to solve the main task. We demonstrate that AuxDistill can learn a pixels-to-actions policy for a challenging multi-stage embodied object rearrangement task from the environment reward without demonstrations, a learning curriculum, or pre-trained skills. AuxDistill achieves $2.3 \times$ higher success than the previous state-of-the-art baseline in the Habitat Object Rearrangement benchmark and outperforms methods that use pre-trained skills and expert demonstrations.
Authors: Nisarg Patel, Mohith Kulkarni, Mihir Parmar, Aashna Budhiraja, Mutsumi Nakamura, Neeraj Varshney, Chitta Baral
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to exhibit remarkable performance in natural language understanding tasks, there is a crucial need to measure their ability for human-like multi-step logical reasoning. Existing logical reasoning evaluation benchmarks often focus primarily on simplistic single-step or multi-step reasoning with a limited set of inference rules. Furthermore, the lack of datasets for evaluating non-monotonic reasoning represents a crucial gap since it aligns more closely with human-like reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-LogiEval, a comprehensive evaluation dataset encompassing multi-step logical reasoning with various inference rules and depths. Multi-LogiEval covers three logic types--propositional, first-order, and non-monotonic--consisting of more than 30 inference rules and more than 60 of their combinations with various depths. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct evaluations on a range of LLMs including GPT-4, ChatGPT, Gemini-Pro, Yi, Orca, and Mistral, employing a zero-shot chain-of-thought. Experimental results show that there is a significant drop in the performance of LLMs as the reasoning steps/depth increases (average accuracy of ~68% at depth-1 to ~43% at depth-5). We further conduct a thorough investigation of reasoning chains generated by LLMs which reveals several important findings. We believe that Multi-LogiEval facilitates future research for evaluating and enhancing the logical reasoning ability of LLMs. Data is available at https://github.com/Mihir3009/Multi-LogiEval.
Authors: Anish Acharya, Inderjit S Dhillon, Sujay Sanghavi
Abstract: Data pruning, the combinatorial task of selecting a small and informative subset from a large dataset, is crucial for mitigating the enormous computational costs associated with training data-hungry modern deep learning models at scale. Since large-scale data collections are invariably noisy, developing data pruning strategies that remain robust even in the presence of corruption is critical in practice. Unfortunately, the existing heuristics for (robust) data pruning lack theoretical coherence and rely on heroic assumptions, that are, often unattainable, by the very nature of the problem setting. Moreover, these strategies often yield sub-optimal neural scaling laws even compared to random sampling, especially in scenarios involving strong corruption and aggressive pruning rates -- making provably robust data pruning an open challenge. In response, in this work, we propose Geometric Median ($\gm$) Matching -- a herding~\citep{welling2009herding} style greedy algorithm -- that yields a $k$-subset such that the mean of the subset approximates the geometric median of the (potentially) noisy dataset. Theoretically, we show that $\gm$ Matching enjoys an improved $\gO(1/k)$ scaling over $\gO(1/\sqrt{k})$ scaling of uniform sampling; while achieving the optimal breakdown point of 1/2 even under arbitrary corruption. Extensive experiments across popular deep learning benchmarks indicate that $\gm$ Matching consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art; the gains become more profound at high rates of corruption and aggressive pruning rates; making $\gm$ Matching a strong baseline for future research in robust data pruning.
Authors: Mengshuo Jia, Zeyu Cui, Gabriela Hug
Abstract: The integration of experiment technologies with large language models (LLMs) is transforming scientific research, offering AI capabilities beyond specialized problem-solving to becoming research assistants for human scientists. In power systems, simulations are essential for research. However, LLMs face significant challenges in power system simulations due to limited pre-existing knowledge and the complexity of power grids. To address this issue, this work proposes a modular framework that integrates expertise from both the power system and LLM domains. This framework enhances LLMs' ability to perform power system simulations on previously unseen tools. Validated using 34 simulation tasks in Daline, a (optimal) power flow simulation and linearization toolbox not yet exposed to LLMs, the proposed framework improved GPT-4o's simulation coding accuracy from 0% to 96.07%, also outperforming the ChatGPT-4o web interface's 33.8% accuracy (with the entire knowledge base uploaded). These results highlight the potential of LLMs as research assistants in power systems.
Authors: Martin Pawelczyk, Jimmy Z. Di, Yiwei Lu, Gautam Kamath, Ayush Sekhari, Seth Neel
Abstract: We revisit the efficacy of several practical methods for approximate machine unlearning developed for large-scale deep learning. In addition to complying with data deletion requests, one often-cited potential application for unlearning methods is to remove the effects of training on poisoned data. We experimentally demonstrate that, while existing unlearning methods have been demonstrated to be effective in a number of evaluation settings (e.g., alleviating membership inference attacks), they fail to remove the effects of data poisoning, across a variety of types of poisoning attacks (indiscriminate, targeted, and a newly-introduced Gaussian poisoning attack) and models (image classifiers and LLMs); even when granted a relatively large compute budget. In order to precisely characterize unlearning efficacy, we introduce new evaluation metrics for unlearning based on data poisoning. Our results suggest that a broader perspective, including a wider variety of evaluations, is required to avoid a false sense of confidence in machine unlearning procedures for deep learning without provable guarantees. Moreover, while unlearning methods show some signs of being useful to efficiently remove poisoned datapoints without having to retrain, our work suggests that these methods are not yet "ready for prime time", and currently provide limited benefit over retraining.
Authors: Zhengtao Yao, Hong Nguyen, Ajitesh Srivastava, Jose Luis Ambite
Abstract: In the realm of medical imaging, leveraging large-scale datasets from various institutions is crucial for developing precise deep learning models, yet privacy concerns frequently impede data sharing. federated learning (FL) emerges as a prominent solution for preserving privacy while facilitating collaborative learning. However, its application in real-world scenarios faces several obstacles, such as task & data heterogeneity, label scarcity, non-identically distributed (non-IID) data, computational vaiation, etc. In real-world, medical institutions may not want to disclose their tasks to FL server and generalization challenge of out-of-network institutions with un-seen task want to join the on-going federated system. This study address task-agnostic and generalization problem on un-seen tasks by adapting self-supervised FL framework. Utilizing Vision Transformer (ViT) as consensus feature encoder for self-supervised pre-training, no initial labels required, the framework enabling effective representation learning across diverse datasets and tasks. Our extensive evaluations, using various real-world non-IID medical imaging datasets, validate our approach's efficacy, retaining 90\% of F1 accuracy with only 5\% of the training data typically required for centralized approaches and exhibiting superior adaptability to out-of-distribution task. The result indicate that federated learning architecture can be a potential approach toward multi-task foundation modeling.
Authors: Wenyu Du, Shuang Cheng, Tongxu Luo, Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Ka Chun Cheung, Reynold Cheng, Jie Fu
Abstract: Language models (LMs) exhibit impressive performance and generalization capabilities. However, LMs struggle with the persistent challenge of catastrophic forgetting, which undermines their long-term sustainability in continual learning (CL). Existing approaches usually address the issue by incorporating old task data or task-wise inductive bias into LMs. However, old data and accurate task information are often unavailable or costly to collect, hindering the availability of current CL approaches for LMs. To address this limitation, we introduce $\textbf{MIGU}$ ($\textbf{M}$agn$\textbf{I}$tude-based $\textbf{G}$radient $\textbf{U}$pdating for continual learning), a rehearsal-free and task-label-free method that only updates the model parameters with large magnitudes of output in LMs' linear layers. MIGU is based on our observation that the L1-normalized magnitude distribution of the output in LMs' linear layers is different when the LM models deal with different task data. By imposing this simple constraint on the gradient update process, we can leverage the inherent behaviors of LMs, thereby unlocking their innate CL abilities. Our experiments demonstrate that MIGU is universally applicable to all three LM architectures (T5, RoBERTa, and Llama2), delivering state-of-the-art or on-par performance across continual finetuning and continual pre-training settings on four CL benchmarks. For example, MIGU brings a 15.2% average accuracy improvement over conventional parameter-efficient finetuning baselines in a 15-task CL benchmark. MIGU can also seamlessly integrate with all three existing CL types to further enhance performance. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/wenyudu/MIGU}{this https URL}.
Authors: Hye-jin Shim, Md Sahidullah, Jee-weon Jung, Shinji Watanabe, Tomi Kinnunen
Abstract: Current trends in audio anti-spoofing detection research strive to improve models' ability to generalize across unseen attacks by learning to identify a variety of spoofing artifacts. This emphasis has primarily focused on the spoof class. Recently, several studies have noted that the distribution of silence differs between the two classes, which can serve as a shortcut. In this paper, we extend class-wise interpretations beyond silence. We employ loss analysis and asymmetric methodologies to move away from traditional attack-focused and result-oriented evaluations towards a deeper examination of model behaviors. Our investigations highlight the significant differences in training dynamics between the two classes, emphasizing the need for future research to focus on robust modeling of the bonafide class.
Authors: Yuzhou Chen, Jose Frias, Yulia R. Gel
Abstract: Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has recently emerged as a new concept which allows for capitalizing on the strengths of graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn rich representations in a wide variety of applications which involve abundant unlabeled information. However, existing GCL approaches largely tend to overlook the important latent information on higher-order graph substructures. We address this limitation by introducing the concepts of topological invariance and extended persistence on graphs to GCL. In particular, we propose a new contrastive mode which targets topological representations of the two augmented views from the same graph, yielded by extracting latent shape properties of the graph at multiple resolutions. Along with the extended topological layer, we introduce a new extended persistence summary, namely, extended persistence landscapes (EPL) and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. Our extensive numerical results on biological, chemical, and social interaction graphs show that the new Topological Graph Contrastive Learning (TopoGCL) model delivers significant performance gains in unsupervised graph classification for 11 out of 12 considered datasets and also exhibits robustness under noisy scenarios.
Authors: Ce Zhang, Azim Eskandarian
Abstract: LiDAR is one of the most crucial sensors for autonomous vehicle perception. However, current LiDAR-based point cloud perception algorithms lack comprehensive and rigorous LiDAR quality assessment methods, leading to uncertainty in detection performance. Additionally, existing point cloud quality assessment algorithms are predominantly designed for indoor environments or single-object scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel image-guided point cloud quality assessment algorithm for outdoor autonomous driving environments, named the Image-Guided Outdoor Point Cloud Quality Assessment (IGO-PQA) algorithm. Our proposed algorithm comprises two main components. The first component is the IGO-PQA generation algorithm, which leverages point cloud data, corresponding RGB surrounding view images, and agent objects' ground truth annotations to generate an overall quality score for a single-frame LiDAR-based point cloud. The second component is a transformer-based IGO-PQA regression algorithm for no-reference outdoor point cloud quality assessment. This regression algorithm allows for the direct prediction of IGO-PQA scores in an online manner, without requiring image data and object ground truth annotations. We evaluate our proposed algorithm using the nuScenes and Waymo open datasets. The IGO-PQA generation algorithm provides consistent and reasonable perception quality indices. Furthermore, our proposed IGO-PQA regression algorithm achieves a Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC) of 0.86 on the nuScenes dataset and 0.97 on the Waymo dataset.
Authors: Rohit Paturi, Xiang Li, Sundararajan Srinivasan
Abstract: Speaker Diarization (SD) systems are typically audio-based and operate independently of the ASR system in traditional speech transcription pipelines and can have speaker errors due to SD and/or ASR reconciliation, especially around speaker turns and regions of speech overlap. To reduce these errors, a Lexical Speaker Error Correction (LSEC), in which an external language model provides lexical information to correct the speaker errors, was recently proposed. Though the approach achieves good Word Diarization error rate (WDER) improvements, it does not use any additional acoustic information and is prone to miscorrections. In this paper, we propose to enhance and acoustically ground the LSEC system with speaker scores directly derived from the existing SD pipeline. This approach achieves significant relative WDER reductions in the range of 25-40% over the audio-based SD, ASR system and beats the LSEC system by 15-25% relative on RT03-CTS, Callhome American English and Fisher datasets.
Authors: Bikram Pandit, Ashutosh Gupta, Mohitvishnu S. Gadde, Addison Johnson, Aayam Kumar Shrestha, Helei Duan, Jeremy Dao, Alan Fern
Abstract: Payload transport over flat terrain via multi-wheel robot carriers is well-understood, highly effective, and configurable. In this paper, our goal is to provide similar effectiveness and configurability for transport over rough terrain that is more suitable for legs rather than wheels. For this purpose, we consider multi-biped robot carriers, where wheels are replaced by multiple bipedal robots attached to the carrier. Our main contribution is to design a decentralized controller for such systems that can be effectively applied to varying numbers and configurations of rigidly attached bipedal robots without retraining. We present a reinforcement learning approach for training the controller in simulation that supports transfer to the real world. Our experiments in simulation provide quantitative metrics showing the effectiveness of the approach over a wide variety of simulated transport scenarios. In addition, we demonstrate the controller in the real-world for systems composed of two and three Cassie robots. To our knowledge, this is the first example of a scalable multi-biped payload transport system.
Authors: Alexandra Dobrita (Imec Netherlands, Delft University of Technology), Amirreza Yousefzadeh (Imec Netherlands), Simon Thorpe (University of Toulouse), Kanishkan Vadivel (Imec Netherlands), Paul Detterer (Imec Netherlands), Guangzhi Tang (Imec Netherlands), Gert-Jan van Schaik (Imec Netherlands), Mario Konijnenburg (Imec Netherlands), Anteneh Gebregiorgis (Delft University of Technology), Said Hamdioui (Delft University of Technology), Manolis Sifalakis (Imec Netherlands)
Abstract: For Edge AI applications, deploying online learning and adaptation on resource-constrained embedded devices can deal with fast sensor-generated streams of data in changing environments. However, since maintaining low-latency and power-efficient inference is paramount at the Edge, online learning and adaptation on the device should impose minimal additional overhead for inference. With this goal in mind, we explore energy-efficient learning and adaptation on-device for streaming-data Edge AI applications using Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which follow the principles of brain-inspired computing, such as high-parallelism, neuron co-located memory and compute, and event-driven processing. We propose EON-1, a brain-inspired processor for near-sensor extreme edge online feature extraction, that integrates a fast online learning and adaptation algorithm. We report results of only 1% energy overhead for learning, by far the lowest overhead when compared to other SoTA solutions, while attaining comparable inference accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that EON-1 is up for the challenge of low-latency processing of HD and UHD streaming video in real-time, with learning enabled.
Authors: Yang Yan, Lizhi Ma, Anqi Li, Jingsong Ma, Zhenzhong Lan
Abstract: Accurate assessment of personality traits is crucial for effective psycho-counseling, yet traditional methods like self-report questionnaires are time-consuming and biased. This study exams whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can predict the Big Five personality traits directly from counseling dialogues and introduces an innovative framework to perform the task. Our framework applies role-play and questionnaire-based prompting to condition LLMs on counseling sessions, simulating client responses to the Big Five Inventory. We evaluated our framework on 853 real-world counseling sessions, finding a significant correlation between LLM-predicted and actual Big Five traits, proving the validity of framework. Moreover, ablation studies highlight the importance of role-play simulations and task simplification via questionnaires in enhancing prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, our fine-tuned Llama3-8B model, utilizing Direct Preference Optimization with Supervised Fine-Tuning, achieves a 130.95\% improvement, surpassing the state-of-the-art Qwen1.5-110B by 36.94\% in personality prediction validity. In conclusion, LLMs can predict personality based on counseling dialogues. Our code and model are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/kuri-leo/BigFive-LLM-Predictor}, providing a valuable tool for future research in computational psychometrics.
Authors: Xin Yang, Heng Chang, Zhijian La, Jinze Yang, Xingrun Li, Yu Lu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Erxue Min
Abstract: Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) seeks to utilize knowledge from different domains to alleviate the problem of data sparsity in the target recommendation domain, and it has been gaining more attention in recent years. Although there have been notable advancements in this area, most current methods represent users and items in Euclidean space, which is not ideal for handling long-tail distributed data in recommendation systems. Additionally, adding data from other domains can worsen the long-tail characteristics of the entire dataset, making it harder to train CDR models effectively. Recent studies have shown that hyperbolic methods are particularly suitable for modeling long-tail distributions, which has led us to explore hyperbolic representations for users and items in CDR scenarios. However, due to the distinct characteristics of the different domains, applying hyperbolic representation learning to CDR tasks is quite challenging. In this paper, we introduce a new framework called Hyperbolic Contrastive Learning (HCTS), designed to capture the unique features of each domain while enabling efficient knowledge transfer between domains. We achieve this by embedding users and items from each domain separately and mapping them onto distinct hyperbolic manifolds with adjustable curvatures for prediction. To improve the representations of users and items in the target domain, we develop a hyperbolic contrastive learning module for knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that hyperbolic manifolds are a promising alternative to Euclidean space for CDR tasks.
Authors: Zhuolin He, Xinrun Li, Heng Gao, Jiachen Tang, Shoumeng Qiu, Wenfu Wang, Lvjian Lu, Xiuchong Qiu, Xiangyang Xue, Jian Pu
Abstract: Traditional camera 3D object detectors are typically trained to recognize a predefined set of known object classes. In real-world scenarios, these detectors may encounter unknown objects outside the training categories and fail to identify them correctly. To address this gap, we present OS-Det3D (Open-set Camera 3D Object Detection), a two-stage training framework enhancing the ability of camera 3D detectors to identify both known and unknown objects. The framework involves our proposed 3D Object Discovery Network (ODN3D), which is specifically trained using geometric cues such as the location and scale of 3D boxes to discover general 3D objects. ODN3D is trained in a class-agnostic manner, and the provided 3D object region proposals inherently come with data noise. To boost accuracy in identifying unknown objects, we introduce a Joint Objectness Selection (JOS) module. JOS selects the pseudo ground truth for unknown objects from the 3D object region proposals of ODN3D by combining the ODN3D objectness and camera feature attention objectness. Experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in enabling camera 3D detectors to successfully identify unknown objects while also improving their performance on known objects.
Authors: Valentin Margraf, Marcel Wever, Sandra Gilhuber, Gabriel Marques Tavares, Thomas Seidl, Eyke H\"ullermeier
Abstract: In settings where only a budgeted amount of labeled data can be afforded, active learning seeks to devise query strategies for selecting the most informative data points to be labeled, aiming to enhance learning algorithms' efficiency and performance. Numerous such query strategies have been proposed and compared in the active learning literature. However, the community still lacks standardized benchmarks for comparing the performance of different query strategies. This particularly holds for the combination of query strategies with different learning algorithms into active learning pipelines and examining the impact of the learning algorithm choice. To close this gap, we propose ALPBench, which facilitates the specification, execution, and performance monitoring of active learning pipelines. It has built-in measures to ensure evaluations are done reproducibly, saving exact dataset splits and hyperparameter settings of used algorithms. In total, ALPBench consists of 86 real-world tabular classification datasets and 5 active learning settings, yielding 430 active learning problems. To demonstrate its usefulness and broad compatibility with various learning algorithms and query strategies, we conduct an exemplary study evaluating 9 query strategies paired with 8 learning algorithms in 2 different settings. We provide ALPBench here: https://github.com/ValentinMargraf/ActiveLearningPipelines.
URLs: https://github.com/ValentinMargraf/ActiveLearningPipelines.
Authors: Songming Zhang, Xue Zhang, Zengkui Sun, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu
Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is known as a promising solution to compress large language models (LLMs) via transferring their knowledge to smaller models. During this process, white-box KD methods usually minimize the distance between the output distributions of the two models so that more knowledge can be transferred. However, in the current white-box KD framework, the output distributions are from the respective output spaces of the two models, using their own prediction heads. We argue that the space discrepancy will lead to low similarity between the teacher model and the student model on both representation and distribution levels. Furthermore, this discrepancy also hinders the KD process between models with different vocabularies, which is common for current LLMs. To address these issues, we propose a dual-space knowledge distillation (DSKD) framework that unifies the output spaces of the two models for KD. On the basis of DSKD, we further develop a cross-model attention mechanism, which can automatically align the representations of the two models with different vocabularies. Thus, our framework is not only compatible with various distance functions for KD (e.g., KL divergence) like the current framework, but also supports KD between any two LLMs regardless of their vocabularies. Experiments on task-agnostic instruction-following benchmarks show that DSKD significantly outperforms the current white-box KD framework with various distance functions, and also surpasses existing KD methods for LLMs with different vocabularies.
Authors: Tianfu Wang, Li Shen, Qilin Fan, Tong Xu, Tongliang Liu, Hui Xiong
Abstract: As an essential resource management problem in network virtualization, virtual network embedding (VNE) aims to allocate the finite resources of physical network to sequentially arriving virtual network requests (VNRs) with different resource demands. Since this is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, many efforts have been made to provide viable solutions. However, most existing approaches have either ignored the admission control of VNRs, which has a potential impact on long-term performances, or not fully exploited the temporal and topological features of the physical network and VNRs. In this paper, we propose a deep Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning approach to learn a joint Admission Control and Resource Allocation policy for VNE, named HRL-ACRA. Specifically, the whole VNE process is decomposed into an upper-level policy for deciding whether to admit the arriving VNR or not and a lower-level policy for allocating resources of the physical network to meet the requirement of VNR through the HRL approach. Considering the proximal policy optimization as the basic training algorithm, we also adopt the average reward method to address the infinite horizon problem of the upper-level agent and design a customized multi-objective intrinsic reward to alleviate the sparse reward issue of the lower-level agent. Moreover, we develop a deep feature-aware graph neural network to capture the features of VNR and physical network and exploit a sequence-to-sequence model to generate embedding actions iteratively. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted in various settings, and show that HRL-ACRA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both the acceptance ratio and long-term average revenue. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/GeminiLight/hrl-acra}.
Authors: Hongliang Zeng, Ping Zhang, Fang Li, Jiahua Wang, Tingyu Ye, Pengteng Guo
Abstract: In the field of 2D image generation modeling and representation learning, Masked Generative Encoder (MAGE) has demonstrated the synergistic potential between generative modeling and representation learning. Inspired by this, we propose Point-MAGE to extend this concept to point cloud data. Specifically, this framework first utilizes a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQVAE) to reconstruct a neural field representation of 3D shapes, thereby learning discrete semantic features of point patches. Subsequently, by combining the masking model with variable masking ratios, we achieve synchronous training for both generation and representation learning. Furthermore, our framework seamlessly integrates with existing point cloud self-supervised learning (SSL) models, thereby enhancing their performance. We extensively evaluate the representation learning and generation capabilities of Point-MAGE. In shape classification tasks, Point-MAGE achieved an accuracy of 94.2% on the ModelNet40 dataset and 92.9% (+1.3%) on the ScanObjectNN dataset. Additionally, it achieved new state-of-the-art performance in few-shot learning and part segmentation tasks. Experimental results also confirmed that Point-MAGE can generate detailed and high-quality 3D shapes in both unconditional and conditional settings.
Authors: Lei Chen, Yuan Meng, Chen Tang, Xinzhu Ma, Jingyan Jiang, Xin Wang, Zhi Wang, Wenwu Zhu
Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion models, particularly the trend of architectural transformation from UNet-based Diffusion to Diffusion Transformer (DiT), have significantly improved the quality and scalability of image synthesis. Despite the incredible generative quality, the large computational requirements of these large-scale models significantly hinder the deployments in real-world scenarios. Post-training Quantization (PTQ) offers a promising solution by compressing model sizes and speeding up inference for the pretrained models while eliminating model retraining. However, we have observed the existing PTQ frameworks exclusively designed for both ViT and conventional Diffusion models fall into biased quantization and result in remarkable performance degradation. In this paper, we find that the DiTs typically exhibit considerable variance in terms of both weight and activation, which easily runs out of the limited numerical representations. To address this issue, we devise Q-DiT, which seamlessly integrates three techniques: fine-grained quantization to manage substantial variance across input channels of weights and activations, an automatic search strategy to optimize the quantization granularity and mitigate redundancies, and dynamic activation quantization to capture the activation changes across timesteps. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Q-DiT. Specifically, when quantizing DiT-XL/2 to W8A8 on ImageNet 256x256, Q-DiT achieves a remarkable reduction in FID by 1.26 compared to the baseline. Under a W4A8 setting, it maintains high fidelity in image generation, showcasing only a marginal increase in FID and setting a new benchmark for efficient, high-quality quantization in diffusion transformers. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Juanerx/Q-DiT}{https://github.com/Juanerx/Q-DiT}.
URLs: https://github.com/Juanerx/Q-DiT, https://github.com/Juanerx/Q-DiT
Authors: Duc-Tuan Truong, Ruijie Tao, Tuan Nguyen, Hieu-Thi Luong, Kong Aik Lee, Eng Siong Chng
Abstract: Recent synthetic speech detectors leveraging the Transformer model have superior performance compared to the convolutional neural network counterparts. This improvement could be due to the powerful modeling ability of the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) in the Transformer model, which learns the temporal relationship of each input token. However, artifacts of synthetic speech can be located in specific regions of both frequency channels and temporal segments, while MHSA neglects this temporal-channel dependency of the input sequence. In this work, we proposed a Temporal-Channel Modeling (TCM) module to enhance MHSA's capability for capturing temporal-channel dependencies. Experimental results on the ASVspoof 2021 show that with only 0.03M additional parameters, the TCM module can outperform the state-of-the-art system by 9.25% in EER. Further ablation study reveals that utilizing both temporal and channel information yields the most improvement for detecting synthetic speech.
Authors: Wanli Shi, Yi Chang, Bin Gu
Abstract: Bilevel optimization (BO) has recently gained prominence in many machine learning applications due to its ability to capture the nested structure inherent in these problems. Recently, many hypergradient methods have been proposed as effective solutions for solving large-scale problems. However, current hypergradient methods for the lower-level constrained bilevel optimization (LCBO) problems need very restrictive assumptions, namely, where optimality conditions satisfy the differentiability and invertibility conditions and lack a solid analysis of the convergence rate. What's worse, existing methods require either double-loop updates, which are sometimes less efficient. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a new hypergradient of LCBO leveraging the theory of nonsmooth implicit function theorem instead of using the restrive assumptions. In addition, we propose a \textit{single-loop single-timescale} algorithm based on the double-momentum method and adaptive step size method and prove it can return a $(\delta, \epsilon)$-stationary point with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d_2^2\epsilon^{-4})$ iterations. Experiments on two applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors: Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru, Vikas Yadav, Rishabh Maheshwary, Paul-Ioan Clotan, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, Mihai Surdeanu
Abstract: We present a simple variable quantization approach that quantizes different layers of a large language model (LLM) at different bit levels. Specifically, we quantize the most important layers to higher bit precision and less important layers to lower bits to achieve floating point quantization levels. We propose two effective strategies to measure the importance of layers within LLMs: the first measures the importance of a layer based on how different its output embeddings are from the input embeddings (the higher the better); the second estimates the importance of a layer using the number of layer weights that are much larger than average (the smaller the better). We show that quantizing different layers at varying bits according to our importance scores results in minimal performance drop with a far more compressed model size. Finally, we present several practical key takeaways from our variable layer-wise quantization experiments: (a) LLM performance under variable quantization remains close to the original model until 25-50% of layers are moved in lower quantization using our proposed ordering but only until 5-10% if moved using no specific ordering; (b) Quantizing LLMs to lower bits performs substantially better than pruning unless extreme quantization (2-bit) is used; and (c) Layer-wise quantization to lower bits works better in the case of larger LLMs with more layers compared to smaller LLMs with fewer layers. The code used to run the experiments is available at: https://github.com/RazvanDu/LayerwiseQuant.
Authors: Jielin Chen, Rudi Stouffs
Abstract: Despite the suitability of graphs for capturing the relational structures inherent in architectural layout designs, there is a notable dearth of research on interpreting architectural design space using graph-based representation learning and exploring architectural design graph generation. Concurrently, disentangled representation learning in graph generation faces challenges such as node permutation invariance and representation expressiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce an unsupervised disentangled representation learning framework, Style-based Edge-augmented Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (SE-VGAE), aiming to generate architectural layout in the form of attributed adjacency multi-graphs while prioritizing representation disentanglement. The framework is designed with three alternative pipelines, each integrating a transformer-based edge-augmented encoder, a latent space disentanglement module, and a style-based decoder. These components collectively facilitate the decomposition of latent factors influencing architectural layout graph generation, enhancing generation fidelity and diversity. We also provide insights into optimizing the framework by systematically exploring graph feature augmentation schemes and evaluating their effectiveness for disentangling architectural layout representation through extensive experiments. Additionally, we contribute a new benchmark large-scale architectural layout graph dataset extracted from real-world floor plan images to facilitate the exploration of graph data-based architectural design representation space interpretation. This study pioneered disentangled representation learning for the architectural layout graph generation. The code and dataset of this study will be open-sourced.
Authors: Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Cheng Fu, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
Abstract: Long-context modeling capabilities have garnered widespread attention, leading to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with ultra-context windows. Meanwhile, benchmarks for evaluating long-context LLMs are gradually catching up. However, existing benchmarks employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-context applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA). Unlike typical document QA, in Loong's test cases, each document is relevant to the final answer, ignoring any document will lead to the failure of the answer. Furthermore, Loong introduces four types of tasks with a range of context lengths: Spotlight Locating, Comparison, Clustering, and Chain of Reasoning, to facilitate a more realistic and comprehensive evaluation of long-context understanding. Extensive experiments indicate that existing long-context language models still exhibit considerable potential for enhancement. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) achieves poor performance, demonstrating that Loong can reliably assess the model's long-context modeling capabilities.
Authors: Zhen Chen, Yong Liao, Youpeng Zhao, Zipeng Dai, Jian Zhao
Abstract: Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (CMARL) strategies are well known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Previous works on adversarial attacks have primarily focused on white-box attacks that directly perturb the states or actions of victim agents, often in scenarios with a limited number of attacks. However, gaining complete access to victim agents in real-world environments is exceedingly difficult. To create more realistic adversarial attacks, we introduce a novel method that involves injecting traitor agents into the CMARL system. We model this problem as a Traitor Markov Decision Process (TMDP), where traitors cannot directly attack the victim agents but can influence their formation or positioning through collisions. In TMDP, traitors are trained using the same MARL algorithm as the victim agents, with their reward function set as the negative of the victim agents' reward. Despite this, the training efficiency for traitors remains low because it is challenging for them to directly associate their actions with the victim agents' rewards. To address this issue, we propose the Curiosity-Driven Adversarial Attack (CuDA2) framework. CuDA2 enhances the efficiency and aggressiveness of attacks on the specified victim agents' policies while maintaining the optimal policy invariance of the traitors. Specifically, we employ a pre-trained Random Network Distillation (RND) module, where the extra reward generated by the RND module encourages traitors to explore states unencountered by the victim agents. Extensive experiments on various scenarios from SMAC demonstrate that our CuDA2 framework offers comparable or superior adversarial attack capabilities compared to other baselines.
Authors: Srinivasa Rao Nandam, Sara Atito, Zhenhua Feng, Josef Kittler, Muhammad Awais
Abstract: Masked Image Modeling (MIM)-based models, such as SdAE, CAE, GreenMIM, and MixAE, have explored different strategies to enhance the performance of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) by modifying prediction, loss functions, or incorporating additional architectural components. In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach that boosts MAE performance by integrating pseudo labelling for both class and data tokens, alongside replacing the traditional pixel-level reconstruction with token-level reconstruction. This strategy uses cluster assignments as pseudo labels to promote instance-level discrimination within the network, while token reconstruction requires generation of discrete tokens encapturing local context. The targets for pseudo labelling and reconstruction needs to be generated by a teacher network. To disentangle the generation of target pseudo labels and the reconstruction of the token features, we decouple the teacher into two distinct models, where one serves as a labelling teacher and the other as a reconstruction teacher. This separation proves empirically superior to a single teacher, while having negligible impact on throughput and memory consumption. Incorporating pseudo-labelling as an auxiliary task has demonstrated notable improvements in ImageNet-1K and other downstream tasks, including classification, semantic segmentation, and detection.
Authors: Yixuan Wang, Baoxin Wang, Yijun Liu, Qingfu Zhu, Dayong Wu, Wanxiang Che
Abstract: Nowadays, data augmentation through synthetic data has been widely used in the field of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. However, these synthetic data are mainly used in the pre-training phase rather than the data-limited fine-tuning phase due to inconsistent error distribution and noisy labels. In this paper, we propose a synthetic data construction method based on contextual augmentation, which can ensure an efficient augmentation of the original data with a more consistent error distribution. Specifically, we combine rule-based substitution with model-based generation, using the generative model to generate a richer context for the extracted error patterns. Besides, we also propose a relabeling-based data cleaning method to mitigate the effects of noisy labels in synthetic data. Experiments on CoNLL14 and BEA19-Test show that our proposed augmentation method consistently and substantially outperforms strong baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art level with only a few synthetic data.
Authors: Vidya Prasad, Hans van Gorp, Christina Humer, Anna Vilanova, Nicola Pezzotti
Abstract: Diffusion models generate high-quality samples by corrupting data with Gaussian noise and iteratively reconstructing it with deep learning, slowly transforming noisy images into refined outputs. Understanding this data evolution is important for interpretability but is complex due to its high-dimensional evolutionary nature. While traditional dimensionality reduction methods like t-distributed stochastic neighborhood embedding (t-SNE) aid in understanding high-dimensional spaces, they neglect evolutionary structure preservation. Hence, we propose Tree of Diffusion Life (TDL), a method to understand data evolution in the generative process of diffusion models. TDL samples a diffusion model's generative space via instances with varying prompts and employs image encoders to extract semantic meaning from these samples, projecting them to an intermediate space. It employs a novel evolutionary embedding algorithm that explicitly encodes the iterations while preserving the high-dimensional relations, facilitating the visualization of data evolution. This embedding leverages three metrics: a standard t-SNE loss to group semantically similar elements, a displacement loss to group elements from the same iteration step, and an instance alignment loss to align elements of the same instance across iterations. We present rectilinear and radial layouts to represent iterations, enabling comprehensive exploration. We assess various feature extractors and highlight TDL's potential with prominent diffusion models like GLIDE and Stable Diffusion with different prompt sets. TDL simplifies understanding data evolution within diffusion models, offering valuable insights into their functioning.
Authors: Qiancheng Xu, Yongqi Li, Heming Xia, Wenjie Li
Abstract: Tool learning aims to enhance and expand large language models' (LLMs) capabilities with external tools, which has gained significant attention recently. Current methods have shown that LLMs can effectively handle a certain amount of tools through in-context learning or fine-tuning. However, in real-world scenarios, the number of tools is typically extensive and irregularly updated, emphasizing the necessity for a dedicated tool retrieval component. Tool retrieval is nontrivial due to the following challenges: 1) complex user instructions and tool descriptions; 2) misalignment between tool retrieval and tool usage models. To address the above issues, we propose to enhance tool retrieval with iterative feedback from the large language model. Specifically, we prompt the tool usage model, i.e., the LLM, to provide feedback for the tool retriever model in multi-round, which could progressively improve the tool retriever's understanding of instructions and tools and reduce the gap between the two standalone components. We build a unified and comprehensive benchmark to evaluate tool retrieval models. The extensive experiments indicate that our proposed approach achieves advanced performance in both in-domain evaluation and out-of-domain evaluation.
Authors: Jintao Yan, Tan Chen, Yuxuan Sun, Zhaojun Nan, Sheng Zhou, Zhisheng Niu
Abstract: Leveraging the computing and sensing capabilities of vehicles, vehicular federated learning (VFL) has been applied to edge training for connected vehicles. The dynamic and interconnected nature of vehicular networks presents unique opportunities to harness direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, enhancing VFL training efficiency. In this paper, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem to optimize the VFL training performance, considering the energy constraints and mobility of vehicles, and propose a V2V-enhanced dynamic scheduling (VEDS) algorithm to solve it. The model aggregation requirements of VFL and the limited transmission time due to mobility result in a stepwise objective function, which presents challenges in solving the problem. We thus propose a derivative-based drift-plus-penalty method to convert the long-term stochastic optimization problem to an online mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, and provide a theoretical analysis to bound the performance gap between the online solution and the offline optimal solution. Further analysis of the scheduling priority reduces the original problem into a set of convex optimization problems, which are efficiently solved using the interior-point method. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art benchmarks, the proposed algorithm enhances the image classification accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset by 3.18% and reduces the average displacement errors on the Argoverse trajectory prediction dataset by 10.21%.
Authors: Joshua Niemeijer, Jan Ehrhardt, Hristina Uzunova, Heinz Handels
Abstract: The usage of medical image data for the training of large-scale machine learning approaches is particularly challenging due to its scarce availability and the costly generation of data annotations, typically requiring the engagement of medical professionals. The rapid development of generative models allows towards tackling this problem by leveraging large amounts of realistic synthetically generated data for the training process. However, randomly choosing synthetic samples, might not be an optimal strategy. In this work, we investigate the targeted generation of synthetic training data, in order to improve the accuracy and robustness of image classification. Therefore, our approach aims to guide the generative model to synthesize data with high epistemic uncertainty, since large measures of epistemic uncertainty indicate underrepresented data points in the training set. During the image generation we feed images reconstructed by an auto encoder into the classifier and compute the mutual information over the class-probability distribution as a measure for uncertainty.We alter the feature space of the autoencoder through an optimization process with the objective of maximizing the classifier uncertainty on the decoded image. By training on such data we improve the performance and robustness against test time data augmentations and adversarial attacks on several classifications tasks.
Authors: Micha{\l} Marci\'nczuk
Abstract: This study examines transformer-based models and their effectiveness in named entity recognition tasks. The study investigates data representation strategies, including single, merged, and context, which respectively use one sentence, multiple sentences, and sentences joined with attention to context per vector. Analysis shows that training models with a single strategy may lead to poor performance on different data representations. To address this limitation, the study proposes a combined training procedure that utilizes all three strategies to improve model stability and adaptability. The results of this approach are presented and discussed for four languages (English, Polish, Czech, and German) across various datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of the combined strategy.
Authors: Matteo Bortoletto, Constantin Ruhdorfer, Lei Shi, Andreas Bulling
Abstract: While numerous works have assessed the generative performance of language models (LMs) on tasks requiring Theory of Mind reasoning, research into the models' internal representation of mental states remains limited. Recent work has used probing to demonstrate that LMs can represent beliefs of themselves and others. However, these claims are accompanied by limited evaluation, making it difficult to assess how mental state representations are affected by model design and training choices. We report an extensive benchmark with various LM types with different model sizes, fine-tuning approaches, and prompt designs to study the robustness of mental state representations and memorisation issues within the probes. Our results show that the quality of models' internal representations of the beliefs of others increases with model size and, more crucially, with fine-tuning. We are the first to study how prompt variations impact probing performance on theory of mind tasks. We demonstrate that models' representations are sensitive to prompt variations, even when such variations should be beneficial. Finally, we complement previous activation editing experiments on Theory of Mind tasks and show that it is possible to improve models' reasoning performance by steering their activations without the need to train any probe.
Authors: Ge Chen, Yulan Hu, Sheng Ouyang, Yong Liu, Cuicui Luo
Abstract: Graph autoencoders (GAEs), as a kind of generative self-supervised learning approach, have shown great potential in recent years. GAEs typically rely on distance-based criteria, such as mean-square-error (MSE), to reconstruct the input graph. However, relying solely on a single reconstruction criterion may lead to a loss of distinctiveness in the reconstructed graph, causing nodes to collapse into similar representations and resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we have developed a simple yet effective strategy to preserve the necessary distinctness in the reconstructed graph. Inspired by the knowledge distillation technique, we found that the dual encoder-decoder architecture of GAEs can be viewed as a teacher-student relationship. Therefore, we propose transferring the knowledge of distinctness from the raw graph to the reconstructed graph, achieved through a simple KL constraint. Specifically, we compute pairwise node similarity scores in the raw graph and reconstructed graph. During the training process, the KL constraint is optimized alongside the reconstruction criterion. We conducted extensive experiments across three types of graph tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generality of our strategy. This indicates that the proposed approach can be employed as a plug-and-play method to avoid vague reconstructions and enhance overall performance.
Authors: Johan Obando-Ceron, Jo\~ao G. M. Ara\'ujo, Aaron Courville, Pablo Samuel Castro
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has achieved tremendous success on various domains through a combination of algorithmic design and careful selection of hyper-parameters. Algorithmic improvements are often the result of iterative enhancements built upon prior approaches, while hyper-parameter choices are typically inherited from previous methods or fine-tuned specifically for the proposed technique. Despite their crucial impact on performance, hyper-parameter choices are frequently overshadowed by algorithmic advancements. This paper conducts an extensive empirical study focusing on the reliability of hyper-parameter selection for value-based deep reinforcement learning agents, including the introduction of a new score to quantify the consistency and reliability of various hyper-parameters. Our findings not only help establish which hyper-parameters are most critical to tune, but also help clarify which tunings remain consistent across different training regimes.
Authors: Lucrezia Grassi, Carmine Tommaso Recchiuto, Antonio Sgorbissa
Abstract: This paper presents a system for diversity-aware autonomous conversation leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The system adapts to diverse populations and individuals, considering factors like background, personality, age, gender, and culture. The conversation flow is guided by the structure of the system's pre-established knowledge base, while LLMs are tasked with various functions, including generating diversity-aware sentences. Achieving diversity-awareness involves providing carefully crafted prompts to the models, incorporating comprehensive information about users, conversation history, contextual details, and specific guidelines. To assess the system's performance, we conducted both controlled and real-world experiments, measuring a wide range of performance indicators.
Authors: Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica, Daniele Potert\`i, Antonio Serino, Andrea Seveso
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to generate and manipulate human language, highlighting their potential across various applications. Evaluating LLMs in languages other than English is crucial for ensuring their linguistic versatility, cultural relevance, and applicability in diverse global contexts, thus broadening their usability and effectiveness. We tackle this challenge by introducing a structured benchmark using the INVALSI tests, a set of well-established assessments designed to measure educational competencies across Italy. Our study makes three primary contributions: Firstly, we adapt the INVALSI benchmark for automated LLM evaluation, which involves rigorous adaptation of the test format to suit automated processing while retaining the essence of the original tests. Secondly, we provide a detailed assessment of current LLMs, offering a crucial reference point for the academic community. Finally, we visually compare the performance of these models against human results. Additionally, researchers are invited to submit their models for ongoing evaluation, ensuring the benchmark remains a current and valuable resource.
Authors: Andrea Pollastro, Francesco Isgr\`o, Roberto Prevete
Abstract: Over the past few decades, electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring has become a pivotal tool for diagnosing neurological disorders, particularly for detecting seizures. Epilepsy, one of the most prevalent neurological diseases worldwide, affects approximately the 1 \% of the population. These patients face significant risks, underscoring the need for reliable, continuous seizure monitoring in daily life. Most of the techniques discussed in the literature rely on supervised Machine Learning (ML) methods. However, the challenge of accurately labeling variations in epileptic EEG waveforms complicates the use of these approaches. Additionally, the rarity of ictal events introduces an high imbalancing within the data, which could lead to poor prediction performance in supervised learning approaches. Instead, a semi-supervised approach allows to train the model only on data not containing seizures, thus avoiding the issues related to the data imbalancing. This work proposes a semi-supervised approach for detecting epileptic seizures from EEG data, utilizing a novel Deep Learning-based method called SincVAE. This proposal incorporates the learning of an ad-hoc array of bandpass filter as a first layer of a Variational Autoencoder (VAE), potentially eliminating the preprocessing stage where informative band frequencies are identified and isolated. Results indicate that SincVAE improves seizure detection in EEG data and is capable of identifying early seizures during the preictal stage as well as monitoring patients throughout the postictal stage.
Authors: Pranav Ajit Nair, Arun Sai Suggala
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse language tasks. But their deployment is often constrained by their substantial computational and storage requirements. Quantization has emerged as a key technique for addressing this challenge, enabling the compression of large models with minimal impact on performance. The recent GPTQ algorithm, a post-training quantization (PTQ) method, has proven highly effective for compressing LLMs, sparking a wave of research that leverages GPTQ as a core component. Recognizing the pivotal role of GPTQ in the PTQ landscape, we introduce CDQuant, a simple and scalable alternative to GPTQ with improved performance. CDQuant uses coordinate descent to minimize the layer-wise reconstruction loss to achieve high-quality quantized weights. Our algorithm is easy to implement and scales efficiently to models with hundreds of billions of parameters. Through extensive evaluation on the PaLM2 model family, we demonstrate that CDQuant consistently outperforms GPTQ across diverse model sizes and quantization levels. In particular, for INT2 quantization of PaLM2-Otter, CDQuant achieves a 10% reduction in perplexity compared to GPTQ.
Authors: Daniel Scalena, Gabriele Sarti, Malvina Nissim
Abstract: Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to single conditioning properties and synthetic settings. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various activation steering strategies, highlighting the property-dependent nature of optimal parameters to ensure a robust effect throughout generation. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Activation Composition, an information-theoretic approach to modulate the steering intensity of one or more properties throughout generation. Our experiments on multi-property steering show that our method successfully maintains high conditioning while minimizing the impact of conditioning on generation fluency.
Authors: Cheng Wang, Christopher Redino, Ryan Clark, Abdul Rahman, Sal Aguinaga, Sathvik Murli, Dhruv Nandakumar, Roland Rao, Lanxiao Huang, Daniel Radke, Edward Bowen
Abstract: Ransomware presents a significant and increasing threat to individuals and organizations by encrypting their systems and not releasing them until a large fee has been extracted. To bolster preparedness against potential attacks, organizations commonly conduct red teaming exercises, which involve simulated attacks to assess existing security measures. This paper proposes a novel approach utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) to simulate ransomware attacks. By training an RL agent in a simulated environment mirroring real-world networks, effective attack strategies can be learned quickly, significantly streamlining traditional, manual penetration testing processes. The attack pathways revealed by the RL agent can provide valuable insights to the defense team, helping them identify network weak points and develop more resilient defensive measures. Experimental results on a 152-host example network confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach, demonstrating the RL agent's capability to discover and orchestrate attacks on high-value targets while evading honeyfiles (decoy files strategically placed to detect unauthorized access).
Authors: Khalil Guetari (ARMEDIA-SAMOVAR), Yannis Tevissen (ARMEDIA-SAMOVAR), Fr\'ed\'eric Petitpont
Abstract: We propose a novel approach for automatic chaptering of TV newscast videos, addressing the challenge of structuring and organizing large collections of unsegmented broadcast content. Our method integrates both audio and visual cues through a two-stage process involving frozen neural networks and a trained LSTM network. The first stage extracts essential features from separate modalities, while the LSTM effectively fuses these features to generate accurate segment boundaries. Our proposed model has been evaluated on a diverse dataset comprising over 500 TV newscast videos of an average of 41 minutes gathered from TF1, a French TV channel, with varying lengths and topics. Experimental results demonstrate that this innovative fusion strategy achieves state of the art performance, yielding a high precision rate of 82% at IoU of 90%. Consequently, this approach significantly enhances analysis, indexing and storage capabilities for TV newscast archives, paving the way towards efficient management and utilization of vast audiovisual resources.
Authors: Yichi Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lingbing Guo, Yajing Xu, Binbin Hu, Ziqi Liu, Wen Zhang, Huajun Chen
Abstract: Multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) aims to automatically discover the unobserved factual knowledge from a given multi-modal knowledge graph by collaboratively modeling the triple structure and multi-modal information from entities. However, real-world MMKGs present challenges due to their diverse and imbalanced nature, which means that the modality information can span various types (e.g., image, text, numeric, audio, video) but its distribution among entities is uneven, leading to missing modalities for certain entities. Existing works usually focus on common modalities like image and text while neglecting the imbalanced distribution phenomenon of modal information. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive framework NativE to achieve MMKGC in the wild. NativE proposes a relation-guided dual adaptive fusion module that enables adaptive fusion for any modalities and employs a collaborative modality adversarial training framework to augment the imbalanced modality information. We construct a new benchmark called WildKGC with five datasets to evaluate our method. The empirical results compared with 21 recent baselines confirm the superiority of our method, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance across different datasets and various scenarios while keeping efficient and generalizable. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/zjukg/NATIVE
Authors: Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Erwan Beurier, Reda Yaich, Nora Boulahia-Cuppens, Fr\'ed\'eric Cuppens
Abstract: The escalating sophistication of cyberattacks has encouraged the integration of machine learning techniques in intrusion detection systems, but the rise of adversarial examples presents a significant challenge. These crafted perturbations mislead ML models, enabling attackers to evade detection or trigger false alerts. As a reaction, adversarial purification has emerged as a compelling solution, particularly with diffusion models showing promising results. However, their purification potential remains unexplored in the context of intrusion detection. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of diffusion models in purifying adversarial examples in network intrusion detection. Through a comprehensive analysis of the diffusion parameters, we identify optimal configurations maximizing adversarial robustness with minimal impact on normal performance. Importantly, this study reveals insights into the relationship between diffusion noise and diffusion steps, representing a novel contribution to the field. Our experiments are carried out on two datasets and against 5 adversarial attacks. The implementation code is publicly available.
Authors: Partha Chakraborty, Venkatraman Arumugam, Meiyappan Nagappan
Abstract: Bug localization refers to the identification of source code files which is in a programming language and also responsible for the unexpected behavior of software using the bug report, which is a natural language. As bug localization is labor-intensive, bug localization models are employed to assist software developers. Due to the domain difference between source code files and bug reports, modern bug-localization systems, based on deep learning models, rely heavily on embedding techniques that project bug reports and source code files into a shared vector space. The creation of an embedding involves several design choices, but the impact of these choices on the quality of embedding and the performance of bug localization models remains unexplained in current research. To address this gap, our study evaluated 14 distinct embedding models to gain insights into the effects of various design choices. Subsequently, we developed bug localization models utilizing these embedding models to assess the influence of these choices on the performance of the localization models. Our findings indicate that the pre-training strategies significantly affect the quality of the embedding. Moreover, we discovered that the familiarity of the embedding models with the data has a notable impact on the bug localization model's performance. Notably, when the training and testing data are collected from different projects, the performance of the bug localization models exhibits substantial fluctuations.
Authors: Zhiyuan Wen, Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao, Haoming Sun, Ruosong Yang, Shuaiqi Liu
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) appear to behave increasingly human-like in text-based interactions, more and more researchers become interested in investigating personality in LLMs. However, the diversity of psychological personality research and the rapid development of LLMs have led to a broad yet fragmented landscape of studies in this interdisciplinary field. Extensive studies across different research focuses, different personality psychometrics, and different LLMs make it challenging to have a holistic overview and further pose difficulties in applying findings to real-world applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review by categorizing current studies into three research problems: self-assessment, exhibition, and recognition, based on the intrinsic characteristics and external manifestations of personality in LLMs. For each problem, we provide a thorough analysis and conduct in-depth comparisons of their corresponding solutions. Besides, we summarize research findings and open challenges from current studies and further discuss their underlying causes. We also collect extensive publicly available resources to facilitate interested researchers and developers. Lastly, we discuss the potential future research directions and application scenarios. Our paper is the first comprehensive survey of up-to-date literature on personality in LLMs. By presenting a clear taxonomy, in-depth analysis, promising future directions, and extensive resource collections, we aim to provide a better understanding and facilitate further advancements in this emerging field.
Authors: Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Siqi Wang, Zuchen Gao, Fei Mi, Lanqing Hong
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) constantly evolve, ensuring their safety remains a critical research problem. Previous red-teaming approaches for LLM safety have primarily focused on single prompt attacks or goal hijacking. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference. We created a dataset of 1,400 questions across 14 categories, each featuring multi-turn coreference safety attacks. We then conducted detailed evaluations on five widely used open-source LLMs. The results indicated that under multi-turn coreference safety attacks, the highest attack success rate was 56% with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was 13.9% with the Mistral-7B-Instruct model. These findings highlight the safety vulnerabilities in LLMs during dialogue coreference interactions.
Authors: Akash Kundu, Aritra Sarkar, Abhishek Sadhu
Abstract: Quantum architecture search~(QAS) is a promising direction for optimization and automated design of quantum circuits towards quantum advantage. Recent techniques in QAS focus on machine learning-based approaches from reinforcement learning, like deep Q-network. While multi-layer perceptron-based deep Q-networks have been applied for QAS, their interpretability remains challenging due to the high number of parameters. In this work, we evaluate the practicality of KANs in quantum architecture search problems, analyzing their efficiency in terms of the probability of success, frequency of optimal solutions and their dependencies on various degrees of freedom of the network. In a noiseless scenario, the probability of success and the number of optimal quantum circuit configurations to generate the multi-qubit maximally entangled states are significantly higher than MLPs. Moreover in noisy scenarios, KAN can achieve a better fidelity in approximating maximally entangled state than MLPs, where the performance of the MLP significantly depends on the choice of activation function. Further investigation reveals that KAN requires a very small number of learnable parameters compared to MLPs, however, the average time of executing each episode for KAN is much higher.
Authors: Alexander Gambashidze, Anton Kulikov, Yuriy Sosnin, Ilya Makarov
Abstract: Recent advancements in human preference optimization, initially developed for Language Models (LMs), have shown promise for text-to-image Diffusion Models, enhancing prompt alignment, visual appeal, and user preference. Unlike LMs, Diffusion Models typically optimize in pixel or VAE space, which does not align well with human perception, leading to slower and less efficient training during the preference alignment stage. We propose using a perceptual objective in the U-Net embedding space of the diffusion model to address these issues. Our approach involves fine-tuning Stable Diffusion 1.5 and XL using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Contrastive Preference Optimization (CPO), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) within this embedding space. This method significantly outperforms standard latent-space implementations across various metrics, including quality and computational cost. For SDXL, our approach provides 60.8\% general preference, 62.2\% visual appeal, and 52.1\% prompt following against original open-sourced SDXL-DPO on the PartiPrompts dataset, while significantly reducing compute. Our approach not only improves the efficiency and quality of human preference alignment for diffusion models but is also easily integrable with other optimization techniques. The training code and LoRA weights will be available here: https://huggingface.co/alexgambashidze/SDXL\_NCP-DPO\_v0.1
URLs: https://huggingface.co/alexgambashidze/SDXL\_NCP-DPO\_v0.1
Authors: Sedigheh Eslami, Gerard de Melo
Abstract: Contrastive Language--Image Pre-training (CLIP) has manifested remarkable improvements in zero-shot classification and cross-modal vision-language tasks. Yet, from a geometrical point of view, the CLIP embedding space has been found to have a pronounced modality gap. This gap renders the embedding space overly sparse and disconnected, with different modalities being densely distributed in distinct subregions of the hypersphere. In this work, we aim at answering two main questions: 1. Does sharing the parameter space between the multi-modal encoders reduce the modality gap? 2. Can the gap be mitigated by pushing apart the uni-modal embeddings via intra-modality separation? We design AlignCLIP, in order to answer these questions and show that answers to both questions are positive. Through extensive experiments, we show that AlignCLIP achieves noticeable enhancements in the cross-modal alignment of the embeddings, and thereby, reduces the modality gap, while maintaining the performance across several downstream evaluations, such as zero-shot image classification, zero-shot multi-modal retrieval and zero-shot semantic text similarity.
Authors: Zeinab Sherkatghanad, Moloud Abdar, Mohammadreza Bakhtyari, Vladimir Makarenkov
Abstract: Test-time augmentation (TTA) is a well-known technique employed during the testing phase of computer vision tasks. It involves aggregating multiple augmented versions of input data. Combining predictions using a simple average formulation is a common and straightforward approach after performing TTA. This paper introduces a novel framework for optimizing TTA, called BayTTA (Bayesian-based TTA), which is based on Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). First, we generate a model list associated with different variations of the input data created through TTA. Then, we use BMA to combine model predictions weighted by their respective posterior probabilities. Such an approach allows one to take into account model uncertainty, and thus to enhance the predictive performance of the related machine learning or deep learning model. We evaluate the performance of BayTTA on various public data, including three medical image datasets comprising skin cancer, breast cancer, and chest X-ray images and two well-known gene editing datasets, CRISPOR and GUIDE-seq. Our experimental results indicate that BayTTA can be effectively integrated into state-of-the-art deep learning models used in medical image analysis as well as into some popular pre-trained CNN models such as VGG-16, MobileNetV2, DenseNet201, ResNet152V2, and InceptionRes-NetV2, leading to the enhancement in their accuracy and robustness performance.
Authors: Johnny Li, Saksham Consul, Eda Zhou, James Wong, Naila Farooqui, Yuxin Ye, Nithyashree Manohar, Zhuxiaona Wei, Tian Wu, Ben Echols, Sharon Zhou, Gregory Diamos
Abstract: Despite their powerful chat, coding, and reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate. Conventional wisdom suggests that hallucinations are a consequence of a balance between creativity and factuality, which can be mitigated, but not eliminated, by grounding the LLM in external knowledge sources. Through extensive systematic experiments, we show that these traditional approaches fail to explain why LLMs hallucinate in practice. Specifically, we show that LLMs augmented with a massive Mixture of Memory Experts (MoME) can easily memorize large datasets of random numbers. We corroborate these experimental findings with a theoretical construction showing that simple neural networks trained to predict the next token hallucinate when the training loss is above a threshold as it usually does in practice when training on internet scale data. We interpret our findings by comparing against traditional retrieval methods for mitigating hallucinations. We use our findings to design a first generation model for removing hallucinations -- Lamini-1 -- that stores facts in a massive mixture of millions of memory experts that are retrieved dynamically.
Authors: Christof Tinnes, Alisa Welter, Sven Apel
Abstract: Modeling structure and behavior of software systems plays a crucial role in the industrial practice of software engineering. As with other software engineering artifacts, software models are subject to evolution. Supporting modelers in evolving software models with recommendations for model completions is still an open problem, though. In this paper, we explore the potential of large language models for this task. In particular, we propose an approach, retrieval-augmented generation, leveraging large language models, model histories, and retrieval-augmented generation for model completion. Through experiments on three datasets, including an industrial application, one public open-source community dataset, and one controlled collection of simulated model repositories, we evaluate the potential of large language models for model completion with retrieval-augmented generation. We found that large language models are indeed a promising technology for supporting software model evolution (62.30% semantically correct completions on real-world industrial data and up to 86.19% type-correct completions). The general inference capabilities of large language models are particularly useful when dealing with concepts for which there are few, noisy, or no examples at all.
Authors: Michelle Adeline, Junn Yong Loo, Vishnu Monn Baskaran
Abstract: Multi-view 3D object detection is a crucial component of autonomous driving systems. Contemporary query-based methods primarily depend either on dataset-specific initialization of 3D anchors, introducing bias, or utilize dense attention mechanisms, which are computationally inefficient and unscalable. To overcome these issues, we present MDHA, a novel sparse query-based framework, which constructs adaptive 3D output proposals using hybrid anchors from multi-view, multi-scale input. Fixed 2D anchors are combined with depth predictions to form 2.5D anchors, which are projected to obtain 3D proposals. To ensure high efficiency, our proposed Anchor Encoder performs sparse refinement and selects the top-k anchors and features. Moreover, while existing multi-view attention mechanisms rely on projecting reference points to multiple images, our novel Circular Deformable Attention mechanism only projects to a single image but allows reference points to seamlessly attend to adjacent images, improving efficiency without compromising on performance. On the nuScenes val set, it achieves 46.4% mAP and 55.0% NDS with a ResNet101 backbone. MDHA significantly outperforms the baseline, where anchor proposals are modelled as learnable embeddings.
Authors: Aditya Kalyanpur, Kailash Saravanakumar, Victor Barres, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, David Melville, David Ferrucci
Abstract: We introduce LLM-ARC, a neuro-symbolic framework designed to enhance the logical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), by combining them with an Automated Reasoning Critic (ARC). LLM-ARC employs an Actor-Critic method where the LLM Actor generates declarative logic programs along with tests for semantic correctness, while the Automated Reasoning Critic evaluates the code, runs the tests and provides feedback on test failures for iterative refinement. Implemented using Answer Set Programming (ASP), LLM-ARC achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 88.32% on the FOLIO benchmark which tests complex logical reasoning capabilities. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements over LLM-only baselines, highlighting the importance of logic test generation and iterative self-refinement. We achieve our best result using a fully automated self-supervised training loop where the Actor is trained on end-to-end dialog traces with Critic feedback. We discuss potential enhancements and provide a detailed error analysis, showcasing the robustness and efficacy of LLM-ARC for complex natural language reasoning tasks.
Authors: Philippe Hansen-Estruch, Sriram Vishwanath, Amy Zhang, Manan Tomar
Abstract: At the core of both successful generative and self-supervised representation learning models there is a reconstruction objective that incorporates some form of image corruption. Diffusion models implement this approach through a scheduled Gaussian corruption process, while masked auto-encoder models do so by masking patches of the image. Despite their different approaches, the underlying similarity in their methodologies suggests a promising avenue for an auto-encoder capable of both de-noising tasks. We propose a unified self-supervised objective, dubbed Unified Masked Diffusion (UMD), that combines patch-based and noise-based corruption techniques within a single auto-encoding framework. Specifically, UMD modifies the diffusion transformer (DiT) training process by introducing an additional noise-free, high masking representation step in the diffusion noising schedule, and utilizes a mixed masked and noised image for subsequent timesteps. By integrating features useful for diffusion modeling and for predicting masked patch tokens, UMD achieves strong performance in downstream generative and representation learning tasks, including linear probing and class-conditional generation. This is achieved without the need for heavy data augmentations, multiple views, or additional encoders. Furthermore, UMD improves over the computational efficiency of prior diffusion based methods in total training time. We release our code at https://github.com/philippe-eecs/small-vision.
Authors: Xi Xiao, Wentao Wang, Jiacheng Xie, Lijing Zhu, Gaofei Chen, Zhengji Li, Tianyang Wang, Min Xu
Abstract: Drug target binding affinity (DTA) is a key criterion for drug screening. Existing experimental methods are time-consuming and rely on limited structural and domain information. While learning-based methods can model sequence and structural information, they struggle to integrate contextual data and often lack comprehensive modeling of drug-target interactions. In this study, we propose a novel DTA prediction method, termed HGTDP-DTA, which utilizes dynamic prompts within a hybrid Graph-Transformer framework. Our method generates context-specific prompts for each drug-target pair, enhancing the model's ability to capture unique interactions. The introduction of prompt tuning further optimizes the prediction process by filtering out irrelevant noise and emphasizing task-relevant information, dynamically adjusting the input features of the molecular graph. The proposed hybrid Graph-Transformer architecture combines structural information from Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) with sequence information captured by Transformers, facilitating the interaction between global and local information. Additionally, we adopted the multi-view feature fusion method to project molecular graph views and affinity subgraph views into a common feature space, effectively combining structural and contextual information. Experiments on two widely used public datasets, Davis and KIBA, show that HGTDP-DTA outperforms state-of-the-art DTA prediction methods in both prediction performance and generalization ability.
Authors: Talfan Evans, Nikhil Parthasarathy, Hamza Merzic, Olivier J. Henaff
Abstract: Data curation is an essential component of large-scale pretraining. In this work, we demonstrate that jointly selecting batches of data is more effective for learning than selecting examples independently. Multimodal contrastive objectives expose the dependencies between data and thus naturally yield criteria for measuring the joint learnability of a batch. We derive a simple and tractable algorithm for selecting such batches, which significantly accelerate training beyond individually-prioritized data points. As performance improves by selecting from larger super-batches, we also leverage recent advances in model approximation to reduce the associated computational overhead. As a result, our approach--multimodal contrastive learning with joint example selection (JEST)--surpasses state-of-the-art models with up to 13$\times$ fewer iterations and 10$\times$ less computation. Essential to the performance of JEST is the ability to steer the data selection process towards the distribution of smaller, well-curated datasets via pretrained reference models, exposing the level of data curation as a new dimension for neural scaling laws.
Authors: Modan Tailleur (IRIT-SAMoVA), Julien Pinquier (IRIT-SAMoVA), Laurent Millot (ACTE), Corsin Vogel (LS2N), Mathieu Lagrange (LS2N)
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the Extreme Metal Vocals Dataset, which comprises a collection of recordings of extreme vocal techniques performed within the realm of heavy metal music. The dataset consists of 760 audio excerpts of 1 second to 30 seconds long, totaling about 100 min of audio material, roughly composed of 60 minutes of distorted voices and 40 minutes of clear voice recordings. These vocal recordings are from 27 different singers and are provided without accompanying musical instruments or post-processing effects. The distortion taxonomy within this dataset encompasses four distinct distortion techniques and three vocal effects, all performed in different pitch ranges. Performance of a state-of-the-art deep learning model is evaluated for two different classification tasks related to vocal techniques, demonstrating the potential of this resource for the audio processing community.
Authors: Elinor Poole-Dayan, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara
Abstract: While state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many tasks, there has been extensive research on undesirable model behavior such as hallucinations and bias. In this work, we investigate how the quality of LLM responses changes in terms of information accuracy, truthfulness, and refusals depending on three user traits: English proficiency, education level, and country of origin. We present extensive experimentation on three state-of-the-art LLMs and two different datasets targeting truthfulness and factuality. Our findings suggest that undesirable behaviors in state-of-the-art LLMs occur disproportionately more for users with lower English proficiency, of lower education status, and originating from outside the US, rendering these models unreliable sources of information towards their most vulnerable users.
Authors: Fei Xia, Yixuan Weng, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Abstract: Taxonomies, which organize domain concepts into hierarchical structures, are crucial for building knowledge systems and downstream applications. As domain knowledge evolves, taxonomies need to be continuously updated to include new concepts. Previous approaches have mainly focused on adding concepts to the leaf nodes of the existing hierarchical tree, which does not fully utilize the taxonomy's knowledge and is unable to update the original taxonomy structure (usually involving non-leaf nodes). In this paper, we propose a two-stage method called ATTEMPT for taxonomy completion. Our method inserts new concepts into the correct position by finding a parent node and labeling child nodes. Specifically, by combining local nodes with prompts to generate natural sentences, we take advantage of pre-trained language models for hypernym/hyponymy recognition. Experimental results on two public datasets (including six domains) show that ATTEMPT performs best on both taxonomy completion and extension tasks, surpassing existing methods.
Authors: Arijit Sehanobish, Avinava Dubey, Krzysztof Choromanski, Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury, Deepali Jain, Vikas Sindhwani, Snigdha Chaturvedi
Abstract: Recent efforts to scale Transformer models have demonstrated rapid progress across a wide range of tasks (Wei et al., 2022). However, fine-tuning these models for downstream tasks is expensive due to their large parameter counts. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches have emerged as a viable alternative by allowing us to fine-tune models by updating only a small number of parameters. In this work, we propose a general framework for parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), based on structured unrestricted-rank matrices (SURM) which can serve as a drop-in replacement for popular approaches such as Adapters and LoRA. Unlike other methods like LoRA, SURMs provides more flexibility in finding the right balance between compactness and expressiveness. This is achieved by using low displacement rank matrices (LDRMs), which hasn't been used in this context before. SURMs remain competitive with baselines, often providing significant quality improvements while using a smaller parameter budget. SURMs achieve 5-7% accuracy gains on various image classification tasks while replacing low-rank matrices in LoRA. It also results in up to 12x reduction of the number of parameters in adapters (with virtually no loss in quality) on the GLUE benchmark.
Authors: Yuchen Zhou, Jiayuan Gu, Tung Yen Chiang, Fanbo Xiang, Hao Su
Abstract: The development of 2D foundation models for image segmentation has been significantly advanced by the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, achieving similar success in 3D models remains a challenge due to issues such as non-unified data formats, lightweight models, and the scarcity of labeled data with diverse masks. To this end, we propose a 3D promptable segmentation model (Point-SAM) focusing on point clouds. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based method, extending SAM to the 3D domain. We leverage part-level and object-level annotations and introduce a data engine to generate pseudo labels from SAM, thereby distilling 2D knowledge into our 3D model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on several indoor and outdoor benchmarks and demonstrates a variety of applications, such as 3D annotation. Codes and demo can be found at https://github.com/zyc00/Point-SAM.
Authors: USVSN Sai Prashanth, Alvin Deng, Kyle O'Brien, Jyothir S V, Mohammad Aflah Khan, Jaydeep Borkar, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Jacob Ray Fuehne, Stella Biderman, Tracy Ke, Katherine Lee, Naomi Saphra
Abstract: Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it to the model and corpus. To build intuition around these factors, we break memorization down into a taxonomy: recitation of highly duplicated sequences, reconstruction of inherently predictable sequences, and recollection of sequences that are neither. We demonstrate the usefulness of our taxonomy by using it to construct a predictive model for memorization. By analyzing dependencies and inspecting the weights of the predictive model, we find that different factors influence the likelihood of memorization differently depending on the taxonomic category.
Authors: Amalie Brogaard Pauli, Isabelle Augenstein, Ira Assent
Abstract: We are exposed to much information trying to influence us, such as teaser messages, debates, politically framed news, and propaganda - all of which use persuasive language. With the recent interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study the ability of LLMs to produce persuasive text. As opposed to prior work which focuses on particular domains or types of persuasion, we conduct a general study across various domains to measure and benchmark to what degree LLMs produce persuasive text - both when explicitly instructed to rewrite text to be more or less persuasive and when only instructed to paraphrase. To this end, we construct a new dataset, Persuasive-Pairs, of pairs each consisting of a short text and of a text rewritten by an LLM to amplify or diminish persuasive language. We multi-annotate the pairs on a relative scale for persuasive language. This data is not only a valuable resource in itself, but we also show that it can be used to train a regression model to predict a score of persuasive language between text pairs. This model can score and benchmark new LLMs across domains, thereby facilitating the comparison of different LLMs. Finally, we discuss effects observed for different system prompts. Notably, we find that different 'personas' in the system prompt of LLaMA3 change the persuasive language in the text substantially, even when only instructed to paraphrase. These findings underscore the importance of investigating persuasive language in LLM generated text.
Authors: Shane Arora, Marzena Karpinska, Hung-Ting Chen, Ipsita Bhattacharjee, Mohit Iyyer, Eunsol Choi
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are commonly used for long-form question answering, which requires them to generate paragraph-length answers to complex questions. While long-form QA has been well-studied in English via many different datasets and evaluation metrics, this research has not been extended to cover most other languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce CaLMQA, a collection of 2.6K complex questions spanning 23 languages, including under-resourced, rarely-studied languages such as Fijian and Kirundi. Our dataset includes both naturally-occurring questions collected from community web forums as well as questions written by native speakers, whom we hire for this purpose. Our process yields diverse, complex questions that reflect cultural topics (e.g. traditions, laws, news) and the language usage of native speakers. We conduct automatic evaluation across a suite of open- and closed-source models using our novel metric CaLMScore, which detects incorrect language and token repetitions in answers, and observe that the quality of LLM-generated answers degrades significantly for some low-resource languages. We perform human evaluation on a subset of models and see that model performance is significantly worse for culturally specific questions than for culturally agnostic questions. Our findings highlight the need for further research in LLM multilingual capabilities and non-English LFQA evaluation.
Authors: Jiahe Huang, Guandao Yang, Zichen Wang, Jeong Joon Park
Abstract: We introduce a general framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) using generative diffusion models. In particular, we focus on the scenarios where we do not have the full knowledge of the scene necessary to apply classical solvers. Most existing forward or inverse PDE approaches perform poorly when the observations on the data or the underlying coefficients are incomplete, which is a common assumption for real-world measurements. In this work, we propose DiffusionPDE that can simultaneously fill in the missing information and solve a PDE by modeling the joint distribution of the solution and coefficient spaces. We show that the learned generative priors lead to a versatile framework for accurately solving a wide range of PDEs under partial observation, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art methods for both forward and inverse directions.
Authors: Ercong Nie, Bo Shao, Zifeng Ding, Mingyang Wang, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Sch\"utze
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive parametric knowledge, but this knowledge is difficult to update with new information because retraining is very expensive and infeasible for closed-source models. Knowledge editing (KE) has emerged as a viable solution for updating the knowledge of LLMs without compromising their overall performance. On-the-fly KE methods, inspired by in-context learning (ICL), have shown great promise and allow LLMs to be treated as black boxes. In the past, KE was primarily employed in English contexts, whereas the potential for cross-lingual KE in current English-centric LLMs has not been fully explored. To foster more research in this direction, we introduce the BMIKE-53 benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual KE on 53 diverse languages across three KE task types. We also propose a gradient-free KE method called Multilingual In-context Knowledge Editing (MIKE) and evaluate it on BMIKE-53. Our evaluation focuses on cross-lingual knowledge transfer in terms of reliability, generality, locality, and portability, offering valuable insights and a framework for future research in cross-lingual KE. Our code and data are publicly accessible via the anonymous repository at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MIKE.
Authors: Jesse Zhang, Minho Heo, Zuxin Liu, Erdem Biyik, Joseph J Lim, Yao Liu, Rasool Fakoor
Abstract: Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods focus on learning optimal policies over low-level action spaces. While these methods can perform well in their training environments, they lack the flexibility to transfer to new tasks. Instead, RL agents that can act over useful, temporally extended skills rather than low-level actions can learn new tasks more easily. Prior work in skill-based RL either requires expert supervision to define useful skills, which is hard to scale, or learns a skill-space from offline data with heuristics that limit the adaptability of the skills, making them difficult to transfer during downstream RL. Our approach, EXTRACT, instead utilizes pre-trained vision language models to extract a discrete set of semantically meaningful skills from offline data, each of which is parameterized by continuous arguments, without human supervision. This skill parameterization allows robots to learn new tasks by only needing to learn when to select a specific skill and how to modify its arguments for the specific task. We demonstrate through experiments in sparse-reward, image-based, robot manipulation environments that EXTRACT can more quickly learn new tasks than prior works, with major gains in sample efficiency and performance over prior skill-based RL. Website at https://www.jessezhang.net/projects/extract/.
Authors: Rafael S. Oyamada, Gabriel M. Tavares, Sylvio Barbon Junior, Paolo Ceravolo
Abstract: Process simulation is gaining attention for its ability to assess potential performance improvements and risks associated with business process changes. The existing literature presents various techniques, generally grounded in process models discovered from event log data or built upon deep learning algorithms. These techniques have specific strengths and limitations. Traditional data-driven approaches offer increased interpretability, while deep learning-based excel at generalizing changes across large event logs. However, the practical application of deep learning faces challenges related to managing stochasticity and integrating information for what-if analysis. This paper introduces a novel recurrent neural architecture tailored to discover COnditioned process Simulation MOdels (CoSMo) based on user-based constraints or any other nature of a-priori knowledge. This architecture facilitates the simulation of event logs that adhere to specific constraints by incorporating declarative-based rules into the learning phase as an attempt to fill the gap of incorporating information into deep learning models to perform what-if analysis. Experimental validation illustrates CoSMo's efficacy in simulating event logs while adhering to predefined declarative conditions, emphasizing both control-flow and data-flow perspectives.
Authors: Shengqiong Wu, Hao Fei, Leigang Qu, Wei Ji, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: While recently Multimodal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have made exciting strides, they mostly fall prey to the limitation of only input-side multimodal understanding, without the ability to produce content in multiple modalities. As we humans always perceive the world and communicate with people through various modalities, developing any-to-any MM-LLMs capable of accepting and delivering content in any modality becomes essential to human-level AI. To fill the gap, we present an end-to-end general-purpose any-to-any MM-LLM system, NExT-GPT. We connect an LLM with multimodal adaptors and different diffusion decoders, enabling NExT-GPT to perceive inputs and generate outputs in arbitrary combinations of text, images, videos, and audio. By leveraging the existing well-trained highly-performing encoders and decoders, NExT-GPT is tuned with only a small amount of parameter (1%) of certain projection layers, which not only benefits low-cost training and also facilitates convenient expansion to more potential modalities. Moreover, we introduce a modality-switching instruction tuning (MosIT) and manually curate a high-quality dataset for MosIT, based on which NExT-GPT is empowered with complex cross-modal semantic understanding and content generation. Overall, our research showcases the promising possibility of building an AI agent capable of modeling universal modalities, paving the way for more human-like AI research in the community. Project page: https://next-gpt.github.io/
Authors: Maolin Wang, Yao Zhao, Jiajia Liu, Jingdong Chen, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu, Ruocheng Guo, Xiangyu Zhao
Abstract: The deployment of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) within AntGroup has significantly advanced multimodal tasks in payment, security, and advertising, notably enhancing advertisement audition tasks in Alipay. However, the deployment of such sizable models introduces challenges, particularly in increased latency and carbon emissions, which are antithetical to the ideals of Green AI. This paper introduces a novel multi-stage compression strategy for our proprietary LLM, AntGMM. Our methodology pivots on three main aspects: employing small training sample sizes, addressing multi-level redundancy through multi-stage pruning, and introducing an advanced distillation loss design. In our research, we constructed a dataset, the Multimodal Advertisement Audition Dataset (MAAD), from real-world scenarios within Alipay, and conducted experiments to validate the reliability of our proposed strategy. Furthermore, the effectiveness of our strategy is evident in its operational success in Alipay's real-world multimodal advertisement audition for three months from September 2023. Notably, our approach achieved a substantial reduction in latency, decreasing it from 700ms to 90ms, while maintaining online performance with only a slight performance decrease. Moreover, our compressed model is estimated to reduce electricity consumption by approximately 75 million kWh annually compared to the direct deployment of AntGMM, demonstrating our commitment to green AI initiatives. We will publicly release our code and the MAAD dataset after some reviews\footnote{https://github.com/MorinW/AntGMM$\_$Pruning}.
Authors: Keyu Wang, Guilin Qi, Jiaoyan Chen, Yi Huang, Tianxing Wu
Abstract: Ontologies contain rich knowledge within domain, which can be divided into two categories, namely extensional knowledge and intensional knowledge. Extensional knowledge provides information about the concrete instances that belong to specific concepts in the ontology, while intensional knowledge details inherent properties, characteristics, and semantic associations among concepts. However, existing ontology embedding approaches fail to take both extensional knowledge and intensional knowledge into fine consideration simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel ontology embedding approach named EIKE (Extensional and Intensional Knowledge Embedding) by representing ontologies in two spaces, called extensional space and intensional space. EIKE presents a unified framework for embedding instances, concepts and their relations in an ontology, applying a geometry-based method to model extensional knowledge and a pretrained language model to model intensional knowledge, which can capture both structure information and textual information. Experimental results show that EIKE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in three datasets for both triple classification and link prediction, indicating that EIKE provides a more comprehensive and representative perspective of the domain.
Authors: Tiansi Dong, Mateja Jamnik, Pietro Li\`o
Abstract: The success of Large Language Models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, is witnessed by their planetary popularity, their capability of human-like communication, and also by their steadily improved reasoning performance. However, it remains unclear whether LLMs reason. It is an open problem how traditional neural networks can be qualitatively extended to go beyond the statistic paradigm and achieve high-level cognition. Here, we present a novel qualitative extension by generalising computational building blocks from vectors to spheres. We propose Sphere Neural Networks (SphNNs) for human-like reasoning through model construction and inspection, and develop SphNN for syllogistic reasoning, a microcosm of human rationality. SphNN is a hierarchical neuro-symbolic Kolmogorov-Arnold geometric GNN, and uses a neuro-symbolic transition map of neighbourhood spatial relations to transform the current sphere configuration towards the target. SphNN is the first neural model that can determine the validity of long-chained syllogistic reasoning in one epoch without training data, with the worst computational complexity of O(N). SphNN can evolve into various types of reasoning, such as spatio-temporal reasoning, logical reasoning with negation and disjunction, event reasoning, neuro-symbolic unification, and humour understanding (the highest level of cognition). All these suggest a new kind of Herbert A. Simon's scissors with two neural blades. SphNNs will tremendously enhance interdisciplinary collaborations to develop the two neural blades and realise deterministic neural reasoning and human-bounded rationality and elevate LLMs to reliable psychological AI. This work suggests that the non-zero radii of spheres are the missing components that prevent traditional deep-learning systems from reaching the realm of rational reasoning and cause LLMs to be trapped in the swamp of hallucination.
Authors: Stephen Obadinma, Alia Lachana, Maia Norman, Jocelyn Rankin, Joanna Yu, Xiaodan Zhu, Darren Mastropaolo, Deval Pandya, Roxana Sultan, Elham Dolatabadi
Abstract: The world's healthcare systems and mental health agencies face both a growing demand for youth mental health services, alongside a simultaneous challenge of limited resources. Here, we focus on frontline crisis support, where Crisis Responders (CRs) engage in conversations for youth mental health support and assign an issue tag to each conversation. In this study, we develop FAIIR (Frontline Assistant: Issue Identification and Recommendation), an advanced tool leveraging an ensemble of domain-adapted and fine-tuned transformer models trained on a large conversational dataset comprising 780,000 conversations. The primary aim is to reduce the cognitive burden on CRs, enhance the accuracy of issue identification, and streamline post-conversation administrative tasks. We evaluate FAIIR on both retrospective and prospective conversations, emphasizing human-in-the-loop design with active CR engagement for model refinement, consensus-building, and overall assessment. Our results indicate that FAIIR achieves an average AUCROC of 94%, a sample average F1-score of 64%, and a sample average recall score of 81% on the retrospective test set. We also demonstrate the robustness and generalizability of the FAIIR tool during the silent testing phase, with less than a 2% drop in all performance metrics. Notably, CRs' responses exhibited an overall agreement of 90.9% with FAIIR's predictions. Furthermore, expert agreement with FAIIR surpassed their agreement with the original labels. To conclude, our findings indicate that assisting with the identification of issues of relevance helps reduce the burden on CRs, ensuring that appropriate resources can be provided and that active rescues and mandatory reporting can take place in critical situations requiring immediate de-escalation.
Authors: Xiaoxuan Lei, Lucas Gomez, Hao Yuan Bai, Pouya Bashivan
Abstract: The ability to perform complex tasks from detailed instructions is a key to many remarkable achievements of our species. As humans, we are not only capable of performing a wide variety of tasks but also very complex ones that may entail hundreds or thousands of steps to complete. Large language models and their more recent multimodal counterparts that integrate textual and visual inputs have achieved unprecedented success in performing complex tasks. Yet, most existing benchmarks are largely confined to single-modality inputs (either text or vision), narrowing the scope of multimodal assessments, particularly for instruction-following in multimodal contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the instructed-Virtual VISual Decision Making (iWISDM) environment engineered to generate a limitless array of vision-language tasks of varying complexity. Using iWISDM, we compiled three distinct benchmarks of instruction following visual tasks across varying complexity levels and evaluated several newly developed multimodal models on these benchmarks. Our findings establish iWISDM as a robust benchmark for assessing the instructional adherence of both existing and emergent multimodal models and highlight a large gap between these models' ability to precisely follow instructions with that of humans.The code of iWISDM is available on GitHub at https://github.com/BashivanLab/iWISDM.
Authors: Li Meng, Anis Yazidi, Morten Goodwin, Paal Engelstad
Abstract: In this article, we propose a novel algorithm for deep reinforcement learning named Expert Q-learning. Expert Q-learning is inspired by Dueling Q-learning and aims at incorporating semi-supervised learning into reinforcement learning through splitting Q-values into state values and action advantages. We require that an offline expert assesses the value of a state in a coarse manner using three discrete values. An expert network is designed in addition to the Q-network, which updates each time following the regular offline minibatch update whenever the expert example buffer is not empty. Using the board game Othello, we compare our algorithm with the baseline Q-learning algorithm, which is a combination of Double Q-learning and Dueling Q-learning. Our results show that Expert Q-learning is indeed useful and more resistant to the overestimation bias. The baseline Q-learning algorithm exhibits unstable and suboptimal behavior in non-deterministic settings, whereas Expert Q-learning demonstrates more robust performance with higher scores, illustrating that our algorithm is indeed suitable to integrate state values from expert examples into Q-learning.
Authors: Xinyu Chen, Zhanhong Cheng, HanQin Cai, Nicolas Saunier, Lijun Sun
Abstract: Spatiotemporal traffic data imputation is of great significance in intelligent transportation systems and data-driven decision-making processes. To perform efficient learning and accurate reconstruction from partially observed traffic data, we assert the importance of characterizing both global and local trends in time series. In the literature, substantial works have demonstrated the effectiveness of utilizing the low-rank property of traffic data by matrix/tensor completion models. In this study, we first introduce a Laplacian kernel to temporal regularization for characterizing local trends in traffic time series, which can be formulated as a circular convolution. Then, we develop a low-rank Laplacian convolutional representation (LCR) model by putting the circulant matrix nuclear norm and the Laplacian kernelized temporal regularization together, which is proved to meet a unified framework that has a fast Fourier transform (FFT) solution in log-linear time complexity. Through extensive experiments on several traffic datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of LCR over several baseline models for imputing traffic time series of various time series behaviors (e.g., data noises and strong/weak periodicity) and reconstructing sparse speed fields of vehicular traffic flow. The proposed LCR model is also an efficient solution to large-scale traffic data imputation over the existing imputation models.
Authors: Mimoun Mohamed (QARMA, I2M), Fran\c{c}ois Malgouyres (IMT), Valentin Emiya (QARMA), Caroline Chaux (IPAL)
Abstract: The {\it straight-through estimator} (STE) is commonly used to optimize quantized neural networks, yet its contexts of effective performance are still unclear despite empirical successes.To make a step forward in this comprehension, we apply STE to a well-understood problem: {\it sparse support recovery}. We introduce the {\it Support Exploration Algorithm} (SEA), a novel algorithm promoting sparsity, and we analyze its performance in support recovery (a.k.a. model selection) problems. SEA explores more supports than the state-of-the-art, leading to superior performance in experiments, especially when the columns of $A$ are strongly coherent.The theoretical analysis considers recovery guarantees when the linear measurements matrix $A$ satisfies the {\it Restricted Isometry Property} (RIP).The sufficient conditions of recovery are comparable but more stringent than those of the state-of-the-art in sparse support recovery. Their significance lies mainly in their applicability to an instance of the STE.
Authors: Farooq Ahmad Wani, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Fabrizio Silvestri
Abstract: We introduce a novel method for training machine learning models in the presence of noisy labels, which are prevalent in domains such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving and have the potential to degrade a model's generalization performance. Inspired by established literature that highlights how deep learning models are prone to overfitting to noisy samples in the later epochs of training, we propose a strategic approach. This strategy leverages the distance to class centroids in the latent space and incorporates a discounting mechanism, aiming to diminish the influence of samples that lie distant from all class centroids. By doing so, we effectively counteract the adverse effects of noisy labels. The foundational premise of our approach is the assumption that samples situated further from their respective class centroid in the initial stages of training are more likely to be associated with noise. Our methodology is grounded in robust theoretical principles and has been validated empirically through extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets. Our results show that our method consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art techniques, achieving significant improvements in classification accuracy in the presence of noisy labels. The code for our proposed loss function and supplementary materials is available at https://github.com/wanifarooq/NCOD
Authors: Max Staats, Matthias Thamm, Bernd Rosenow
Abstract: Large annotated datasets inevitably contain noisy labels, which poses a major challenge for training deep neural networks as they easily memorize the labels. Noise-robust loss functions have emerged as a notable strategy to counteract this issue, but it remains challenging to create a robust loss function which is not susceptible to underfitting. Through a quantitative approach, this paper explores the limited overlap between the network output at initialization and regions of non-vanishing gradients of bounded loss functions in the initial learning phase. Using these insights, we address underfitting of the MAE loss with a novel method denoted as logit bias, which adds a real number $\epsilon$ to the logit at the position of the correct class. This method enables bounded losses to learn, even on datasets like WebVision, consisting of over a million images from 1000 classes. Extensive numerical experiments show that the logit bias enables MAE to compete with state-of-the-art noise robust loss functions. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can be used to determine optimal parameters for other loss functions -- without having to train networks. Remarkably, our method determines the hyperparameters based on the number of classes, resulting in loss functions which require zero dataset or noise-dependent parameters.
Authors: Akansha Kalra, Daniel S. Brown
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for capturing human intent to alleviate the challenges of hand-crafting the reward values. Despite the increasing interest in RLHF, most works learn black box reward functions that while expressive are difficult to interpret and often require running the whole costly process of RL before we can even decipher if these frameworks are actually aligned with human preferences. We propose and evaluate a novel approach for learning expressive and interpretable reward functions from preferences using Differentiable Decision Trees (DDTs). Our experiments across several domains, including CartPole, Visual Gridworld environments and Atari games, provide evidence that the tree structure of our learned reward function is useful in determining the extent to which the reward function is aligned with human preferences. We also provide experimental evidence that not only shows that reward DDTs can often achieve competitive RL performance when compared with larger capacity deep neural network reward functions but also demonstrates the diagnostic utility of our framework in checking alignment of learned reward functions. We also observe that the choice between soft and hard (argmax) output of reward DDT reveals a tension between wanting highly shaped rewards to ensure good RL performance, while also wanting simpler, more interpretable rewards. Videos and code, are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/ddt-rlhf
Authors: Charlie Hou, Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil, Michael Shavlovsky, Giulia Fanti, Yesh Dattatreya, Sujay Sanghavi
Abstract: On tabular data, a significant body of literature has shown that current deep learning (DL) models perform at best similarly to Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs), while significantly underperforming them on outlier data. However, these works often study idealized problem settings which may fail to capture complexities of real-world scenarios. We identify a natural tabular data setting where DL models can outperform GBDTs: tabular Learning-to-Rank (LTR) under label scarcity. Tabular LTR applications, including search and recommendation, often have an abundance of unlabeled data, and scarce labeled data. We show that DL rankers can utilize unsupervised pretraining to exploit this unlabeled data. In extensive experiments over both public and proprietary datasets, we show that pretrained DL rankers consistently outperform GBDT rankers on ranking metrics -- sometimes by as much as 38% -- both overall and on outliers.
Authors: Haokun Chen, Denis Krompass, Jindong Gu, Volker Tresp
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning (ML) paradigm, in which multiple clients collaboratively train ML models without centralizing their local data. Similar to conventional ML pipelines, the client local optimization and server aggregation procedure in FL are sensitive to the hyperparameter (HP) selection. Despite extensive research on tuning HPs for centralized ML, these methods yield suboptimal results when employed in FL. This is mainly because their "training-after-tuning" framework is unsuitable for FL with limited client computation power. While some approaches have been proposed for HP-Tuning in FL, they are limited to the HPs for client local updates. In this work, we propose a novel HP-tuning algorithm, called Federated Population-based Hyperparameter Tuning (FedPop), to address this vital yet challenging problem. FedPop employs population-based evolutionary algorithms to optimize the HPs, which accommodates various HP types at both client and server sides. Compared with prior tuning methods, FedPop employs an online "tuning-while-training" framework, offering computational efficiency and enabling the exploration of a broader HP search space. Our empirical validation on the common FL benchmarks and complex real-world FL datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method, which substantially outperforms the concurrent state-of-the-art HP tuning methods for FL.
Authors: Wenjie Fu, Huandong Wang, Chen Gao, Guanghua Liu, Yong Li, Tao Jiang
Abstract: Membership Inference Attack (MIA) identifies whether a record exists in a machine learning model's training set by querying the model. MIAs on the classic classification models have been well-studied, and recent works have started to explore how to transplant MIA onto generative models. Our investigation indicates that existing MIAs designed for generative models mainly depend on the overfitting in target models. However, overfitting can be avoided by employing various regularization techniques, whereas existing MIAs demonstrate poor performance in practice. Unlike overfitting, memorization is essential for deep learning models to attain optimal performance, making it a more prevalent phenomenon. Memorization in generative models leads to an increasing trend in the probability distribution of generating records around the member record. Therefore, we propose a Probabilistic Fluctuation Assessing Membership Inference Attack (PFAMI), a black-box MIA that infers memberships by detecting these trends via analyzing the overall probabilistic fluctuations around given records. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple generative models and datasets, which demonstrate PFAMI can improve the attack success rate (ASR) by about 27.9% when compared with the best baseline.
Authors: Wenxuan Ding, Shangbin Feng, Yuhan Liu, Zhaoxuan Tan, Vidhisha Balachandran, Tianxing He, Yulia Tsvetkov
Abstract: We propose Knowledge Crosswords, a geometric knowledge reasoning benchmark consisting of incomplete knowledge networks bounded by structured factual constraints, where LLMs are tasked with inferring the missing facts to meet all constraints. The novel setting of geometric knowledge reasoning necessitates new LM abilities beyond existing atomic/linear multi-hop QA, such as backtracking, verifying facts and constraints, reasoning with uncertainty, and more. Knowledge Crosswords contains 2,101 individual problems, covering diverse knowledge domains, and is further divided into three difficulty levels. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate existing LLMs and approaches on Knowledge Crosswords. Results demonstrate that baseline approaches struggle with larger knowledge networks and semantically-equivalent entity distractors. In light of their limitations, we propose two new approaches, Staged Prompting and Verify-All, to augment LLMs' abilities for error-aware backtracking and constraint verification. Our Verify-All significantly outperforms prior methods and is more robust towards problems in the hard subset. Further analysis shows that geometric knowledge reasoning poses new challenges to LLMs' knowledge abilities, particularly in robustness towards varying option orders, complex structural constraints in knowledge networks, "none of the above" scenarios, and more.
Authors: Cat P. Le, Chris Cannella, Ali Hasan, Yuting Ng, Vahid Tarokh
Abstract: Transformers have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in forecasting time series data. However, their extensive dependence on self-attention mechanisms demands significant computational resources, thereby limiting their practical applicability across diverse tasks, especially in multimodal problems. In this work, we propose a new architecture, called perceiver-CDF, for modeling cumulative distribution functions (CDF) of time series data. Our approach combines the perceiver architecture with a copula-based attention mechanism tailored for multimodal time series prediction. By leveraging the perceiver, our model efficiently transforms high-dimensional and multimodal data into a compact latent space, thereby significantly reducing computational demands. Subsequently, we implement a copula-based attention mechanism to construct the joint distribution of missing data for prediction. Further, we propose an output variance testing mechanism to effectively mitigate error propagation during prediction. To enhance efficiency and reduce complexity, we introduce midpoint inference for the local attention mechanism. This enables the model to efficiently capture dependencies within nearby imputed samples without considering all previous samples. The experiments on the unimodal and multimodal benchmarks consistently demonstrate a 20% improvement over state-of-the-art methods while utilizing less than half of the computational resources.
Authors: David Chuan-En Lin, Nikolas Martelaro
Abstract: Recent advancements in AI foundation models have made it possible for them to be utilized off-the-shelf for creative tasks, including ideating design concepts or generating visual prototypes. However, integrating these models into the creative process can be challenging as they often exist as standalone applications tailored to specific tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Jigsaw, a prototype system that employs puzzle pieces as metaphors to represent foundation models. Jigsaw allows designers to combine different foundation model capabilities across various modalities by assembling compatible puzzle pieces. To inform the design of Jigsaw, we interviewed ten designers and distilled design goals. In a user study, we showed that Jigsaw enhanced designers' understanding of available foundation model capabilities, provided guidance on combining capabilities across different modalities and tasks, and served as a canvas to support design exploration, prototyping, and documentation.
Authors: Nan Jiang, Chengxiao Wang, Kevin Liu, Xiangzhe Xu, Lin Tan, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract: Binary code analysis is the foundation of crucial tasks in the security domain; thus building effective binary analysis techniques is more important than ever. Large language models (LLMs) although have brought impressive improvement to source code tasks, do not directly generalize to assembly code due to the unique challenges of assembly: (1) the low information density of assembly and (2) the diverse optimizations in assembly code. To overcome these challenges, this work proposes a hierarchical attention mechanism that builds attention summaries to capture the semantics more effectively, and designs contrastive learning objectives to train LLMs to learn assembly optimization. Equipped with these techniques, this work develops Nova, a generative LLM for assembly code. Nova outperforms existing techniques on binary code decompilation by up to 146.54%, and outperforms the latest binary code similarity detection techniques by up to 6.17%, showing promising abilities on both assembly generation and understanding tasks.
Authors: Jiaqi Li, Yuanhao Lai, Rui Wang, Changjian Shui, Sabyasachi Sahoo, Charles X. Ling, Shichun Yang, Boyu Wang, Christian Gagn\'e, Fan Zhou
Abstract: Continual learning aims to learn a series of tasks sequentially without forgetting the knowledge acquired from the previous ones. In this work, we propose the Hessian Aware Low-Rank Perturbation algorithm for continual learning. By modeling the parameter transitions along the sequential tasks with the weight matrix transformation, we propose to apply the low-rank approximation on the task-adaptive parameters in each layer of the neural networks. Specifically, we theoretically demonstrate the quantitative relationship between the Hessian and the proposed low-rank approximation. The approximation ranks are then globally determined according to the marginal increment of the empirical loss estimated by the layer-specific gradient and low-rank approximation error. Furthermore, we control the model capacity by pruning less important parameters to diminish the parameter growth. We conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks, including a dataset with large-scale tasks, and compare our method against some recent state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed method. Empirical results show that our method performs better on different benchmarks, especially in achieving task order robustness and handling the forgetting issue. The source code is at https://github.com/lijiaqi/HALRP.
Authors: Sergio Davies, Andrew Gait, Andrew Rowley, Alessandro Di Nuovo
Abstract: Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have gained significant popularity thanks to their ability to learn using the well-known backpropagation algorithm. Conversely, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), despite having broader capabilities than ANNs, have always posed challenges in the training phase. This paper shows a new method to perform supervised learning on SNNs, using Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) and homeostasis, aiming at training the network to identify spatial patterns. Spatial patterns refer to spike patterns without a time component, where all spike events occur simultaneously. The method is tested using the SpiNNaker digital architecture. A SNN is trained to recognise one or multiple patterns and performance metrics are extracted to measure the performance of the network. Some considerations are drawn from the results showing that, in the case of a single trained pattern, the network behaves as the ideal detector, with 100% accuracy in detecting the trained pattern. However, as the number of trained patterns on a single network increases, the accuracy of identification is linked to the similarities between these patterns. This method of training an SNN to detect spatial patterns may be applied to pattern recognition in static images or traffic analysis in computer networks, where each network packet represents a spatial pattern. It will be stipulated that the homeostatic factor may enable the network to detect patterns with some degree of similarity, rather than only perfectly matching patterns.The principles outlined in this article serve as the fundamental building blocks for more complex systems that utilise both spatial and temporal patterns by converting specific features of input signals into spikes.One example of such a system is a computer network packet classifier, tasked with real-time identification of packet streams based on features within the packet content
Authors: Kaustubh Shivdikar
Abstract: The advent of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has revolutionized the field of machine learning, offering a novel paradigm for learning on graph-structured data. Unlike traditional neural networks, GNNs are capable of capturing complex relationships and dependencies inherent in graph data, making them particularly suited for a wide range of applications including social network analysis, molecular chemistry, and network security. GNNs, with their unique structure and operation, present new computational challenges compared to conventional neural networks. This requires comprehensive benchmarking and a thorough characterization of GNNs to obtain insight into their computational requirements and to identify potential performance bottlenecks. In this thesis, we aim to develop a better understanding of how GNNs interact with the underlying hardware and will leverage this knowledge as we design specialized accelerators and develop new optimizations, leading to more efficient and faster GNN computations. A pivotal component within GNNs is the Sparse General Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (SpGEMM) kernel, known for its computational intensity and irregular memory access patterns. In this thesis, we address the challenges posed by SpGEMM by implementing a highly optimized hashing-based SpGEMM kernel tailored for a custom accelerator. Synthesizing these insights and optimizations, we design state-of-the-art hardware accelerators capable of efficiently handling various GNN workloads. Our accelerator architectures are built on our characterization of GNN computational demands, providing clear motivation for our approaches. This exploration into novel models underlines our comprehensive approach, as we strive to enable accelerators that are not just performant, but also versatile, able to adapt to the evolving landscape of graph computing.
Authors: Haozhi Gao, Qianqian Ren, Jinbao Li
Abstract: Contrastive representation learning is crucial in time series analysis as it alleviates the issue of data noise and incompleteness as well as sparsity of supervision signal. However, existing constrastive learning frameworks usually focus on intral-temporal features, which fails to fully exploit the intricate nature of time series data. To address this issue, we propose DE-TSMCL, an innovative distillation enhanced framework for long sequence time series forecasting. Specifically, we design a learnable data augmentation mechanism which adaptively learns whether to mask a timestamp to obtain optimized sub-sequences. Then, we propose a contrastive learning task with momentum update to explore inter-sample and intra-temporal correlations of time series to learn the underlying structure feature on the unlabeled time series. Meanwhile, we design a supervised task to learn more robust representations and facilitate the contrastive learning process. Finally, we jointly optimize the above two tasks. By developing model loss from multiple tasks, we can learn effective representations for downstream forecasting task. Extensive experiments, in comparison with state-of-the-arts, well demonstrate the effectiveness of DE-TSMCL, where the maximum improvement can reach to 27.3%.
Authors: Jiaming Ji, Boyuan Chen, Hantao Lou, Donghai Hong, Borong Zhang, Xuehai Pan, Juntao Dai, Tianyi Qiu, Yaodong Yang
Abstract: With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) and ever-evolving practical requirements, finding an efficient and effective alignment method has never been more critical. However, the tension between the complexity of current alignment methods and the need for rapid iteration in deployment scenarios necessitates the development of a model-agnostic alignment approach that can operate under these constraints. In this paper, we introduce Aligner, a novel and simple alignment paradigm that learns the correctional residuals between preferred and dispreferred answers using a small model. Designed as a model-agnostic, plug-and-play module, Aligner can be directly applied to various open-source and API-based models with only one-off training, making it suitable for rapid iteration. Notably, Aligner can be applied to any powerful, large-scale upstream models. Moreover, it can even iteratively bootstrap the upstream models using corrected responses as synthetic human preference data, breaking through the model's performance ceiling. Our experiments demonstrate performance improvements by deploying the same Aligner model across 11 different LLMs, evaluated on the 3H dimensions (helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty). Specifically, Aligner-7B has achieved an average improvement of 68.9% in helpfulness and 23.8% in harmlessness across the tested LLMs while also effectively reducing hallucination. In the Alpaca-Eval leaderboard, stacking Aligner-2B on GPT-4 Turbo improved its LC Win Rate from 55.0% to 58.3%, surpassing GPT-4 Omni's 57.5% Win Rate (community report).
Authors: Tianyi Zhao, Liangliang Zhang, Yao Ma, Lu Cheng
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, multimodal learning systems (MMLS) have gained traction for their ability to process and integrate information from diverse modality inputs. Their expanding use in vital sectors such as healthcare has made safety assurance a critical concern. However, the absence of systematic research into their safety is a significant barrier to progress in this field. To bridge the gap, we present the first taxonomy that systematically categorizes and assesses MMLS safety. This taxonomy is structured around four fundamental pillars that are critical to ensuring the safety of MMLS: robustness, alignment, monitoring, and controllability. Leveraging this taxonomy, we review existing methodologies, benchmarks, and the current state of research, while also pinpointing the principal limitations and gaps in knowledge. Finally, we discuss unique challenges in MMLS safety. In illuminating these challenges, we aim to pave the way for future research, proposing potential directions that could lead to significant advancements in the safety protocols of MMLS.
Authors: Haimin Hu, Gabriele Dragotto, Zixu Zhang, Kaiqu Liang, Bartolomeo Stellato, Jaime F. Fisac
Abstract: We consider the multi-agent spatial navigation problem of computing the socially optimal order of play, i.e., the sequence in which the agents commit to their decisions, and its associated equilibrium in an N-player Stackelberg trajectory game. We model this problem as a mixed-integer optimization problem over the space of all possible Stackelberg games associated with the order of play's permutations. To solve the problem, we introduce Branch and Play (B&P), an efficient and exact algorithm that provably converges to a socially optimal order of play and its Stackelberg equilibrium. As a subroutine for B&P, we employ and extend sequential trajectory planning, i.e., a popular multi-agent control approach, to scalably compute valid local Stackelberg equilibria for any given order of play. We demonstrate the practical utility of B&P to coordinate air traffic control, swarm formation, and delivery vehicle fleets. We find that B&P consistently outperforms various baselines, and computes the socially optimal equilibrium.
Authors: Sangkyu Lee, Sungdong Kim, Ashkan Yousefpour, Minjoon Seo, Kang Min Yoo, Youngjae Yu
Abstract: Existing approaches for aligning large language models with human preferences face a trade-off that requires a separate reward model (RM) for on-policy learning. In this paper, we present a novel alignment framework, SELF-JUDGE that (1) does on-policy learning and 2) is parameter efficient, as it does not require an additional RM for evaluating the samples for on-policy learning. To this end, we propose Judge-augmented Supervised Fine-Tuning (JSFT) to train a single model to act as both a policy and a judge. Specifically, we view the pairwise judgment task, choosing the better response from a response pair, as a special case of the instruction-following task. The resulting model can judge preferences of on-the-fly responses from current policy initialized from itself. Experimental results show the efficacy of SELF-JUDGE, outperforming baselines in preference benchmarks. We also show that the rejecting sampling by itself can improve performance further without an additional evaluator.
Authors: Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville, Pablo Samuel Castro
Abstract: Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement learning agents have difficulty in effectively using their network parameters. We leverage prior insights into the advantages of sparse training techniques and demonstrate that gradual magnitude pruning enables value-based agents to maximize parameter effectiveness. This results in networks that yield dramatic performance improvements over traditional networks, using only a small fraction of the full network parameters.
Authors: Ge Bai, Jie Liu, Xingyuan Bu, Yancheng He, Jiaheng Liu, Zhanhui Zhou, Zhuoran Lin, Wenbo Su, Tiezheng Ge, Bo Zheng, Wanli Ouyang
Abstract: The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has drastically enhanced dialogue systems. However, comprehensively evaluating the dialogue abilities of LLMs remains a challenge. Previous benchmarks have primarily focused on single-turn dialogues or provided coarse-grained and incomplete assessments of multi-turn dialogues, overlooking the complexity and fine-grained nuances of real-life dialogues. To address this issue, we introduce MT-Bench-101, specifically designed to evaluate the fine-grained abilities of LLMs in multi-turn dialogues. By conducting a detailed analysis of real multi-turn dialogue data, we construct a three-tier hierarchical ability taxonomy comprising 4208 turns across 1388 multi-turn dialogues in 13 distinct tasks. We then evaluate 21 popular LLMs based on MT-Bench-101, conducting comprehensive analyses from both ability and task perspectives and observing differing trends in LLMs performance across dialogue turns within various tasks. Further analysis indicates that neither utilizing common alignment techniques nor chat-specific designs has led to obvious enhancements in the multi-turn abilities of LLMs. Extensive case studies suggest that our designed tasks accurately assess the corresponding multi-turn abilities. The data and code are available at \url{https://github.com/mtbench101/mt-bench-101}.
Authors: Jun Wang, Guocheng He, Yiannis Kantaros
Abstract: This paper addresses task planning problems for language-instructed robot teams. Tasks are expressed in natural language (NL), requiring the robots to apply their capabilities at various locations and semantic objects. Several recent works have addressed similar planning problems by leveraging pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to design effective multi-robot plans. However, these approaches lack mission completion guarantees. To address this challenge, we introduce a new decentralized LLM-based planner, called S-ATLAS for Safe plAnning for Teams of Language-instructed AgentS, that is capable of achieving user-defined mission success rates. This is accomplished by leveraging conformal prediction (CP), a distribution-free uncertainty quantification tool in black-box models. CP allows the proposed multi-robot planner to reason about its inherent uncertainty in a decentralized fashion, enabling robots to make individual decisions when they are sufficiently certain and seek help otherwise. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that the proposed planner can achieve user-specified task success rates while minimizing the overall number of help requests. We provide comparative experiments against related works showing that our method is significantly more computational efficient and achieves lower help rates. The advantage of our algorithm over baselines becomes more pronounced with increasing robot team size.
Authors: Stefan Hegselmann, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Florian Gierse, Monica Agrawal, David Sontag, Xiaoyi Jiang
Abstract: Patients often face difficulties in understanding their hospitalizations, while healthcare workers have limited resources to provide explanations. In this work, we investigate the potential of large language models to generate patient summaries based on doctors' notes and study the effect of training data on the faithfulness and quality of the generated summaries. To this end, we release (i) a rigorous labeling protocol for errors in medical texts and (ii) a publicly available dataset of annotated hallucinations in 100 doctor-written and 100 generated summaries. We show that fine-tuning on hallucination-free data effectively reduces hallucinations from 2.60 to 1.55 per summary for Llama 2, while preserving relevant information. We observe a similar effect on GPT-4 (0.70 to 0.40), when the few-shot examples are hallucination-free. We also conduct a qualitative evaluation using hallucination-free and improved training data. We find that common quantitative metrics do not correlate well with faithfulness and quality. Finally, we test GPT-4 for automatic hallucination detection, which clearly outperforms common baselines.
Authors: Jinhong Wang, Jintai Chen, Danny Chen, Jian Wu
Abstract: In clinical practice, medical image segmentation provides useful information on the contours and dimensions of target organs or tissues, facilitating improved diagnosis, analysis, and treatment. In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers have dominated this area, but they still suffer from either limited receptive fields or costly long-range modeling. Mamba, a State Space Sequence Model (SSM), recently emerged as a promising paradigm for long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity. In this paper, we introduce a Large Kernel Vision Mamba U-shape Network, or LKM-UNet, for medical image segmentation. A distinguishing feature of our LKM-UNet is its utilization of large Mamba kernels, excelling in locally spatial modeling compared to small kernel-based CNNs and Transformers, while maintaining superior efficiency in global modeling compared to self-attention with quadratic complexity. Additionally, we design a novel hierarchical and bidirectional Mamba block to further enhance Mamba's global and neighborhood spatial modeling capability for vision inputs. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of using large-size Mamba kernels to achieve large receptive fields. Codes are available at https://github.com/wjh892521292/LKM-UNet.
Authors: Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Pascale Fung
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to perform diverse tasks in underrepresented languages using only short in-context information, offering a crucial avenue for narrowing the gap between high-resource and low-resource languages. Nonetheless, there is only a handful of works explored ICL for low-resource languages with most of them focusing on relatively high-resource languages, such as French and Spanish. In this work, we extensively study ICL and its cross-lingual variation (X-ICL) on 25 low-resource and 7 relatively higher-resource languages. Our study not only assesses the effectiveness of ICL with LLMs in low-resource languages but also identifies the shortcomings of in-context label alignment, and introduces a more effective alternative: query alignment. Moreover, we provide valuable insights into various facets of ICL for low-resource languages. Our study concludes the significance of few-shot in-context information on enhancing the low-resource understanding quality of LLMs through semantically relevant information by closing the language gap in the target language and aligning the semantics between the targeted low-resource and the high-resource language that the model is proficient in. Our work highlights the importance of advancing ICL research, particularly for low-resource languages. Our code is publicly released at https://github.com/SamuelCahyawijaya/in-context-alignment
URLs: https://github.com/SamuelCahyawijaya/in-context-alignment
Authors: Kai Zhang, Yi Luan, Hexiang Hu, Kenton Lee, Siyuan Qiao, Wenhu Chen, Yu Su, Ming-Wei Chang
Abstract: Image retrieval, i.e., finding desired images given a reference image, inherently encompasses rich, multi-faceted search intents that are difficult to capture solely using image-based measures. Recent works leverage text instructions to allow users to more freely express their search intents. However, they primarily focus on image pairs that are visually similar and/or can be characterized by a small set of pre-defined relations. The core thesis of this paper is that text instructions can enable retrieving images with richer relations beyond visual similarity. To show this, we introduce MagicLens, a series of self-supervised image retrieval models that support open-ended instructions. MagicLens is built on a key novel insight: image pairs that naturally occur on the same web pages contain a wide range of implicit relations (e.g., inside view of), and we can bring those implicit relations explicit by synthesizing instructions via foundation models. Trained on 36.7M (query image, instruction, target image) triplets with rich semantic relations mined from the web, MagicLens achieves results comparable with or better than prior best on eight benchmarks of various image retrieval tasks, while maintaining high parameter efficiency with a significantly smaller model size. Additional human analyses on a 1.4M-image unseen corpus further demonstrate the diversity of search intents supported by MagicLens. Code and models are publicly available at https://open-vision-language.github.io/MagicLens/.
Authors: Samuel Cahyawijaya, Delong Chen, Yejin Bang, Leila Khalatbari, Bryan Wilie, Ziwei Ji, Etsuko Ishii, Pascale Fung
Abstract: The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks and fields has necessitated the alignment of these models with human values and preferences. Given various approaches of human value alignment, ranging from Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), to constitutional learning, etc. there is an urgent need to understand the scope and nature of human values injected into these models before their release. There is also a need for model alignment without a costly large scale human annotation effort. We propose UniVaR, a high-dimensional representation of human value distributions in LLMs, orthogonal to model architecture and training data. Trained from the value-relevant output of eight multilingual LLMs and tested on the output from four multilingual LLMs, namely LlaMA2, ChatGPT, JAIS and Yi, we show that UniVaR is a powerful tool to compare the distribution of human values embedded in different LLMs with different langauge sources. Through UniVaR, we explore how different LLMs prioritize various values in different languages and cultures, shedding light on the complex interplay between human values and language modeling.
Authors: Edward Y. Chang
Abstract: This paper explores the integration of human-like emotions and ethical considerations into Large Language Models (LLMs). We first model eight fundamental human emotions, presented as opposing pairs, and employ collaborative LLMs to reinterpret and express these emotions across a spectrum of intensity. Our focus extends to embedding a latent ethical dimension within LLMs, guided by a novel self-supervised learning algorithm with human feedback (SSHF). This approach enables LLMs to perform self-evaluations and adjustments concerning ethical guidelines, enhancing their capability to generate content that is not only emotionally resonant but also ethically aligned. The methodologies and case studies presented herein illustrate the potential of LLMs to transcend mere text and image generation, venturing into the realms of empathetic interaction and principled decision-making, thereby setting a new precedent in the development of emotionally aware and ethically conscious AI systems.
Authors: Andrew Liu, Hongjian Zhou, Yining Hua, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton
Abstract: The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. To better understand LLMs in the clinic, we construct a benchmark ClinicBench. We first collect eleven existing datasets covering diverse clinical language generation, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we construct six novel datasets and complex clinical tasks that are close to real-world practice, i.e., referral QA, treatment recommendation, hospitalization (long document) summarization, patient education, pharmacology QA and drug interaction for emerging drugs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Finally, we invite medical experts to evaluate the clinical usefulness of LLMs.
Authors: Joaquim Comas, Adria Ruiz, Federico Sukno
Abstract: Recent advancements in data-driven approaches for remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) have significantly improved the accuracy of remote heart rate estimation. However, the performance of such approaches worsens considerably under video compression, which is nevertheless necessary to store and transmit video data efficiently. In this paper, we present a novel approach to address the impact of video compression on rPPG estimation, which leverages a pulse-signal magnification transformation to adapt compressed videos to an uncompressed data domain in which the rPPG signal is magnified. We validate the effectiveness of our model by exhaustive evaluations on two publicly available datasets, UCLA-rPPG and UBFC-rPPG, employing both intra- and cross-database performance at several compression rates. Additionally, we assess the robustness of our approach on two additional highly compressed and widely-used datasets, MAHNOB-HCI and COHFACE, which reveal outstanding heart rate estimation results.
Authors: Ermis Soumalias, Michael J. Curry, Sven Seuken
Abstract: Online platforms generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year by showing advertisements alongside their own content. Currently, these platforms are integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into their services. This makes revenue generation from LLM-generated content the next major challenge in online advertising. We consider a scenario where advertisers aim to influence the responses of an LLM to align with their interests, while platforms seek to maximize advertiser value and ensure user satisfaction. We introduce an auction mechanism for this problem that operates without LLM fine-tuning or access to model weights and provably converges to the output of the optimally fine-tuned LLM for the platform's objective as computational resources increase. Our mechanism ensures that truthful reporting is a dominant strategy for advertisers and it aligns each advertiser's utility with their contribution to social welfare - an essential feature for long-term viability. Additionally, it can incorporate contextual information about the advertisers, significantly accelerating convergence. Via experiments with a publicly available LLM, we show that our mechanism significantly boosts advertiser value and platform revenue, with low computational overhead. While our motivating application is online advertising, our mechanism can be applied in any setting with monetary transfers, making it a general-purpose solution for truthfully aggregating the preferences of self-interested agents over LLM-generated replies.
Authors: Mounes Zaval, Sedat Ozer
Abstract: In the evolving field of Explainable AI (XAI), interpreting the decisions of deep neural networks (DNNs) in computer vision tasks is an important process. While pixel-based XAI methods focus on identifying significant pixels, existing concept-based XAI methods use pre-defined or human-annotated concepts. The recently proposed Segment Anything Model (SAM) achieved a significant step forward to prepare automatic concept sets via comprehensive instance segmentation. Building upon this, the Explain Any Concept (EAC) model emerged as a flexible method for explaining DNN decisions. EAC model is based on using a surrogate model which has one trainable linear layer to simulate the target model. In this paper, by introducing an additional nonlinear layer to the original surrogate model, we show that we can improve the performance of the EAC model. We compare our proposed approach to the original EAC model and report improvements obtained on both ImageNet and MS COCO datasets.
Authors: Hao Tang, Brian Xiao, Wenhao He, Pero Subasic, Avetik R. Harutyunyan, Yao Wang, Fang Liu, Haowei Xu, Ju Li
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) plays an important role in quantum chemistry, providing fast-to-evaluate predictive models for various properties of molecules. However, most existing ML models for molecular electronic properties use density functional theory (DFT) databases as ground truth in training, and their prediction accuracy cannot surpass that of DFT. In this work, we developed a unified ML method for electronic structures of organic molecules using the gold-standard CCSD(T) calculations as training data. Tested on hydrocarbon molecules, our model outperforms DFT with the widely-used hybrid and double hybrid functionals in computational costs and prediction accuracy of various quantum chemical properties. As case studies, we apply the model to aromatic compounds and semiconducting polymers on both ground state and excited state properties, demonstrating its accuracy and generalization capability to complex systems that are hard to calculate using CCSD(T)-level methods.
Authors: Shashata Sawmya, Linghao Kong, Ilia Markov, Dan Alistarh, Nir Shavit
Abstract: We show how to improve the inference efficiency of an LLM by expanding it into a mixture of sparse experts, where each expert is a copy of the original weights, one-shot pruned for a specific cluster of input values. We call this approach $\textit{Sparse Expansion}$. We show that, for models such as Llama 2 70B, as we increase the number of sparse experts, Sparse Expansion outperforms all other one-shot sparsification approaches for the same inference FLOP budget per token, and that this gap grows as sparsity increases, leading to inference speedups. But why? To answer this, we provide strong evidence that the mixture of sparse experts is effectively $\textit{disentangling}$ the input-output relationship of every individual neuron across clusters of inputs. Specifically, sparse experts approximate the dense neuron output distribution with fewer weights by decomposing the distribution into a collection of simpler ones, each with a separate sparse dot product covering it. Interestingly, we show that the Wasserstein distance between a neuron's output distribution and a Gaussian distribution is an indicator of its entanglement level and contribution to the accuracy of the model. Every layer of an LLM has a fraction of highly entangled Wasserstein neurons, and model performance suffers more when these are sparsified as opposed to others. The code for Sparse Expansion is available at: https://github.com/Shavit-Lab/Sparse-Expansion .
Authors: Danshi Wang, Yidi Wang, Xiaotian Jiang, Yao Zhang, Yue Pang, Min Zhang
Abstract: Since the advent of GPT, large language models (LLMs) have brought about revolutionary advancements in all walks of life. As a superior natural language processing (NLP) technology, LLMs have consistently achieved state-of-the-art performance on numerous areas. However, LLMs are considered to be general-purpose models for NLP tasks, which may encounter challenges when applied to complex tasks in specialized fields such as optical networks. In this study, we propose a framework of LLM-empowered optical networks, facilitating intelligent control of the physical layer and efficient interaction with the application layer through an LLM-driven agent (AI-Agent) deployed in the control layer. The AI-Agent can leverage external tools and extract domain knowledge from a comprehensive resource library specifically established for optical networks. This is achieved through user input and well-crafted prompts, enabling the generation of control instructions and result representations for autonomous operation and maintenance in optical networks. To improve LLM's capability in professional fields and stimulate its potential on complex tasks, the details of performing prompt engineering, establishing domain knowledge library, and implementing complex tasks are illustrated in this study. Moreover, the proposed framework is verified on two typical tasks: network alarm analysis and network performance optimization. The good response accuracies and sematic similarities of 2,400 test situations exhibit the great potential of LLM in optical networks.
Authors: Ravil Mussabayev
Abstract: The problem of natural language generation, and, more specifically, method name prediction, faces significant difficulties when proposed models need to be evaluated on test data. Such a metric would need to consider the versatility with which a single method can be named, with respect to both semantics and syntax. Measuring the direct overlap between the predicted and reference (true) sequences will not be able to capture these subtleties. Other existing embedding based metrics either do not measure precision and recall or impose strict unrealistic assumptions on both sequences. To address these issues, we propose a new metric that, on the one hand, is very simple and lightweight, and, on the other hand, is able to calculate precision and recall without resorting to any assumptions while obtaining good performance with respect to the human judgement.
Authors: Shwai He, Daize Dong, Liang Ding, Ang Li
Abstract: Scaling large language models has revolutionized the performance across diverse domains, yet the continual growth in model size poses significant challenges for real-world deployment. The Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach addresses this by dynamically selecting and activating only a subset of experts, significantly reducing computational costs while maintaining high performance. However, MoE introduces potential redundancy (e.g., parameters) and extra costs (e.g., communication overhead). Despite numerous compression techniques developed for mitigating the redundancy in dense models, the compression of MoE remains under-explored. We first bridge this gap with a cutting-edge unified framework that not only seamlessly integrates mainstream compression methods but also helps systematically understand MoE compression. This framework approaches compression from two perspectives: Expert Slimming which compresses individual experts and Expert Trimming which removes structured modules. Within this framework, we explore the optimization space unexplored by existing methods,and further introduce aggressive Expert Trimming techniques, i.e., Layer Drop and Block Drop, to eliminate redundancy at larger scales. Based on these insights,we present a comprehensive recipe to guide practitioners in compressing MoE effectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the compression methods under our framework and the proposed recipe, achieving a 6.05x speedup and only 20.0GB memory usage while maintaining over 92% of performance on Mixtral-8x7B. Code is released at \url{https://github.com/DaizeDong/Unified-MoE-Compression}.
Authors: You Zuo (ALMAnaCH), Kim Gerdes (LISN), Eric Villemonte de La Clergerie (ALMAnaCH), Beno\^it Sagot (ALMAnaCH)
Abstract: In this work, we introduce a comprehensive error typology specifically designed for evaluating two distinct tasks in machine-generated patent texts: claims-to-abstract generation, and the generation of the next claim given previous ones. We have also developed a benchmark, PatentEval, for systematically assessing language models in this context. Our study includes a comparative analysis, annotated by humans, of various models. These range from those specifically adapted during training for tasks within the patent domain to the latest general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, we explored and evaluated some metrics to approximate human judgments in patent text evaluation, analyzing the extent to which these metrics align with expert assessments. These approaches provide valuable insights into the capabilities and limitations of current language models in the specialized field of patent text generation.
Authors: Jianhua Pei, Cheng Feng, Ping Wang, Hina Tabassum, Dongyuan Shi
Abstract: Semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a new paradigm for 6G communication, with deep learning (DL) models being one of the key drives to shift from the accuracy of bit/symbol to the semantics and pragmatics of data. Nevertheless, DL-based SemCom systems often face performance bottlenecks due to overfitting, poor generalization, and sensitivity to outliers. Furthermore, the varying-fading gains and noises with uncertain signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) commonly present in wireless channels usually restrict the accuracy of semantic information transmission. Consequently, this paper constructs a latent diffusion model-enabled SemCom system, and proposes three improvements compared to existing works: i) To handle potential outliers in the source data, semantic errors obtained by projected gradient descent based on the vulnerabilities of DL models, are utilized to update the parameters and obtain an outlier-robust encoder. ii) A lightweight single-layer latent space transformation adapter completes one-shot learning at the transmitter and is placed before the decoder at the receiver, enabling adaptation for out-of-distribution data and enhancing human-perceptual quality. iii) An end-to-end consistency distillation (EECD) strategy is used to distill the diffusion models trained in latent space, enabling deterministic single or few-step real-time denoising in various noisy channels while maintaining high semantic quality. Extensive numerical experiments across different datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SemCom system, consistently proving its robustness to outliers, the capability to transmit data with unknown distributions, and the ability to perform real-time channel denoising tasks while preserving high human perceptual quality, outperforming the existing denoising approaches in semantic metrics.
Authors: Ross Irwin, Alessandro Tibo, Jon Paul Janet, Simon Olsson
Abstract: Generative models for 3D drug design have gained prominence recently for their potential to design ligands directly within protein pockets. Current approaches, however, often suffer from very slow sampling times or generate molecules with poor chemical validity. Addressing these limitations, we propose Semla, a scalable E(3)-equivariant message passing architecture. We further introduce a molecular generation model, SemlaFlow, which is trained using flow matching along with scale optimal transport, a novel extension of equivariant optimal transport. Our model produces state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets with just 100 sampling steps. Crucially, SemlaFlow samples high quality molecules with as few as 20 steps, corresponding to a two order-of-magnitude speed-up compared to state-of-the-art, without sacrificing performance. Furthermore, we highlight limitations of current evaluation methods for 3D generation and propose new benchmark metrics for unconditional molecular generators. Finally, using these new metrics, we compare our model's ability to generate high quality samples against current approaches and further demonstrate SemlaFlow's strong performance.
Authors: \'Alvaro Ciudad, Adri\'an Morales-Pastor, Laura Malo, Isaac Filella-Merc\`e, Victor Guallar, Alexis Molina
Abstract: In this study, we present ScoreFormer, a novel graph transformer model designed to accurately predict molecular docking scores, thereby optimizing high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) in drug discovery. The architecture integrates Principal Neighborhood Aggregation (PNA) and Learnable Random Walk Positional Encodings (LRWPE), enhancing the model's ability to understand complex molecular structures and their relationship with their respective docking scores. This approach significantly surpasses traditional HTVS methods and recent Graph Neural Network (GNN) models in both recovery and efficiency due to a wider coverage of the chemical space and enhanced performance. Our results demonstrate that ScoreFormer achieves competitive performance in docking score prediction and offers a substantial 1.65-fold reduction in inference time compared to existing models. We evaluated ScoreFormer across multiple datasets under various conditions, confirming its robustness and reliability in identifying potential drug candidates rapidly.
Authors: Zijin Lin, Yue Zhao, Kai Chen, Jinwen He
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have revolutionized the field of computer vision like object detection with their unparalleled performance. However, existing research has shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In the physical world, an adversary could exploit adversarial patches to implement a Hiding Attack (HA) which patches the target object to make it disappear from the detector, and an Appearing Attack (AA) which fools the detector into misclassifying the patch as a specific object. Recently, many defense methods for detectors have been proposed to mitigate the potential threats of adversarial patches. However, such methods still have limitations in generalization, robustness and efficiency. Most defenses are only effective against the HA, leaving the detector vulnerable to the AA. In this paper, we propose \textit{NutNet}, an innovative model for detecting adversarial patches, with high generalization, robustness and efficiency. With experiments for six detectors including YOLOv2-v4, SSD, Faster RCNN and DETR on both digital and physical domains, the results show that our proposed method can effectively defend against both the HA and AA, with only 0.4\% sacrifice of the clean performance. We compare NutNet with four baseline defense methods for detectors, and our method exhibits an average defense performance that is over 2.4 times and 4.7 times higher than existing approaches for HA and AA, respectively. In addition, NutNet only increases the inference time by 8\%, which can meet the real-time requirements of the detection systems. Demos of NutNet are available at: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/nutnet}.
Authors: Cheng Niu, Yang Guan, Yuanhao Wu, Juno Zhu, Juntong Song, Randy Zhong, Kaihua Zhu, Siliang Xu, Shizhe Diao, Tong Zhang
Abstract: The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very foundations of democracy. The recent advance of generative artificial intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. In response to this challenge, we introduce VeraCT Scan, a novel retrieval-augmented system for fake news detection. This system operates by extracting the core facts from a given piece of news and subsequently conducting an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. Then sources' credibility is leveraged for information verification. Besides determining the veracity of news, we also provide transparent evidence and reasoning to support its conclusions, resulting in the interpretability and trust in the results. In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, Llama-2 13B is also fine-tuned for news content understanding, information verification, and reasoning. Both implementations have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection.
Authors: Bhrij Patel, Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, Dinesh Manocha, Amrit Singh Bedi
Abstract: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is an important problem, which involves an agent exploring the environment to answer user queries. In the existing literature, EQA has exclusively been studied in single-agent scenarios, where exploration can be time-consuming and costly. In this work, we consider EQA in a multi-agent framework involving multiple large language models (LLM) based agents independently answering queries about a household environment. To generate one answer for each query, we use the individual responses to train a Central Answer Model (CAM) that aggregates responses for a robust answer. Using CAM, we observe a $50\%$ higher EQA accuracy when compared against aggregation methods for ensemble LLM, such as voting schemes and debates. CAM does not require any form of agent communication, alleviating it from the associated costs. We ablate CAM with various nonlinear (neural network, random forest, decision tree, XGBoost) and linear (logistic regression classifier, SVM) algorithms. Finally, we present a feature importance analysis for CAM via permutation feature importance (PFI), quantifying CAMs reliance on each independent agent and query context.
Authors: Nikhil Khandekar, Qiao Jin, Guangzhi Xiong, Soren Dunn, Serina S Applebaum, Zain Anwar, Maame Sarfo-Gyamfi, Conrad W Safranek, Abid A Anwar, Andrew Zhang, Aidan Gilson, Maxwell B Singer, Amisha Dave, Andrew Taylor, Aidong Zhang, Qingyu Chen, Zhiyong Lu
Abstract: As opposed to evaluating computation and logic-based reasoning, current benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in medicine are primarily focused on question-answering involving domain knowledge and descriptive reasoning. While such qualitative capabilities are vital to medical diagnosis, in real-world scenarios, doctors frequently use clinical calculators that follow quantitative equations and rule-based reasoning paradigms for evidence-based decision support. To this end, we propose MedCalc-Bench, a first-of-its-kind dataset focused on evaluating the medical calculation capability of LLMs. MedCalc-Bench contains an evaluation set of over 1000 manually reviewed instances from 55 different medical calculation tasks. Each instance in MedCalc-Bench consists of a patient note, a question requesting to compute a specific medical value, a ground truth answer, and a step-by-step explanation showing how the answer is obtained. While our evaluation results show the potential of LLMs in this area, none of them are effective enough for clinical settings. Common issues include extracting the incorrect entities, not using the correct equation or rules for a calculation task, or incorrectly performing the arithmetic for the computation. We hope our study highlights the quantitative knowledge and reasoning gaps in LLMs within medical settings, encouraging future improvements of LLMs for various clinical calculation tasks.
Authors: William Merrill, Noah A. Smith, Yanai Elazar
Abstract: How novel are texts generated by language models (LMs) relative to their training corpora? In this work, we investigate the extent to which modern LMs generate $n$-grams from their training data, evaluating both (i) the probability LMs assign to complete training $n$-grams and (ii) $n$-novelty, the proportion of $n$-grams generated by an LM that did not appear in the training data (for arbitrarily large $n$). To enable arbitrary-length $n$-gram search over a corpus in constant time, we develop Rusty-DAWG, a novel search tool inspired by indexing of genomic data. We compare the novelty of LM-generated text to human-written text and explore factors that affect generation novelty, focusing on the Pythia models. We find that, for $n > 4$, LM-generated text is less novel than human-written text, though it is more novel for smaller $n$. Larger LMs and more constrained decoding strategies both decrease novelty. Finally, we show that LMs complete $n$-grams with lower loss if they are more frequent in the training data. Overall, our results reveal factors influencing the novelty of LM-generated text, and we release Rusty-DAWG to facilitate further pretraining data research.
Authors: Gayane Ghazaryan, Erik Arakelyan, Pasquale Minervini, Isabelle Augenstein
Abstract: Question Answering (QA) datasets have been instrumental in developing and evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities. However, such datasets are scarce for languages other than English due to the cost and difficulties of collection and manual annotation. This means that producing novel models and measuring the performance of multilingual LLMs in low-resource languages is challenging. To mitigate this, we propose $\textbf{S}$yn$\textbf{DAR}$in, a method for generating and validating QA datasets for low-resource languages. We utilize parallel content mining to obtain $\textit{human-curated}$ paragraphs between English and the target language. We use the English data as context to $\textit{generate}$ synthetic multiple-choice (MC) question-answer pairs, which are automatically translated and further validated for quality. Combining these with their designated non-English $\textit{human-curated}$ paragraphs form the final QA dataset. The method allows to maintain the content quality, reduces the likelihood of factual errors, and circumvents the need for costly annotation. To test the method, we created a QA dataset with $1.2$K samples for the Armenian language. The human evaluation shows that $98\%$ of the generated English data maintains quality and diversity in the question types and topics, while the translation validation pipeline can filter out $\sim70\%$ of data with poor quality. We use the dataset to benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs, showing their inability to achieve human accuracy with some model performances closer to random chance. This shows that the generated dataset is non-trivial and can be used to evaluate reasoning capabilities in low-resource language.
Authors: Yujian Hu, Yilang Xiang, Yan-Jie Zhou, Yangyan He, Shifeng Yang, Xiaolong Du, Chunlan Den, Youyao Xu, Gaofeng Wang, Zhengyao Ding, Jingyong Huang, Wenjun Zhao, Xuejun Wu, Donglin Li, Qianqian Zhu, Zhenjiang Li, Chenyang Qiu, Ziheng Wu, Yunjun He, Chen Tian, Yihui Qiu, Zuodong Lin, Xiaolong Zhang, Yuan He, Zhenpeng Yuan, Xiaoxiang Zhou, Rong Fan, Ruihan Chen, Wenchao Guo, Jianpeng Zhang, Tony C. W. Mok, Zi Li, Le Lu, Dehai Lang, Xiaoqiang Li, Guofu Wang, Wei Lu, Zhengxing Huang, Minfeng Xu, Hongkun Zhang
Abstract: Chest pain symptoms are highly prevalent in emergency departments (EDs), where acute aortic syndrome (AAS) is a catastrophic cardiovascular emergency with a high fatality rate, especially when timely and accurate treatment is not administered. However, current triage practices in the ED can cause up to approximately half of patients with AAS to have an initially missed diagnosis or be misdiagnosed as having other acute chest pain conditions. Subsequently, these AAS patients will undergo clinically inaccurate or suboptimal differential diagnosis. Fortunately, even under these suboptimal protocols, nearly all these patients underwent non-contrast CT covering the aorta anatomy at the early stage of differential diagnosis. In this study, we developed an artificial intelligence model (DeepAAS) using non-contrast CT, which is highly accurate for identifying AAS and provides interpretable results to assist in clinical decision-making. Performance was assessed in two major phases: a multi-center retrospective study (n = 20,750) and an exploration in real-world emergency scenarios (n = 137,525). In the multi-center cohort, DeepAAS achieved a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.958 (95% CI 0.950-0.967). In the real-world cohort, DeepAAS detected 109 AAS patients with misguided initial suspicion, achieving 92.6% (95% CI 76.2%-97.5%) in mean sensitivity and 99.2% (95% CI 99.1%-99.3%) in mean specificity. Our AI model performed well on non-contrast CT at all applicable early stages of differential diagnosis workflows, effectively reduced the overall missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis rate from 48.8% to 4.8% and shortened the diagnosis time for patients with misguided initial suspicion from an average of 681.8 (74-11,820) mins to 68.5 (23-195) mins. DeepAAS could effectively fill the gap in the current clinical workflow without requiring additional tests.
Authors: Davi M F\'ebba, Kingsley Egbo, William A. Callahan, Andriy Zakutayev
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are transforming the landscape of chemistry and materials science. Recent examples of LLM-accelerated experimental research include virtual assistants for parsing synthesis recipes from the literature, or using the extracted knowledge to guide synthesis and characterization. Despite these advancements, their application is constrained to labs with automated instruments and control software, leaving much of materials science reliant on manual processes. Here, we demonstrate the rapid deployment of a Python-based control module for a Keithley 2400 electrical source measure unit using ChatGPT-4. Through iterative refinement, we achieved effective instrument management with minimal human intervention. Additionally, a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) was created, effectively linking all instrument controls to interactive screen elements. Finally, we integrated this AI-crafted instrument control software with a high-performance stochastic optimization algorithm to facilitate rapid and automated extraction of electronic device parameters related to semiconductor charge transport mechanisms from current-voltage (IV) measurement data. This integration resulted in a comprehensive open-source toolkit for semiconductor device characterization and analysis using IV curve measurements. We demonstrate the application of these tools by acquiring, analyzing, and parameterizing IV data from a Pt/Cr$_2$O$_3$:Mg/$\beta$-Ga$_2$O$_3$ heterojunction diode, a novel stack for high-power and high-temperature electronic devices. This approach underscores the powerful synergy between LLMs and the development of instruments for scientific inquiry, showcasing a path for further acceleration in materials science.
Authors: Ajan Subramanian, Zhongqi Yang, Iman Azimi, Amir M. Rahmani
Abstract: Health monitoring systems have revolutionized modern healthcare by enabling the continuous capture of physiological and behavioral data, essential for preventive measures and early health intervention. While integrating this data with Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown promise in delivering interactive health advice, traditional methods like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning often fail to fully utilize the complex, multi-dimensional, and temporally relevant data from wearable devices. These conventional approaches typically provide limited actionable and personalized health insights due to their inadequate capacity to dynamically integrate and interpret diverse health data streams. In response, this paper introduces a graph-augmented LLM framework designed to significantly enhance the personalization and clarity of health insights. Utilizing a hierarchical graph structure, the framework captures inter and intra-patient relationships, enriching LLM prompts with dynamic feature importance scores derived from a Random Forest Model. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through a sleep analysis case study involving 20 college students during the COVID-19 lockdown, highlighting the potential of our model to generate actionable and personalized health insights efficiently. We leverage another LLM to evaluate the insights for relevance, comprehensiveness, actionability, and personalization, addressing the critical need for models that process and interpret complex health data effectively. Our findings show that augmenting prompts with our framework yields significant improvements in all 4 criteria. Through our framework, we can elicit well-crafted, more thoughtful responses tailored to a specific patient.
Authors: Jingze Shi, Ting Xie, Bingheng Wu, Chunjun Zheng, Kai Wang
Abstract: Recent research has shown that combining Mamba with Transformer architecture, which has selective state space and quadratic self-attention mechanism, outperforms using Mamba or Transformer architecture alone in language modeling tasks. The quadratic self-attention mechanism effectively alleviates the shortcomings of selective state space in handling long-term dependencies of any element in the sequence. We propose a position information injection method that connects the selective state space model with the quadratic attention, and integrates these two architectures with hybrid experts with cross-sharing domains, so that we can enjoy the advantages of both. We design a new architecture with a more biomimetic idea: Observer-Thinker-Conceiver-Expresser (OTCE), which can compete with well-known medium-scale open-source language models on a small scale in language modeling tasks.
Authors: Yushun Zhang, Congliang Chen, Ziniu Li, Tian Ding, Chenwei Wu, Yinyu Ye, Zhi-Quan Luo, Ruoyu Sun
Abstract: We propose Adam-mini, an optimizer that achieves on-par or better performance than AdamW with 45% to 50% less memory footprint. Adam-mini reduces memory by cutting down the number of learning rates in Adam: Instead of assigning an individual learning rate for each parameter using $1/\sqrt{v}$, Adam-mini uses the average of $v$ within a pre-defined parameter block as the learning rate for that block. Such a design is inspired by two empirical findings. First, the Hessian of Transformers exhibits a near-block diagonal structure with different sizes of dense sub-blocks. Second, for each of these dense sub-blocks, there exists a single high-quality learning rate that can outperform Adam, provided that sufficient resources are available to search it out. Adam-mini provides one cost-effective way to find these good learning rates and manage to cut down $\geq$ 90% $v$ in Adam. Empirically, we verify that Adam-mini performs on par or better than AdamW on various language models sized from 125M to 7B for pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and RLHF. The reduced memory footprint of Adam-mini also alleviates communication overheads among GPUs and CPUs, thereby increasing throughput. For instance, Adam-mini achieves 49.6% higher throughput than AdamW when pre-training Llama2-7B on 2x A800-80GB GPUs, which saves 33% wall-clock time for pre-training.
Authors: Ashwinee Panda, Berivan Isik, Xiangyu Qi, Sanmi Koyejo, Tsachy Weissman, Prateek Mittal
Abstract: Existing methods for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks are not suited to multi-task adaptation because they modify all the model weights -- causing destructive interference between tasks. The resulting effects, such as catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks, make it challenging to obtain good performance on multiple tasks at the same time. To mitigate this, we propose Lottery Ticket Adaptation (LoTA), a sparse adaptation method that identifies and optimizes only a sparse subnetwork of the model. We evaluate LoTA on a wide range of challenging tasks such as instruction following, reasoning, math, and summarization. LoTA obtains better performance than full fine-tuning and low-rank adaptation (LoRA), and maintains good performance even after training on other tasks -- thus, avoiding catastrophic forgetting. By extracting and fine-tuning over lottery tickets (or sparse task vectors), LoTA also enables model merging over highly dissimilar tasks. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/kiddyboots216/lottery-ticket-adaptation.
URLs: https://github.com/kiddyboots216/lottery-ticket-adaptation.