Authors: Matthew Barthet, Roberto Gallotta, Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Georgios N. Yannakakis
Abstract: Game environments offer a unique opportunity for training virtual agents due to their interactive nature, which provides diverse play traces and affect labels. Despite their potential, no reinforcement learning framework incorporates human affect models as part of their observation space or reward mechanism. To address this, we present the \emph{Affectively Framework}, a set of Open-AI Gym environments that integrate affect as part of the observation space. This paper introduces the framework and its three game environments and provides baseline experiments to validate its effectiveness and potential.
Authors: Shalini Sushri, Rahul Dass, Rhea Basappa, Hong Lu, Ashok Goel
Abstract: The Virtual Experimental Research Assistant (VERA) is an inquiry-based learning environment that empowers a learner to build conceptual models of complex ecological systems and experiment with agent-based simulations of the models. This study investigates the convergence of cognitive AI and generative AI for self-explanation in interactive AI agents such as VERA. From a cognitive AI viewpoint, we endow VERA with a functional model of its own design, knowledge, and reasoning represented in the Task--Method--Knowledge (TMK) language. From the perspective of generative AI, we use ChatGPT, LangChain, and Chain-of-Thought to answer user questions based on the VERA TMK model. Thus, we combine cognitive and generative AI to generate explanations about how VERA works and produces its answers. The preliminary evaluation of the generation of explanations in VERA on a bank of 66 questions derived from earlier work appears promising.
Authors: Hyunin Lee, David Abel, Ming Jin, Javad Lavaei, Somayeh Sojoudi
Abstract: Black swan events are statistically rare occurrences that carry extremely high risks. A typical view of defining black swan events is heavily assumed to originate from an unpredictable time-varying environments; however, the community lacks a comprehensive definition of black swan events. To this end, this paper challenges that the standard view is incomplete and claims that high-risk, statistically rare events can also occur in unchanging environments due to human misperception of their value and likelihood, which we call as spatial black swan event. We first carefully categorize black swan events, focusing on spatial black swan events, and mathematically formalize the definition of black swan events. We hope these definitions can pave the way for the development of algorithms to prevent such events by rationally correcting human perception
Authors: Anthony C. Constantinou, Neville K. Kitson, Alessio Zanga
Abstract: Since its introduction to the public, ChatGPT has had an unprecedented impact. While some experts praised AI advancements and highlighted their potential risks, others have been critical about the accuracy and usefulness of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we are interested in the ability of LLMs to identify causal relationships. We focus on the well-established GPT-4 (Turbo) and evaluate its performance under the most restrictive conditions, by isolating its ability to infer causal relationships based solely on the variable labels without being given any context, demonstrating the minimum level of effectiveness one can expect when it is provided with label-only information. We show that questionnaire participants judge the GPT-4 graphs as the most accurate in the evaluated categories, closely followed by knowledge graphs constructed by domain experts, with causal Machine Learning (ML) far behind. We use these results to highlight the important limitation of causal ML, which often produces causal graphs that violate common sense, affecting trust in them. However, we show that pairing GPT-4 with causal ML overcomes this limitation, resulting in graphical structures learnt from real data that align more closely with those identified by domain experts, compared to structures learnt by causal ML alone. Overall, our findings suggest that despite GPT-4 not being explicitly designed to reason causally, it can still be a valuable tool for causal representation, as it improves the causal discovery process of causal ML algorithms that are designed to do just that.
Authors: Xu Yang, Haotian Chen, Wenjun Feng, Haoxue Wang, Zeqi Ye, Xinjie Shen, Xiao Yang, Shizhao Sun, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) significantly influences many fields, largely thanks to the vast amounts of high-quality data for machine learning models. The emphasis is now on a data-centric AI strategy, prioritizing data development over model design progress. Automating this process is crucial. In this paper, we serve as the first work to introduce the automatic data-centric development (AD^2) task and outline its core challenges, which require domain-experts-like task scheduling and implementation capability, largely unexplored by previous work. By leveraging the strong complex problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), we propose an LLM-based autonomous agent, equipped with a strategy named Collaborative Knowledge-STudying-Enhanced Evolution by Retrieval (Co-STEER), to simultaneously address all the challenges. Specifically, our proposed Co-STEER agent enriches its domain knowledge through our proposed evolving strategy and develops both its scheduling and implementation skills by accumulating and retrieving domain-specific practical experience. With an improved schedule, the capability for implementation accelerates. Simultaneously, as implementation feedback becomes more thorough, the scheduling accuracy increases. These two capabilities evolve together through practical feedback, enabling a collaborative evolution process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our Co-STEER agent breaks new ground in AD^2 research, possesses strong evolvable schedule and implementation ability, and demonstrates the significant effectiveness of its components. Our Co-STEER paves the way for AD^2 advancements.
Authors: Walter Laurito (Ho Wan), Sharan Maiya (Ho Wan), Gr\'egoire Dhimo\"ila (Ho Wan), Owen (Ho Wan), Yeung, Kaarel H\"anni
Abstract: The deployment of language models brings challenges in generating reliable information, especially when these models are fine-tuned using human preferences. To extract encoded knowledge without (potentially) biased human labels, unsupervised probing techniques like Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS) have been developed (Burns et al., 2022). However, salient but unrelated features in a given dataset can mislead these probes (Farquhar et al., 2023). Addressing this, we propose a cluster normalization method to minimize the impact of such features by clustering and normalizing activations of contrast pairs before applying unsupervised probing techniques. While this approach does not address the issue of differentiating between knowledge in general and simulated knowledge - a major issue in the literature of latent knowledge elicitation (Christiano et al., 2021) - it significantly improves the ability of unsupervised probes to identify the intended knowledge amidst distractions.
Authors: Amit Sheth, Vishal Pallagani, Kaushik Roy
Abstract: Generative AI, especially via Large Language Models (LLMs), has transformed content creation across text, images, and music, showcasing capabilities in following instructions through prompting, largely facilitated by instruction tuning. Instruction tuning is a supervised fine-tuning method where LLMs are trained on datasets formatted with specific tasks and corresponding instructions. This method systematically enhances the model's ability to comprehend and execute the provided directives. Despite these advancements, LLMs still face challenges in consistently interpreting complex, multi-step instructions and generalizing them to novel tasks, which are essential for broader applicability in real-world scenarios. This article explores why neurosymbolic AI offers a better path to enhance the instructability of LLMs. We explore the use a symbolic task planner to decompose high-level instructions into structured tasks, a neural semantic parser to ground these tasks into executable actions, and a neuro-symbolic executor to implement these actions while dynamically maintaining an explicit representation of state. We also seek to show that neurosymbolic approach enhances the reliability and context-awareness of task execution, enabling LLMs to dynamically interpret and respond to a wider range of instructional contexts with greater precision and flexibility.
Authors: Ahmed R. Sadik (Honda Research Institute Europe, Offenbach am Main, Germany), Christian Goerick (Honda Research Institute Europe, Offenbach am Main, Germany)
Abstract: Multi-Robot System (MRS) is a complex system that contains many different software and hardware components. This main problem addressed in this article is the MRS design complexity. The proposed solution provides a modular modeling and simulation technique that is based on formal system engineering method, therefore the MRS design complexity is decomposed and reduced. Modeling the MRS has been achieved via two formal Architecture Description Languages (ADLs), which are Systems Modeling Language (SysML) and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), to design the system blueprints. By using those abstract design ADLs, the implementation of the project becomes technology agnostic. This allows to transfer the design concept from on programming language to another. During the simulation phase, a multi-agent environment is used to simulate the MRS blueprints. The simulation has been implemented in Java Agent Development (JADE) middleware. Therefore, its results can be used to analysis and verify the proposed MRS model in form of performance evaluation matrix.
Authors: Yves Lepage, Miguel Couceiro
Abstract: This work presents a formalization of analogy on numbers that relies on generalized means. It is motivated by recent advances in artificial intelligence and applications of machine learning, where the notion of analogy is used to infer results, create data and even as an assessment tool of object representations, or embeddings, that are basically collections of numbers (vectors, matrices, tensors). This extended analogy use asks for mathematical foundations and clear understanding of the notion of analogy between numbers. We propose a unifying view of analogies that relies on generalized means defined in terms of a power parameter. In particular, we show that any four increasing positive real numbers is an analogy in a unique suitable power. In addition, we show that any such analogy can be reduced to an equivalent arithmetic analogy and that any analogical equation has a solution for increasing numbers, which generalizes without restriction to complex numbers. These foundational results provide a better understanding of analogies in areas where representations are numerical.
Authors: Martina Mattioli, Antonio Emanuele Cin\`a, Marcello Pelillo
Abstract: Despite explainable AI (XAI) has recently become a hot topic and several different approaches have been developed, there is still a widespread belief that it lacks a convincing unifying foundation. On the other hand, over the past centuries, the very concept of explanation has been the subject of extensive philosophical analysis in an attempt to address the fundamental question of "why" in the context of scientific law. However, this discussion has rarely been connected with XAI. This paper tries to fill in this gap and aims to explore the concept of explanation in AI through an epistemological lens. By comparing the historical development of both the philosophy of science and AI, an intriguing picture emerges. Specifically, we show that a gradual progression has independently occurred in both domains from logical-deductive to statistical models of explanation, thereby experiencing in both cases a paradigm shift from deterministic to nondeterministic and probabilistic causality. Interestingly, we also notice that similar concepts have independently emerged in both realms such as, for example, the relation between explanation and understanding and the importance of pragmatic factors. Our study aims to be the first step towards understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the notion of explanation in AI, and we hope that our findings will shed some fresh light on the elusive nature of XAI.
Authors: Ying Li, Patrick Lambrix
Abstract: The quality of ontologies and their alignments is crucial for developing high-quality semantics-based applications. Traditional debugging techniques repair ontology networks by removing unwanted axioms and mappings, but may thereby remove consequences that are correct in the domain of the ontology network. In this paper we propose a framework for repairing ontology networks that deals with this issue. It defines basic operations such as debugging, weakening and completing. Further, it defines combination operators that reflect choices in how and when to use the basic operators, as well as choices regarding the autonomy level of the ontologies and alignments in the ontology network. We show the influence of the combination operators on the quality of the repaired network and present an implemented tool. By using our framework together with existing algorithms for debugging, weakening and completing, we essentially provide a blueprint for extending previous work and systems.
Authors: Yoonyoung Cho, Junhyek Han, Yoontae Cho, Beomjoon Kim
Abstract: Nonprehensile manipulation is essential for manipulating objects that are too thin, large, or otherwise ungraspable in the wild. To sidestep the difficulty of contact modeling in conventional modeling-based approaches, reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising alternative. However, previous RL approaches either lack the ability to generalize over diverse object shapes, or use simple action primitives that limit the diversity of robot motions. Furthermore, using RL over diverse object geometry is challenging due to the high cost of training a policy that takes in high-dimensional sensory inputs. We propose a novel contact-based object representation and pretraining pipeline to tackle this. To enable massively parallel training, we leverage a lightweight patch-based transformer architecture for our encoder that processes point clouds, thus scaling our training across thousands of environments. Compared to learning from scratch, or other shape representation baselines, our representation facilitates both time- and data-efficient learning. We validate the efficacy of our overall system by zero-shot transferring the trained policy to novel real-world objects. Code and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/contact-non-prehensile.
Authors: Seyed Nima Omidsajedi, Rekha Reddy, Jianming Yi, Jan Herbst, Christoph Lipps, Hans Dieter Schotten
Abstract: Almost in every heavily computation-dependent application, from 6G communication systems to autonomous driving platforms, a large portion of computing should be near to the client side. Edge computing (AI at Edge) in mobile devices is one of the optimized approaches for addressing this requirement. Therefore, in this work, the possibilities and challenges of implementing a low-latency and power-optimized smart mobile system are examined. Utilizing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based solutions at the edge will lead to bandwidth-optimized designs and as a consequence can boost the computational effectiveness at a system-level deadline. Moreover, various performance aspects and implementation feasibilities of Neural Networks (NNs) on both embedded FPGA edge devices (using Xilinx Multiprocessor System on Chip (MPSoC)) and Cloud are discussed throughout this research. The main goal of this work is to demonstrate a hybrid system that uses the deep learning programmable engine developed by Xilinx Inc. as the main component of the hardware accelerator. Then based on this design, an efficient system for mobile edge computing is represented by utilizing an embedded solution.
Authors: Junfeng Gong, Cheng Liu, Long Cheng, Huawei Li, Xiaowei Li
Abstract: Mixed-precision neural network (MPNN) that utilizes just enough data width for the neural network processing is an effective approach to meet the stringent resources constraints including memory and computing of MCUs. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of sub-byte and mixed-precision SIMD operations in MCU-class ISA and the limited computing capability of MCUs remains underutilized, which further aggravates the computing bound encountered in neural network processing. As a result, the benefits of MPNNs cannot be fully unleashed. In this work, we propose to pack multiple low-bitwidth arithmetic operations within a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions in typical MCUs, and then develop an efficient convolution operator by exploring both the data parallelism and computing parallelism in convolution along with the proposed SIMD packing. Finally, we further leverage Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to build a HW/SW co-designed MPNN design framework, namely MCU-MixQ. This framework can optimize both the MPNN quantization and MPNN implementation efficiency, striking an optimized balance between neural network performance and accuracy. According to our experiment results, MCU-MixQ achieves 2.1$\times$ and 1.4$\times$ speedup over CMix-NN and MCUNet respectively under the same resource constraints.
Authors: Chen-Chia Chang, Yikang Shan, Shaoze Fan, Jing Li, Shun Zhang, Ningyuan Cao, Yiran Chen, Xin Zhang
Abstract: In the realm of electronic and electrical engineering, automation of analog circuit is increasingly vital given the complexity and customized requirements of modern applications. However, existing methods only develop search-based algorithms that require many simulation iterations to design a custom circuit topology, which is usually a time-consuming process. To this end, we introduce LaMAGIC, a pioneering language model-based topology generation model that leverages supervised finetuning for automated analog circuit design. LaMAGIC can efficiently generate an optimized circuit design from the custom specification in a single pass. Our approach involves a meticulous development and analysis of various input and output formulations for circuit. These formulations can ensure canonical representations of circuits and align with the autoregressive nature of LMs to effectively addressing the challenges of representing analog circuits as graphs. The experimental results show that LaMAGIC achieves a success rate of up to 96\% under a strict tolerance of 0.01. We also examine the scalability and adaptability of LaMAGIC, specifically testing its performance on more complex circuits. Our findings reveal the enhanced effectiveness of our adjacency matrix-based circuit formulation with floating-point input, suggesting its suitability for handling intricate circuit designs. This research not only demonstrates the potential of language models in graph generation, but also builds a foundational framework for future explorations in automated analog circuit design.
Authors: Ning Wang, Bingkun Yao, Jie Zhou, Xi Wang, Zhe Jiang, Nan Guan
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant interest in the automatic generation of Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code, particularly Verilog, from natural language instructions. While commercial LLMs like ChatGPT have dominated this domain, open-source alternatives have lagged considerably in performance, limiting the flexibility and data privacy of this emerging technology. This study introduces a novel approach utilizing reinforcement learning with golden code feedback to enhance the performance of pre-trained models. Leveraging open-source data and base models, we have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with a substantial margin. Notably, our 6.7B parameter model \ours{} demonstrates superior performance compared to current best-in-class 13B and 16B models. Furthermore, through a comprehensive analysis of the limitations in direct fine-tuning and the training dynamics of reinforcement learning, we posit that the development of comprehensive supervisory signals, which are align with the inherent parallel semantics of Verilog code, is critical to effective generation. The code and data associated with this research are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/CatIIIIIIII/veriseek}. The model weights can be accessed at \url{https://huggingface.co/WANGNingroci/VeriSeek}.
URLs: https://github.com/CatIIIIIIII/veriseek, https://huggingface.co/WANGNingroci/VeriSeek
Authors: Asal Mehradfar, Xuzhe Zhao, Yue Niu, Sara Babakniya, Mahdi Alesheikh, Hamidreza Aghasi, Salman Avestimehr
Abstract: Analog and radio-frequency circuit design requires extensive exploration of both circuit topology and parameters to meet specific design criteria like power consumption and bandwidth. Designers must review state-of-the-art topology configurations in the literature and sweep various circuit parameters within each configuration. This design process is highly specialized and time-intensive, particularly as the number of circuit parameters increases and the circuit becomes more complex. Prior research has explored the potential of machine learning to enhance circuit design procedures. However, these studies primarily focus on simple circuits, overlooking the more practical and complex analog and radio-frequency systems. A major obstacle for bearing the power of machine learning in circuit design is the availability of a generic and diverse dataset, along with robust metrics, which are essential for thoroughly evaluating and improving machine learning algorithms in the analog and radio-frequency circuit domain. We present AICircuit, a comprehensive multi-level dataset and benchmark for developing and evaluating ML algorithms in analog and radio-frequency circuit design. AICircuit comprises seven commonly used basic circuits and two complex wireless transceiver systems composed of multiple circuit blocks, encompassing a wide array of design scenarios encountered in real-world applications. We extensively evaluate various ML algorithms on the dataset, revealing the potential of ML algorithms in learning the mapping from the design specifications to the desired circuit parameters.
Authors: Zhiwei Yang, Yuecen Wei, Haoran Li, Qian Li, Lei Jiang, Li Sun, Xiaoyan Yu, Chunming Hu, Hao Peng
Abstract: Social event detection refers to extracting relevant message clusters from social media data streams to represent specific events in the real world. Social event detection is important in numerous areas, such as opinion analysis, social safety, and decision-making. Most current methods are supervised and require access to large amounts of data. These methods need prior knowledge of the events and carry a high risk of leaking sensitive information in the messages, making them less applicable in open-world settings. Therefore, conducting unsupervised detection while fully utilizing the rich information in the messages and protecting data privacy remains a significant challenge. To this end, we propose a novel social event detection framework, ADP-SEMEvent, an unsupervised social event detection method that prioritizes privacy. Specifically, ADP-SEMEvent is divided into two stages, i.e., the construction stage of the private message graph and the clustering stage of the private message graph. In the first stage, an adaptive differential privacy approach is used to construct a private message graph. In this process, our method can adaptively apply differential privacy based on the events occurring each day in an open environment to maximize the use of the privacy budget. In the second stage, to address the reduction in data utility caused by noise, a novel 2-dimensional structural entropy minimization algorithm based on optimal subgraphs is used to detect events in the message graph. The highlight of this process is unsupervised and does not compromise differential privacy. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that ADP-SEMEvent can achieve detection performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining reasonable privacy budget parameters.
Authors: Andre Nakkab, Sai Qian Zhang, Ramesh Karri, Siddharth Garg
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective in computer hardware synthesis via hardware description language (HDL) generation. However, LLM-assisted approaches for HDL generation struggle when handling complex tasks. We introduce a suite of hierarchical prompting techniques which facilitate efficient stepwise design methods, and develop a generalizable automation pipeline for the process. To evaluate these techniques, we present a benchmark set of hardware designs which have solutions with or without architectural hierarchy. Using these benchmarks, we compare various open-source and proprietary LLMs, including our own fine-tuned Code Llama-Verilog model. Our hierarchical methods automatically produce successful designs for complex hardware modules that standard flat prompting methods cannot achieve, allowing smaller open-source LLMs to compete with large proprietary models. Hierarchical prompting reduces HDL generation time and yields savings on LLM costs. Our experiments detail which LLMs are capable of which applications, and how to apply hierarchical methods in various modes. We explore case studies of generating complex cores using automatic scripted hierarchical prompts, including the first-ever LLM-designed processor with no human feedback.
Authors: Ahmad M. Nazar, Mohamed Y. Selim, Ashraf Gaffar, Shakil Ahmed
Abstract: Integrating Generative AI (GenAI) into educational contexts presents a transformative potential for enhancing learning experiences. This paper introduces CourseGPT, a generative AI tool designed to support instructors and enhance the educational experiences of undergraduate students. Built on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) from Mistral AI, CourseGPT offers continuous instructor support and regular updates to course materials, enriching the learning environment. By utilizing course-specific content, such as slide decks and supplementary readings and references, CourseGPT provides precise, dynamically generated responses to student inquiries. Unlike generic AI models, CourseGPT allows instructors to manage and control the responses, thus extending the course scope without overwhelming details. The paper demonstrates the application of CourseGPT using the CPR E 431 - Basics of Information System Security course as a pilot. This course, with its large enrollments and diverse curriculum, serves as an ideal testbed for CourseGPT. The tool aims to enhance the learning experience, accelerate feedback processes, and streamline administrative tasks. The study evaluates CourseGPT's impact on student outcomes, focusing on correctness scores, context recall, and faithfulness of responses. Results indicate that the Mixtral-8x7b model, with a higher parameter count, outperforms smaller models, achieving an 88.0% correctness score and a 66.6% faithfulness score. Additionally, feedback from former students and teaching assistants on CourseGPT's accuracy, helpfulness, and overall performance was collected. The outcomes revealed that a significant majority found CourseGPT to be highly accurate and beneficial in addressing their queries, with many praising its ability to provide timely and relevant information.
Authors: Joe B Hakim, Jeffery L Painter, Darmendra Ramcharran, Vijay Kara, Greg Powell, Paulina Sobczak, Chiho Sato, Andrew Bate, Andrew Beam
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are useful tools with the capacity for performing specific types of knowledge work at an effective scale. However, LLM deployments in high-risk and safety-critical domains pose unique challenges, notably the issue of ``hallucination,'' where LLMs can generate fabricated information. This is particularly concerning in settings such as drug safety, where inaccuracies could lead to patient harm. To mitigate these risks, we have developed and demonstrated a proof of concept suite of guardrails specifically designed to mitigate certain types of hallucinations and errors for drug safety, and potentially applicable to other medical safety-critical contexts. These guardrails include mechanisms to detect anomalous documents to prevent the ingestion of inappropriate data, identify incorrect drug names or adverse event terms, and convey uncertainty in generated content. We integrated these guardrails with an LLM fine-tuned for a text-to-text task, which involves converting both structured and unstructured data within adverse event reports into natural language. This method was applied to translate individual case safety reports, demonstrating effective application in a pharmacovigilance processing task. Our guardrail framework offers a set of tools with broad applicability across various domains, ensuring LLMs can be safely used in high-risk situations by eliminating the occurrence of key errors, including the generation of incorrect pharmacovigilance-related terms, thus adhering to stringent regulatory and quality standards in medical safety-critical environments.
Authors: Mingzhe Gao, Jieru Zhao, Zhe Lin, Wenchao Ding, Xiaofeng Hou, Yu Feng, Chao Li, Minyi Guo
Abstract: Recently, the use of large language models (LLMs) for software code generation, e.g., C/C++ and Python, has proven a great success. However, LLMs still suffer from low syntactic and functional correctness when it comes to the generation of register-transfer level (RTL) code, such as Verilog. To address this issue, in this paper, we develop AutoVCoder, a systematic open-source framework that significantly improves the LLMs' correctness of generating Verilog code and enhances the quality of its output at the same time. Our framework integrates three novel techniques, including a high-quality hardware dataset generation approach, a two-round LLM fine-tuning method and a domain-specific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that AutoVCoder outperforms both industrial and academic LLMs in Verilog code generation. Specifically, AutoVCoder shows a 0.5% and 2.2% improvement in functional correctness on the EvalMachine and EvalHuman benchmarks compared with BetterV, and also achieves a 3.4% increase in syntax correctness and a 3.4% increase in functional correctness on the RTLLM benchmark compared with RTLCoder.
Authors: Abdul Jabbar, Syed Qaisar Jalil
Abstract: This study evaluates the performance of 41 machine learning models, including 21 classifiers and 20 regressors, in predicting Bitcoin prices for algorithmic trading. By examining these models under various market conditions, we highlight their accuracy, robustness, and adaptability to the volatile cryptocurrency market. Our comprehensive analysis reveals the strengths and limitations of each model, providing critical insights for developing effective trading strategies. We employ both machine learning metrics (e.g., Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Squared Error) and trading metrics (e.g., Profit and Loss percentage, Sharpe Ratio) to assess model performance. Our evaluation includes backtesting on historical data, forward testing on recent unseen data, and real-world trading scenarios, ensuring the robustness and practical applicability of our models. Key findings demonstrate that certain models, such as Random Forest and Stochastic Gradient Descent, outperform others in terms of profit and risk management. These insights offer valuable guidance for traders and researchers aiming to leverage machine learning for cryptocurrency trading.
Authors: Alessandro De Carlo, Enea Parimbelli, Nicola Melillo, Giovanna Nicora
Abstract: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is central to the debate on integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms into clinical practice. High-performing AI/ML models, such as ensemble learners and deep neural networks, often lack interpretability, hampering clinicians' trust in their predictions. To address this, XAI techniques are being developed to describe AI/ML predictions in human-understandable terms. One promising direction is the adaptation of sensitivity analysis (SA) and global sensitivity analysis (GSA), which inherently rank model inputs by their impact on predictions. Here, we introduce a novel delta-XAI method that provides local explanations of ML model predictions by extending the delta index, a GSA metric. The delta-XAI index assesses the impact of each feature's value on the predicted output for individual instances in both regression and classification problems. We formalize the delta-XAI index and provide code for its implementation. The delta-XAI method was evaluated on simulated scenarios using linear regression models, with Shapley values serving as a benchmark. Results showed that the delta-XAI index is generally consistent with Shapley values, with notable discrepancies in models with highly impactful or extreme feature values. The delta-XAI index demonstrated higher sensitivity in detecting dominant features and handling extreme feature values. Qualitatively, the delta-XAI provides intuitive explanations by leveraging probability density functions, making feature rankings clearer and more explainable for practitioners. Overall, the delta-XAI method appears promising for robustly obtaining local explanations of ML model predictions. Further investigations in real-world clinical settings will be conducted to evaluate its impact on AI-assisted clinical workflows.
Authors: Sai Puppala, Ismail Hossain, Md Jahangir Alam, Sajedul Talukder, Jannatul Ferdaus, Mahedi Hasan, Sameera Pisupati, Shanmukh Mathukumilli
Abstract: Federated learning has become a significant approach for training machine learning models using decentralized data without necessitating the sharing of this data. Recently, the incorporation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) methods has provided new possibilities for improving privacy, augmenting data, and customizing models. This research explores potential integrations of generative AI in federated learning, revealing various opportunities to enhance privacy, data efficiency, and model performance. It particularly emphasizes the importance of generative models like generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) in creating synthetic data that replicates the distribution of real data. Generating synthetic data helps federated learning address challenges related to limited data availability and supports robust model development. Additionally, we examine various applications of generative AI in federated learning that enable more personalized solutions.
Authors: Lukas R. A. Wilde
Abstract: The article presents some current observations (as of April 10, 2024) on the integration of AI-generated images within processes of media convergence. It draws on two different concepts of intermediality. Primary intermediality concepts are motivated by the object when a new type of technology develops the potential to become socially relevant as a media form and thus a socially, politically, or culturally important communicative factor. Due to their uncertain 'measurements' within the wider media ecology, however, the new, still potential media form appears hybrid. The "inter-" or "between-" of this initial intermediality moment thus refers to the questionable "site" and the questionable description of the potential media form between already existing technologies and cultural forms and their conceptual measurements. For secondary concepts of intermediality, in contrast, it can be assumed that the boundaries of media forms and their application have already been drawn and are reasonably undisputed. This then raises the question of intentional and staged references to AI imagery within other media forms and pictures. The article discusses indicators of both intermediality moments using current examples and controversies surrounding AI images. The thesis is that there can be no talk of a seamless 'integration' of AI images into the wider media landscape at the moment (within films, comic books, or video games, for example) - as one of countless other image production techniques - and that the medial 'site' of AI image circulation - at least where it is not a matter of deception, but rather their conscious use as AI images - especially in social media communication and in fan cultures, but with repercussions for the more general media ecology and image interpretation, insofar as the suspicion that an image could be AI-generated is now increasingly present as a "hermeneutics of suspicion".
Authors: Yujia Wang, Shiqiang Wang, Songtao Lu, Jinghui Chen
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a widely adopted training paradigm for privacy-preserving machine learning. While the SGD-based FL algorithms have demonstrated considerable success in the past, there is a growing trend towards adopting adaptive federated optimization methods, particularly for training large-scale models. However, the conventional synchronous aggregation design poses a significant challenge to the practical deployment of those adaptive federated optimization methods, particularly in the presence of straggler clients. To fill this research gap, this paper introduces federated adaptive asynchronous optimization, named FADAS, a novel method that incorporates asynchronous updates into adaptive federated optimization with provable guarantees. To further enhance the efficiency and resilience of our proposed method in scenarios with significant asynchronous delays, we also extend FADAS with a delay-adaptive learning adjustment strategy. We rigorously establish the convergence rate of the proposed algorithms and empirical results demonstrate the superior performance of FADAS over other asynchronous FL baselines.
Authors: Nazanin Jafari, James Allan
Abstract: Claim verification can be a challenging task. In this paper, we present a method to enhance the robustness and reasoning capabilities of automated claim verification through the extraction of short facts from evidence. Our novel approach, FactDetect, leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate concise factual statements from evidence and label these facts based on their semantic relevance to the claim and evidence. The generated facts are then combined with the claim and evidence. To train a lightweight supervised model, we incorporate a fact-detection task into the claim verification process as a multitasking approach to improve both performance and explainability. We also show that augmenting FactDetect in the claim verification prompt enhances performance in zero-shot claim verification using LLMs. Our method demonstrates competitive results in the supervised claim verification model by 15% on the F1 score when evaluated for challenging scientific claim verification datasets. We also demonstrate that FactDetect can be augmented with claim and evidence for zero-shot prompting (AugFactDetect) in LLMs for verdict prediction. We show that AugFactDetect outperforms the baseline with statistical significance on three challenging scientific claim verification datasets with an average of 17.3% performance gain compared to the best performing baselines.
Authors: Sai Puppala, Ismail Hossain, Md Jahangir Alam, Sajedul Talukder, Zahidur Talukder, Syed Bahauddin
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a transformative approach for enabling distributed machine learning while preserving user privacy, yet it faces challenges like communication inefficiencies and reliance on centralized infrastructures, leading to increased latency and costs. This paper presents a novel FL methodology that overcomes these limitations by eliminating the dependency on edge servers, employing a server-assisted Proximity Evaluation for dynamic cluster formation based on data similarity, performance indices, and geographical proximity. Our integrated approach enhances operational efficiency and scalability through a Hybrid Decentralized Aggregation Protocol, which merges local model training with peer-to-peer weight exchange and a centralized final aggregation managed by a dynamically elected driver node, significantly curtailing global communication overhead. Additionally, the methodology includes Decentralized Driver Selection, Check-pointing to reduce network traffic, and a Health Status Verification Mechanism for system robustness. Validated using the breast cancer dataset, our architecture not only demonstrates a nearly tenfold reduction in communication overhead but also shows remarkable improvements in reducing training latency and energy consumption while maintaining high learning performance, offering a scalable, efficient, and privacy-preserving solution for the future of federated learning ecosystems.
Authors: Daniel Szelogowski
Abstract: Music is a complex auditory stimulus capable of eliciting significant changes in brain activity, influencing cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and emotional regulation. However, the underlying mechanisms of music-induced cognitive processes remain largely unknown. Organoid intelligence and deep learning models show promise for simulating and analyzing these neural responses to classical music, an area significantly unexplored in computational neuroscience. Hence, we present the PyOrganoid library, an innovative tool that facilitates the simulation of organoid learning models, integrating sophisticated machine learning techniques with biologically inspired organoid simulations. Our study features the development of the Pianoid model, a "deep organoid learning" model that utilizes a Bidirectional LSTM network to predict EEG responses based on audio features from classical music recordings. This model demonstrates the feasibility of using computational methods to replicate complex neural processes, providing valuable insights into music perception and cognition. Likewise, our findings emphasize the utility of synthetic models in neuroscience research and highlight the PyOrganoid library's potential as a versatile tool for advancing studies in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Authors: Xiaohang Tang, Afonso Marques, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Ilija Bogunovic
Abstract: Decision Transformer (DT), as one of the representative Reinforcement Learning via Supervised Learning (RvS) methods, has achieved strong performance in offline learning tasks by leveraging the powerful Transformer architecture for sequential decision-making. However, in adversarial environments, these methods can be non-robust, since the return is dependent on the strategies of both the decision-maker and adversary. Training a probabilistic model conditioned on observed return to predict action can fail to generalize, as the trajectories that achieve a return in the dataset might have done so due to a weak and suboptimal behavior adversary. To address this, we propose a worst-case-aware RvS algorithm, the Adversarial Robust Decision Transformer (ARDT), which learns and conditions the policy on in-sample minimax returns-to-go. ARDT aligns the target return with the worst-case return learned through minimax expectile regression, thereby enhancing robustness against powerful test-time adversaries. In experiments conducted on sequential games with full data coverage, ARDT can generate a maximin (Nash Equilibrium) strategy, the solution with the largest adversarial robustness. In large-scale sequential games and continuous adversarial RL environments with partial data coverage, ARDT demonstrates significantly superior robustness to powerful test-time adversaries and attains higher worst-case returns compared to contemporary DT methods.
Authors: Vinay Samuel, Henry Peng Zou, Yue Zhou, Shreyas Chaudhari, Ashwin Kalyan, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ameet Deshpande, Karthik Narasimhan, Vishvak Murahari
Abstract: Persona agents, which are LLM agents that act according to an assigned persona, have demonstrated impressive contextual response capabilities across various applications. These persona agents offer significant enhancements across diverse sectors, such as education, healthcare, and entertainment, where model developers can align agent responses to different user requirements thereby broadening the scope of agent applications. However, evaluating persona agent performance is incredibly challenging due to the complexity of assessing persona adherence in free-form interactions across various environments that are relevant to each persona agent. We introduce PersonaGym, the first dynamic evaluation framework for assessing persona agents, and PersonaScore, the first automated human-aligned metric grounded in decision theory for comprehensive large-scale evaluation of persona agents. Our evaluation of 6 open and closed-source LLMs, using a benchmark encompassing 200 personas and 10,000 questions, reveals significant opportunities for advancement in persona agent capabilities across state-of-the-art models. For example, Claude 3.5 Sonnet only has a 2.97% relative improvement in PersonaScore than GPT 3.5 despite being a much more advanced model. Importantly, we find that increased model size and complexity do not necessarily imply enhanced persona agent capabilities thereby highlighting the pressing need for algorithmic and architectural invention towards faithful and performant persona agents.
Authors: Bhuvnesh Kumar, Saurav Nanda, Ganapathy Parthasarathy, Pawan Patil, Austin Tsai, Parivesh Choudhary
Abstract: This paper presents Hardware Description Language Generative Pre-trained Transformers (HDL-GPT), a novel approach that leverages the vast repository of open-source High Definition Language (HDL) codes to train superior quality large code models. The core premise of this paper is the hypothesis that high-quality HDL is all you need to create models with exceptional performance and broad zero-shot generalization abilities. The paper elucidates the methods employed for the curation and augmentation of large corpora from open-source HDL code, transforming highly variable quality data into high-quality data through careful prompting and context maintenance. We demonstrate that the careful selection, filtering, and augmentation of data across HDLs can yield powerful models that surpass current state-of-the-art models. We also explore the impact of different fine-tuning methods on the quality of results. We describe experimental results across a range of fine-tuned SOTA LLMs, substantiating our claims. We demonstrate improvements of 50% to 200% over SOTA HDL models on current benchmarks in tasks ranging from HDL circuit explanations, code generation, formal and simulation testbench creation, triaging bugs, and fixing them. HDL-GPT opens new avenues for the development of advanced model training techniques for circuit design tasks.
Authors: Gina Wong, Joshua Gleason, Rama Chellappa, Yoav Wald, Anqi Liu
Abstract: Learning models whose predictions are invariant under multiple environments is a promising approach for out-of-distribution generalization. Such models are trained to extract features $X_{\text{inv}}$ where the conditional distribution $Y \mid X_{\text{inv}}$ of the label given the extracted features does not change across environments. Invariant models are also supposed to generalize to shifts in the marginal distribution $p(X_{\text{inv}})$ of the extracted features $X_{\text{inv}}$, a type of shift we call an $\textit{invariant covariate shift}$. However, we show that proposed methods for learning invariant models underperform under invariant covariate shift, either failing to learn invariant models$\unicode{x2014}$even for data generated from simple and well-studied linear-Gaussian models$\unicode{x2014}$or having poor finite-sample performance. To alleviate these problems, we propose $\textit{weighted risk invariance}$ (WRI). Our framework is based on imposing invariance of the loss across environments subject to appropriate reweightings of the training examples. We show that WRI provably learns invariant models, i.e. discards spurious correlations, in linear-Gaussian settings. We propose a practical algorithm to implement WRI by learning the density $p(X_{\text{inv}})$ and the model parameters simultaneously, and we demonstrate empirically that WRI outperforms previous invariant learning methods under invariant covariate shift.
Authors: Benjamin Ulsmaag, Jia-Chun Lin, Ming-Chang Lee
Abstract: Robot vacuum cleaners have become increasingly popular and are widely used in various smart environments. To improve user convenience, manufacturers also introduced smartphone applications that enable users to customize cleaning settings or access information about their robot vacuum cleaners. While this integration enhances the interaction between users and their robot vacuum cleaners, it results in potential privacy concerns because users' personal information may be exposed. To address these concerns, end-to-end encryption is implemented between the application, cloud service, and robot vacuum cleaners to secure the exchanged information. Nevertheless, network header metadata remains unencrypted and it is still vulnerable to network eavesdropping. In this paper, we investigate the potential risk of private information exposure through such metadata. A popular robot vacuum cleaner was deployed in a real smart environment where passive network eavesdropping was conducted during several selected cleaning events. Our extensive analysis, based on Association Rule Learning, demonstrates that it is feasible to identify certain events using only the captured Internet traffic metadata, thereby potentially exposing private user information and raising privacy concerns.
Authors: Gihwan Kim, Jemin Lee, Sihyeong Park, Yongin Kwon, Hyungshin Kim
Abstract: The majority of quantization methods have been proposed to reduce the model size of Vision Transformers, yet most of them have overlooked the quantization of non-linear operations. Only a few works have addressed quantization for non-linear operations, but they applied a single quantization method across all non-linear operations. We believe that this can be further improved by employing a different quantization method for each non-linear operation. Therefore, to assign the most error-minimizing quantization method from the known methods to each non-linear layer, we propose a mixed non-linear quantization that considers layer-wise quantization sensitivity measured by SQNR difference metric. The results show that our method outperforms I-BERT, FQ-ViT, and I-ViT in both 8-bit and 6-bit settings for ViT, DeiT, and Swin models by an average of 0.6%p and 19.6%p, respectively. Our method outperforms I-BERT and I-ViT by 0.6%p and 20.8%p, respectively, when training time is limited. We plan to release our code at https://gitlab.com/ones-ai/mixed-non-linear-quantization.
URLs: https://gitlab.com/ones-ai/mixed-non-linear-quantization.
Authors: Amanda Riverol, Gustavo Betarte, Rodrigo Mart\'inez, \'Alvaro Pardo
Abstract: This article puts forward the use of mutual information values to replicate the expertise of security professionals in selecting features for detecting web attacks. The goal is to enhance the effectiveness of web application firewalls (WAFs). Web applications are frequently vulnerable to various security threats, making WAFs essential for their protection. WAFs analyze HTTP traffic using rule-based approaches to identify known attack patterns and to detect and block potential malicious requests. However, a major challenge is the occurrence of false positives, which can lead to blocking legitimate traffic and impact the normal functioning of the application. The problem is addressed as an approach that combines supervised learning for feature selection with a semi-supervised learning scenario for training a One-Class SVM model. The experimental findings show that the model trained with features selected by the proposed algorithm outperformed the expert-based selection approach in terms of performance. Additionally, the results obtained by the traditional rule-based WAF ModSecurity, configured with a vanilla set of OWASP CRS rules, were also improved.
Authors: Thang Viet Doan, Zhibo Chu, Zichong Wang, Wenbin Zhang
Abstract: Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite these advancements, LMs can inherit and amplify societal biases related to sensitive attributes such as gender and race, limiting their adoption in real-world applications. Therefore, fairness has been extensively explored in LMs, leading to the proposal of various fairness notions. However, the lack of clear agreement on which fairness definition to apply in specific contexts (\textit{e.g.,} medium-sized LMs versus large-sized LMs) and the complexity of understanding the distinctions between these definitions can create confusion and impede further progress. To this end, this paper proposes a systematic survey that clarifies the definitions of fairness as they apply to LMs. Specifically, we begin with a brief introduction to LMs and fairness in LMs, followed by a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of existing fairness notions in LMs and the introduction of a novel taxonomy that categorizes these concepts based on their foundational principles and operational distinctions. We further illustrate each definition through experiments, showcasing their practical implications and outcomes. Finally, we discuss current research challenges and open questions, aiming to foster innovative ideas and advance the field. The implementation and additional resources are publicly available at https://github.com/LavinWong/Fairness-in-Large-Language-Models/tree/main/definitions.
URLs: https://github.com/LavinWong/Fairness-in-Large-Language-Models/tree/main/definitions.
Authors: Lei Guo, Wei Chen, Yuxuan Sun, Bo Ai, Nikolaos Pappas, Tony Quek
Abstract: Diffusion models have been extensively utilized in AI-generated content (AIGC) in recent years, thanks to the superior generation capabilities. Combining with semantic communications, diffusion models are used for tasks such as denoising, data reconstruction, and content generation. However, existing diffusion-based generative models do not consider the stringent bandwidth limitation, which limits its application in wireless communication. This paper introduces a diffusion-driven semantic communication framework with advanced VAE-based compression for bandwidth-constrained generative model. Our designed architecture utilizes the diffusion model, where the signal transmission process through the wireless channel acts as the forward process in diffusion. To reduce bandwidth requirements, we incorporate a downsampling module and a paired upsampling module based on a variational auto-encoder with reparameterization at the receiver to ensure that the recovered features conform to the Gaussian distribution. Furthermore, we derive the loss function for our proposed system and evaluate its performance through comprehensive experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in pixel-level metrics such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and semantic metrics like learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS). These enhancements are more profound regarding the compression rates and SNR compared to deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC).
Authors: Laiyi Fu, Binbin Fan, Hongkai Du, Yanxiang Feng, Chunhua Li, Huping Song
Abstract: Ophthalmology consultations are crucial for diagnosing, treating, and preventing eye diseases. However, the growing demand for consultations exceeds the availability of ophthalmologists. By leveraging large pre-trained language models, we can design effective dialogues for specific scenarios, aiding in consultations. Traditional fine-tuning strategies for question-answering tasks are impractical due to increasing model size and often ignoring patient-doctor role function during consultations. In this paper, we propose EyeDoctor, an ophthalmic medical questioning large language model that enhances accuracy through doctor-patient role perception guided and an augmented knowledge base with external disease information. Experimental results show EyeDoctor achieves higher question-answering precision in ophthalmology consultations. Notably, EyeDoctor demonstrated a 7.25% improvement in Rouge-1 scores and a 10.16% improvement in F1 scores on multi-round datasets compared to second best model ChatGPT, highlighting the importance of doctor-patient role differentiation and dynamic knowledge base expansion for intelligent medical consultations. EyeDoc also serves as a free available web based service and souce code is available at https://github.com/sperfu/EyeDoc.
Authors: Yankai Zeng, Abhiramon Rajashekharan, Kinjal Basu, Huaduo Wang, Joaqu\'in Arias, Gopal Gupta
Abstract: The development of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, has enabled the construction of several socialbots, like ChatGPT, that are receiving a lot of attention for their ability to simulate a human conversation. However, the conversation is not guided by a goal and is hard to control. In addition, because LLMs rely more on pattern recognition than deductive reasoning, they can give confusing answers and have difficulty integrating multiple topics into a cohesive response. These limitations often lead the LLM to deviate from the main topic to keep the conversation interesting. We propose AutoCompanion, a socialbot that uses an LLM model to translate natural language into predicates (and vice versa) and employs commonsense reasoning based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) to hold a social conversation with a human. In particular, we rely on s(CASP), a goal-directed implementation of ASP as the backend. This paper presents the framework design and how an LLM is used to parse user messages and generate a response from the s(CASP) engine output. To validate our proposal, we describe (real) conversations in which the chatbot's goal is to keep the user entertained by talking about movies and books, and s(CASP) ensures (i) correctness of answers, (ii) coherence (and precision) during the conversation, which it dynamically regulates to achieve its specific purpose, and (iii) no deviation from the main topic.
Authors: Tao Yu, Peng Gao, Fei Wang, Ru-Yue Yuan
Abstract: Due to the increasing complexity of chip design, existing placement methods still have many shortcomings in dealing with macro cells coverage and optimization efficiency. Aiming at the problems of layout overlap, inferior performance, and low optimization efficiency in existing chip design methods, this paper proposes an end-to-end placement method, SRLPlacer, based on reinforcement learning. First, the placement problem is transformed into a Markov decision process by establishing the coupling relationship graph model between macro cells to learn the strategy for optimizing layouts. Secondly, the whole placement process is optimized after integrating the standard cell layout. By assessing on the public benchmark ISPD2005, the proposed SRLPlacer can effectively solve the overlap problem between macro cells while considering routing congestion and shortening the total wire length to ensure routability.
Authors: Yi Zhu, Surya Koppisetti, Trang Tran, Gaurav Bharaj
Abstract: Audio deepfake detection (ADD) is crucial to combat the misuse of speech synthesized from generative AI models. Existing ADD models suffer from generalization issues, with a large performance discrepancy between in-domain and out-of-domain data. Moreover, the black-box nature of existing models limits their use in real-world scenarios, where explanations are required for model decisions. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a new ADD model that explicitly uses the StyleLInguistics Mismatch (SLIM) in fake speech to separate them from real speech. SLIM first employs self-supervised pretraining on only real samples to learn the style-linguistics dependency in the real class. The learned features are then used in complement with standard pretrained acoustic features (e.g., Wav2vec) to learn a classifier on the real and fake classes. When the feature encoders are frozen, SLIM outperforms benchmark methods on out-of-domain datasets while achieving competitive results on in-domain data. The features learned by SLIM allow us to quantify the (mis)match between style and linguistic content in a sample, hence facilitating an explanation of the model decision.
Authors: Wenbo Yan, Ying Tan
Abstract: Recently, the incorporation of both temporal features and the correlation across time series has become an effective approach in time series prediction. Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) demonstrate good performance on many Temporal-correlation Forecasting Problem. However, when applied to tasks lacking periodicity, such as stock data prediction, the effectiveness and robustness of STGNNs are found to be unsatisfactory. And STGNNs are limited by memory savings so that cannot handle problems with a large number of nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called the Temporal-Correlation Graph Pre-trained Network (TCGPN) to address these limitations. TCGPN utilize Temporal-correlation fusion encoder to get a mixed representation and pre-training method with carefully designed temporal and correlation pre-training tasks. Entire structure is independent of the number and order of nodes, so better results can be obtained through various data enhancements. And memory consumption during training can be significantly reduced through multiple sampling. Experiments are conducted on real stock market data sets CSI300 and CSI500 that exhibit minimal periodicity. We fine-tune a simple MLP in downstream tasks and achieve state-of-the-art results, validating the capability to capture more robust temporal correlation patterns.
Authors: Asankhaya Sharma
Abstract: This paper introduces Patched MOA (Mixture of Agents), an inference optimization technique that significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across diverse software development tasks. We evaluate three inference optimization algorithms - Best of N, Mixture of Agents, and Monte Carlo Tree Search and demonstrate that Patched MOA can boost the performance of smaller models to surpass that of larger, more expensive models. Notably, our approach improves the gpt-4o-mini model's performance on the Arena-Hard-Auto benchmark by 15.52%, outperforming gpt-4-turbo at a fraction of the cost. We also apply Patched MOA to various software development workflows, showing consistent improvements in task completion rates. Our method is model-agnostic, transparent to end-users, and can be easily integrated into existing LLM pipelines. This work contributes to the growing field of LLM optimization, offering a cost-effective solution for enhancing model performance without the need for fine-tuning or larger models.
Authors: Amalia Foka
Abstract: This paper examines gender bias in AI-generated imagery of construction workers, highlighting discrepancies in the portrayal of male and female figures. Grounded in Griselda Pollock's theories on visual culture and gender, the analysis reveals that AI models tend to sexualize female figures while portraying male figures as more authoritative and competent. These findings underscore AI's potential to mirror and perpetuate societal biases, emphasizing the need for critical engagement with AI-generated content. The project contributes to discussions on the ethical implications of AI in creative practices and its broader impact on cultural perceptions of gender.
Authors: Yinghao Zhu, Junyi Gao, Zixiang Wang, Weibin Liao, Xiaochen Zheng, Lifang Liang, Yasha Wang, Chengwei Pan, Ewen M. Harrison, Liantao Ma
Abstract: The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in medicine is growing, but their ability to handle both structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) data and unstructured clinical notes is not well-studied. This study benchmarks various models, including GPT-based LLMs, BERT-based models, and traditional clinical predictive models, for non-generative medical tasks utilizing renowned datasets. We assessed 14 language models (9 GPT-based and 5 BERT-based) and 7 traditional predictive models using the MIMIC dataset (ICU patient records) and the TJH dataset (early COVID-19 EHR data), focusing on tasks such as mortality and readmission prediction, disease hierarchy reconstruction, and biomedical sentence matching, comparing both zero-shot and finetuned performance. Results indicated that LLMs exhibited robust zero-shot predictive capabilities on structured EHR data when using well-designed prompting strategies, frequently surpassing traditional models. However, for unstructured medical texts, LLMs did not outperform finetuned BERT models, which excelled in both supervised and unsupervised tasks. Consequently, while LLMs are effective for zero-shot learning on structured data, finetuned BERT models are more suitable for unstructured texts, underscoring the importance of selecting models based on specific task requirements and data characteristics to optimize the application of NLP technology in healthcare.
Authors: Hoang Giang Pham, Tien Mai
Abstract: In this paper, we study the assortment optimization problem under the mixed-logit customer choice model. While assortment optimization has been a major topic in revenue management for decades, the mixed-logit model is considered one of the most general and flexible approaches for modeling and predicting customer purchasing behavior. Existing exact methods have primarily relied on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) or second-order cone (CONIC) reformulations, which allow for exact problem solving using off-the-shelf solvers. However, these approaches often suffer from weak continuous relaxations and are slow when solving large instances. Our work addresses the problem by focusing on components of the objective function that can be proven to be monotonically super-modular and convex. This allows us to derive valid cuts to outer-approximate the nonlinear objective functions. We then demonstrate that these valid cuts can be incorporated into Cutting Plane or Branch-and-Cut methods to solve the problem exactly. Extensive experiments show that our approaches consistently outperform previous methods in terms of both solution quality and computation time.
Authors: Julian Neuberger, Lars Ackermann, Han van der Aa, Stefan Jablonski
Abstract: Over the past decade, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to the extraction of information from textual process descriptions. Despite the remarkable progress witnessed in natural language processing (NLP), information extraction within the Business Process Management domain remains predominantly reliant on rule-based systems and machine learning methodologies. Data scarcity has so far prevented the successful application of deep learning techniques. However, the rapid progress in generative large language models (LLMs) makes it possible to solve many NLP tasks with very high quality without the need for extensive data. Therefore, we systematically investigate the potential of LLMs for extracting information from textual process descriptions, targeting the detection of process elements such as activities and actors, and relations between them. Using a heuristic algorithm, we demonstrate the suitability of the extracted information for process model generation. Based on a novel prompting strategy, we show that LLMs are able to outperform state-of-the-art machine learning approaches with absolute performance improvements of up to 8\% $F_1$ score across three different datasets. We evaluate our prompting strategy on eight different LLMs, showing it is universally applicable, while also analyzing the impact of certain prompt parts on extraction quality. The number of example texts, the specificity of definitions, and the rigour of format instructions are identified as key for improving the accuracy of extracted information. Our code, prompts, and data are publicly available.
Authors: Neil Shah, Shirish Karande, Vineet Gandhi
Abstract: We propose a novel approach to significantly improve the intelligibility in the Non-Audible Murmur (NAM)-to-speech conversion task, leveraging self-supervision and sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning techniques. Unlike conventional methods that explicitly record ground-truth speech, our methodology relies on self-supervision and speech-to-speech synthesis to simulate ground-truth speech. Despite utilizing simulated speech, our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 29.08% improvement in the Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD) metric. Additionally, we present error rates and demonstrate our model's proficiency to synthesize speech in novel voices of interest. Moreover, we present a methodology for augmenting the existing CSTR NAM TIMIT Plus corpus, setting a benchmark with a Word Error Rate (WER) of 42.57% to gauge the intelligibility of the synthesized speech. Speech samples can be found at https://nam2speech.github.io/NAM2Speech/
Authors: Taewoong Kim, Cheolhong Min, Byeonghwi Kim, Jinyeon Kim, Wonje Jeung, Jonghyun Choi
Abstract: Simulated virtual environments have been widely used to learn robotic agents that perform daily household tasks. These environments encourage research progress by far, but often provide limited object interactability, visual appearance different from real-world environments, or relatively smaller environment sizes. This prevents the learned models in the virtual scenes from being readily deployable. To bridge the gap between these learning environments and deploying (i.e., real) environments, we propose the ReALFRED benchmark that employs real-world scenes, objects, and room layouts to learn agents to complete household tasks by understanding free-form language instructions and interacting with objects in large, multi-room and 3D-captured scenes. Specifically, we extend the ALFRED benchmark with updates for larger environmental spaces with smaller visual domain gaps. With ReALFRED, we analyze previously crafted methods for the ALFRED benchmark and observe that they consistently yield lower performance in all metrics, encouraging the community to develop methods in more realistic environments. Our code and data are publicly available.
Authors: Guipeng Xin, Duanfeng Chu, Liping Lu, Zejian Deng, Yuang Lu, Xigang Wu
Abstract: Trajectory prediction is crucial for autonomous driving as it aims to forecast the future movements of traffic participants. Traditional methods usually perform holistic inference on the trajectories of agents, neglecting the differences in prediction difficulty among agents. This paper proposes a novel Difficulty-Guided Feature Enhancement Network (DGFNet), which leverages the prediction difficulty differences among agents for multi-agent trajectory prediction. Firstly, we employ spatio-temporal feature encoding and interaction to capture rich spatio-temporal features. Secondly, a difficulty-guided decoder is used to control the flow of future trajectories into subsequent modules, obtaining reliable future trajectories. Then, feature interaction and fusion are performed through the future feature interaction module. Finally, the fused agent features are fed into the final predictor to generate the predicted trajectory distributions for multiple participants. Experimental results demonstrate that our DGFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse 1\&2 motion forecasting benchmarks. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each module. Moreover, compared with SOTA methods, our method balances trajectory prediction accuracy and real-time inference speed.
Authors: Amirhosein Toosi, Sara Harsini, Fran\c{c}ois B\'enard, Carlos Uribe, Arman Rahmim
Abstract: Prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) imaging provides a tremendously exciting frontier in visualization of prostate cancer (PCa) metastatic lesions. However, accurate segmentation of metastatic lesions is challenging due to low signal-to-noise ratios and variable sizes, shapes, and locations of the lesions. This study proposes a novel approach for automated segmentation of metastatic lesions in PSMA PET/CT 3D volumetric images using 2D denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). Instead of 2D trans-axial slices or 3D volumes, the proposed approach segments the lesions on generated multi-angle maximum intensity projections (MA-MIPs) of the PSMA PET images, then obtains the final 3D segmentation masks from 3D ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM) reconstruction of 2D MA-MIPs segmentations. Our proposed method achieved superior performance compared to state-of-the-art 3D segmentation approaches in terms of accuracy and robustness in detecting and segmenting small metastatic PCa lesions. The proposed method has significant potential as a tool for quantitative analysis of metastatic burden in PCa patients.
Authors: Saiping Guan, Jiyao Wei, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
Abstract: Sparse Knowledge Graphs (KGs), frequently encountered in real-world applications, contain fewer facts in the form of (head entity, relation, tail entity) compared to more populated KGs. The sparse KG completion task, which reasons answers for given queries in the form of (head entity, relation, ?) for sparse KGs, is particularly challenging due to the necessity of reasoning missing facts based on limited facts. Path-based models, known for excellent explainability, are often employed for this task. However, existing path-based models typically rely on external models to fill in missing facts and subsequently perform path reasoning. This approach introduces unexplainable factors or necessitates meticulous rule design. In light of this, this paper proposes an alternative approach by looking inward instead of seeking external assistance. We introduce a two-stage path reasoning model called LoGRe (Look Globally and Reason) over sparse KGs. LoGRe constructs a relation-path reasoning schema by globally analyzing the training data to alleviate the sparseness problem. Based on this schema, LoGRe then aggregates paths to reason out answers. Experimental results on five benchmark sparse KG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LoGRe model.
Authors: Chaoyi Ai, Yong Jiang, Shen Huang, Pengjun Xie, Kewei Tu
Abstract: Named entity recognition (NER) models often struggle with noisy inputs, such as those with spelling mistakes or errors generated by Optical Character Recognition processes, and learning a robust NER model is challenging. Existing robust NER models utilize both noisy text and its corresponding gold text for training, which is infeasible in many real-world applications in which gold text is not available. In this paper, we consider a more realistic setting in which only noisy text and its NER labels are available. We propose to retrieve relevant text of the noisy text from a knowledge corpus and use it to enhance the representation of the original noisy input. We design three retrieval methods: sparse retrieval based on lexicon similarity, dense retrieval based on semantic similarity, and self-retrieval based on task-specific text. After retrieving relevant text, we concatenate the retrieved text with the original noisy text and encode them with a transformer network, utilizing self-attention to enhance the contextual token representations of the noisy text using the retrieved text. We further employ a multi-view training framework that improves robust NER without retrieving text during inference. Experiments show that our retrieval-augmented model achieves significant improvements in various noisy NER settings.
Authors: Fangze Lin, Ying He, Fei Yu
Abstract: Personalized motion planning holds significant importance within urban automated driving, catering to the unique requirements of individual users. Nevertheless, prior endeavors have frequently encountered difficulties in simultaneously addressing two crucial aspects: personalized planning within intricate urban settings and enhancing planning performance through data utilization. The challenge arises from the expensive and limited nature of user data, coupled with the scene state space tending towards infinity. These factors contribute to overfitting and poor generalization problems during model training. Henceforth, we propose an instance-based transfer imitation learning approach. This method facilitates knowledge transfer from extensive expert domain data to the user domain, presenting a fundamental resolution to these issues. We initially train a pre-trained model using large-scale expert data. Subsequently, during the fine-tuning phase, we feed the batch data, which comprises expert and user data. Employing the inverse reinforcement learning technique, we extract the style feature distribution from user demonstrations, constructing the regularization term for the approximation of user style. In our experiments, we conducted extensive evaluations of the proposed method. Compared to the baseline methods, our approach mitigates the overfitting issue caused by sparse user data. Furthermore, we discovered that integrating the driving model with a differentiable nonlinear optimizer as a safety protection layer for end-to-end personalized fine-tuning results in superior planning performance.
Authors: Mahmoud Salhab, Haidar Harmanani
Abstract: Speech bandwidth expansion is crucial for expanding the frequency range of low-bandwidth speech signals, thereby improving audio quality, clarity and perceptibility in digital applications. Its applications span telephony, compression, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition. This paper presents a novel approach using a high-fidelity generative adversarial network, unlike cascaded systems, our system is trained end-to-end on paired narrowband and wideband speech signals. Our method integrates various bandwidth upsampling ratios into a single unified model specifically designed for speech bandwidth expansion applications. Our approach exhibits robust performance across various bandwidth expansion factors, including those not encountered during training, demonstrating zero-shot capability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to showcase this capability. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous end-to-end approaches, as well as interpolation and traditional techniques, showcasing its effectiveness in practical speech enhancement applications.
Authors: Koen Ponse, Felix Kleuker, M\'arton Fej\'er, \'Alvaro Serra-G\'omez, Aske Plaat, Thomas Moerland
Abstract: The transition to sustainable energy is a key challenge of our time, requiring modifications in the entire pipeline of energy production, storage, transmission, and consumption. At every stage, new sequential decision-making challenges emerge, ranging from the operation of wind farms to the management of electrical grids or the scheduling of electric vehicle charging stations. All such problems are well suited for reinforcement learning, the branch of machine learning that learns behavior from data. Therefore, numerous studies have explored the use of reinforcement learning for sustainable energy. This paper surveys this literature with the intention of bridging both the underlying research communities: energy and machine learning. After a brief introduction of both fields, we systematically list relevant sustainability challenges, how they can be modeled as a reinforcement learning problem, and what solution approaches currently exist in the literature. Afterwards, we zoom out and identify overarching reinforcement learning themes that appear throughout sustainability, such as multi-agent, offline, and safe reinforcement learning. Lastly, we also cover standardization of environments, which will be crucial for connecting both research fields, and highlight potential directions for future work. In summary, this survey provides an extensive overview of reinforcement learning methods for sustainable energy, which may play a vital role in the energy transition.
Authors: Claudius Gros
Abstract: Attention involves comparing query and key vectors in terms of a scalar product, $\mathbf{Q}^T\mathbf{K}$, together with a subsequent softmax normalization. Classicaly, parallel/orthogonal/antiparallel queries and keys lead to large/intermediate/small attention weights. Here we study expressive attention (EA), which is based on $(\mathbf{Q}^T\mathbf{K})^2$, the squared dot product. In this case attention is enhanced when query and key are either parallel or antiparallel, and suppressed for orthogonal configurations. For a series of autoregressive prediction tasks, we find that EA performs at least as well as the standard mechanism, dot-product attention (DPA). Increasing task complexity, EA is observed to outperform DPA with increasing margins, which also holds for multi-task settings. For a given model size, EA manages to achieve 100\% performance for a range of complexity levels not accessible to DPA.
Authors: Bo Wang, Shaocong Wang, Ning Lin, Yi Li, Yifei Yu, Yue Zhang, Jichang Yang, Xiaoshan Wu, Yangu He, Songqi Wang, Rui Chen, Guoqi Li, Xiaojuan Qi, Zhongrui Wang, Dashan Shang
Abstract: There is unprecedented development in machine learning, exemplified by recent large language models and world simulators, which are artificial neural networks running on digital computers. However, they still cannot parallel human brains in terms of energy efficiency and the streamlined adaptability to inputs of different difficulties, due to differences in signal representation, optimization, run-time reconfigurability, and hardware architecture. To address these fundamental challenges, we introduce pruning optimization for input-aware dynamic memristive spiking neural network (PRIME). Signal representation-wise, PRIME employs leaky integrate-and-fire neurons to emulate the brain's inherent spiking mechanism. Drawing inspiration from the brain's structural plasticity, PRIME optimizes the topology of a random memristive spiking neural network without expensive memristor conductance fine-tuning. For runtime reconfigurability, inspired by the brain's dynamic adjustment of computational depth, PRIME employs an input-aware dynamic early stop policy to minimize latency during inference, thereby boosting energy efficiency without compromising performance. Architecture-wise, PRIME leverages memristive in-memory computing, mirroring the brain and mitigating the von Neumann bottleneck. We validated our system using a 40 nm 256 Kb memristor-based in-memory computing macro on neuromorphic image classification and image inpainting. Our results demonstrate the classification accuracy and Inception Score are comparable to the software baseline, while achieving maximal 62.50-fold improvements in energy efficiency, and maximal 77.0% computational load savings. The system also exhibits robustness against stochastic synaptic noise of analogue memristors. Our software-hardware co-designed model paves the way to future brain-inspired neuromorphic computing with brain-like energy efficiency and adaptivity.
Authors: Xiang Shi, Jiawei Liu, Yinpeng Liu, Qikai Cheng, Wei Lu
Abstract: This paper tackles a key issue in the interpretation of scientific figures: the fine-grained alignment of text and figures. It advances beyond prior research that primarily dealt with straightforward, data-driven visualizations such as bar and pie charts and only offered a basic understanding of diagrams through captioning and classification. We introduce a novel task, Figure Integrity Verification, designed to evaluate the precision of technologies in aligning textual knowledge with visual elements in scientific figures. To support this, we develop a semi-automated method for constructing a large-scale dataset, Figure-seg, specifically designed for this task. Additionally, we propose an innovative framework, Every Part Matters (EPM), which leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to not only incrementally improve the alignment and verification of text-figure integrity but also enhance integrity through analogical reasoning. Our comprehensive experiments show that these innovations substantially improve upon existing methods, allowing for more precise and thorough analysis of complex scientific figures. This progress not only enhances our understanding of multimodal technologies but also stimulates further research and practical applications across fields requiring the accurate interpretation of complex visual data.
Authors: Mengjie Zhao, Cees Taal, Stephan Baggerohr, Olga Fink
Abstract: Real-time condition monitoring is crucial for the reliable and efficient operation of complex systems. However, relying solely on physical sensors can be limited due to their cost, placement constraints, or inability to directly measure certain critical parameters. Virtual sensing addresses these limitations by leveraging readily available sensor data and system knowledge to estimate inaccessible parameters or infer system states. The increasing complexity of industrial systems necessitates deployments of sensors with diverse modalities to provide a comprehensive understanding of system states. These sensors capture data at varying frequencies to monitor both rapid and slowly varying system dynamics, as well as local and global state evolutions of the systems. This leads to heterogeneous temporal dynamics, which, particularly under varying operational end environmental conditions, pose a significant challenge for accurate virtual sensing. To address this, we propose a Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network (HTGNN) framework. HTGNN explicitly models signals from diverse sensors and integrates operating conditions into the model architecture. We evaluate HTGNN using two newly released datasets: a bearing dataset with diverse load conditions for bearing load prediction and a year-long simulated dataset for predicting bridge live loads. Our results demonstrate that HTGNN significantly outperforms established baseline methods in both tasks, particularly under highly varying operating conditions. These results highlight HTGNN's potential as a robust and accurate virtual sensing approach for complex systems, paving the way for improved monitoring, predictive maintenance, and enhanced system performance.
Authors: Michael F\"arber, David Lamprecht, Yuni Susanti
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce AutoRDF2GML, a framework designed to convert RDF data into data representations tailored for graph machine learning tasks. AutoRDF2GML enables, for the first time, the creation of both content-based features -- i.e., features based on RDF datatype properties -- and topology-based features -- i.e., features based on RDF object properties. Characterized by automated feature extraction, AutoRDF2GML makes it possible even for users less familiar with RDF and SPARQL to generate data representations ready for graph machine learning tasks, such as link prediction, node classification, and graph classification. Furthermore, we present four new benchmark datasets for graph machine learning, created from large RDF knowledge graphs using our framework. These datasets serve as valuable resources for evaluating graph machine learning approaches, such as graph neural networks. Overall, our framework effectively bridges the gap between the Graph Machine Learning and Semantic Web communities, paving the way for RDF-based machine learning applications.
Authors: Alphaeus Dmonte, Tejas Arya, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Marcos Zampieri
Abstract: The prevalence of offensive content on the internet, encompassing hate speech and cyberbullying, is a pervasive issue worldwide. Consequently, it has garnered significant attention from the machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) communities. As a result, numerous systems have been developed to automatically identify potentially harmful content and mitigate its impact. These systems can follow two approaches; (1) Use publicly available models and application endpoints, including prompting large language models (LLMs) (2) Annotate datasets and train ML models on them. However, both approaches lack an understanding of how generalizable they are. Furthermore, the applicability of these systems is often questioned in off-domain and practical environments. This paper empirically evaluates the generalizability of offensive language detection models and datasets across a novel generalized benchmark. We answer three research questions on generalizability. Our findings will be useful in creating robust real-world offensive language detection systems.
Authors: Yuni Susanti, Michael F\"arber
Abstract: Causal discovery aims to estimate causal structures among variables based on observational data. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a fresh perspective to tackle the causal discovery problem by reasoning on the metadata associated with variables rather than their actual data values, an approach referred to as knowledge-based causal discovery. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of Small Language Models (SLMs, defined as LLMs with fewer than 1 billion parameters) with prompt-based learning for knowledge-based causal discovery. Specifically, we present KG Structure as Prompt, a novel approach for integrating structural information from a knowledge graph, such as common neighbor nodes and metapaths, into prompt-based learning to enhance the capabilities of SLMs. Experimental results on three types of biomedical and open-domain datasets under few-shot settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing most baselines and even conventional fine-tuning approaches trained on full datasets. Our findings further highlight the strong capabilities of SLMs: in combination with knowledge graphs and prompt-based learning, SLMs demonstrate the potential to surpass LLMs with larger number of parameters. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub.
Authors: Francesco Montagna, Philipp M. Faller, Patrick Bloebaum, Elke Kirschbaum, Francesco Locatello
Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data holds great promise, but existing methods rely on strong assumptions about the underlying causal structure, often requiring full observability of all relevant variables. We tackle these challenges by leveraging the score function $\nabla \log p(X)$ of observed variables for causal discovery and propose the following contributions. First, we generalize the existing results of identifiability with the score to additive noise models with minimal requirements on the causal mechanisms. Second, we establish conditions for inferring causal relations from the score even in the presence of hidden variables; this result is two-faced: we demonstrate the score's potential as an alternative to conditional independence tests to infer the equivalence class of causal graphs with hidden variables, and we provide the necessary conditions for identifying direct causes in latent variable models. Building on these insights, we propose a flexible algorithm for causal discovery across linear, nonlinear, and latent variable models, which we empirically validate.
Authors: Helge Spieker, Nassim Belmecheri, Arnaud Gotlieb, Nadjib Lazaar
Abstract: The prediction of human trajectories is important for planning in autonomous systems that act in the real world, e.g. automated driving or mobile robots. Human trajectory prediction is a noisy process, and no prediction does precisely match any future trajectory. It is therefore approached as a stochastic problem, where the goal is to minimise the error between the true and the predicted trajectory. In this work, we explore the application of metamorphic testing for human trajectory prediction. Metamorphic testing is designed to handle unclear or missing test oracles. It is well-designed for human trajectory prediction, where there is no clear criterion of correct or incorrect human behaviour. Metamorphic relations rely on transformations over source test cases and exploit invariants. A setting well-designed for human trajectory prediction where there are many symmetries of expected human behaviour under variations of the input, e.g. mirroring and rescaling of the input data. We discuss how metamorphic testing can be applied to stochastic human trajectory prediction and introduce the Wasserstein Violation Criterion to statistically assess whether a follow-up test case violates a label-preserving metamorphic relation.
Authors: Kevin Kliimask, Anastasija Nikiforova
Abstract: Efforts directed towards promoting Open Government Data (OGD) have gained significant traction across various governmental tiers since the mid-2000s. As more datasets are published on OGD portals, finding specific data becomes harder, leading to information overload. Complete and accurate documentation of datasets, including association of proper tags with datasets is key to improving dataset findability and accessibility. Analysis conducted on the Estonian Open Data Portal, revealed that 11% datasets have no associated tags, while 26% had only one tag assigned to them, which underscores challenges in data findability and accessibility within the portal, which, according to the recent Open Data Maturity Report, is considered trend-setter. The aim of this study is to propose an automated solution to tagging datasets to improve data findability on OGD portals. This paper presents Tagify - a prototype of tagging interface that employs large language models (LLM) such as GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 to automate dataset tagging, generating tags for datasets in English and Estonian, thereby augmenting metadata preparation by data publishers and improving data findability on OGD portals by data users. The developed solution was evaluated by users and their feedback was collected to define an agenda for future prototype improvements.
Authors: Zechen Zhang, Haim Sompolinsky
Abstract: The infinite width limit of random neural networks is known to result in Neural Networks as Gaussian Process (NNGP) (Lee et al. [2018]), characterized by task-independent kernels. It is widely accepted that larger network widths contribute to improved generalization (Park et al. [2019]). However, this work challenges this notion by investigating the narrow width limit of the Bayesian Parallel Branching Graph Neural Network (BPB-GNN), an architecture that resembles residual networks. We demonstrate that when the width of a BPB-GNN is significantly smaller compared to the number of training examples, each branch exhibits more robust learning due to a symmetry breaking of branches in kernel renormalization. Surprisingly, the performance of a BPB-GNN in the narrow width limit is generally superior or comparable to that achieved in the wide width limit in bias-limited scenarios. Furthermore, the readout norms of each branch in the narrow width limit are mostly independent of the architectural hyperparameters but generally reflective of the nature of the data. Our results characterize a newly defined narrow-width regime for parallel branching networks in general.
Authors: Florian Krach, Josef Teichmann
Abstract: The Path-dependent Neural Jump ODE (PD-NJ-ODE) is a model for online prediction of generic (possibly non-Markovian) stochastic processes with irregular (in time) and potentially incomplete (with respect to coordinates) observations. It is a model for which convergence to the $L^2$-optimal predictor, which is given by the conditional expectation, is established theoretically. Thereby, the training of the model is solely based on a dataset of realizations of the underlying stochastic process, without the need of knowledge of the law of the process. In the case where the underlying process is deterministic, the conditional expectation coincides with the process itself. Therefore, this framework can equivalently be used to learn the dynamics of ODE or PDE systems solely from realizations of the dynamical system with different initial conditions. We showcase the potential of our method by applying it to the chaotic system of a double pendulum. When training the standard PD-NJ-ODE method, we see that the prediction starts to diverge from the true path after about half of the evaluation time. In this work we enhance the model with two novel ideas, which independently of each other improve the performance of our modelling setup. The resulting dynamics match the true dynamics of the chaotic system very closely. The same enhancements can be used to provably enable the PD-NJ-ODE to learn long-term predictions for general stochastic datasets, where the standard model fails. This is verified in several experiments.
Authors: Raphael Avalos, Eugenio Bargiacchi, Ann Now\'e, Diederik M. Roijers, Frans A. Oliehoek
Abstract: In key real-world problems, full state information is sometimes available but only at a high cost, like activating precise yet energy-intensive sensors or consulting humans, thereby compelling the agent to operate under partial observability. For this scenario, we propose AEMS-SR (Anytime Error Minimization Search with State Requests), a principled online planning algorithm tailored for POMDPs with state requests. By representing the search space as a graph instead of a tree, AEMS-SR avoids the exponential growth of the search space originating from state requests. Theoretical analysis demonstrates AEMS-SR's $\varepsilon$-optimality, ensuring solution quality, while empirical evaluations illustrate its effectiveness compared with AEMS and POMCP, two SOTA online planning algorithms. AEMS-SR enables efficient planning in domains characterized by partial observability and costly state requests offering practical benefits across various applications.
Authors: Mutahar Safdar, Jiarui Xie, Andrei Mircea, Yaoyao Fiona Zhao
Abstract: Data-driven research in Additive Manufacturing (AM) has gained significant success in recent years. This has led to a plethora of scientific literature to emerge. The knowledge in these works consists of AM and Artificial Intelligence (AI) contexts that have not been mined and formalized in an integrated way. It requires substantial effort and time to extract scientific information from these works. AM domain experts have contributed over two dozen review papers to summarize these works. However, information specific to AM and AI contexts still requires manual effort to extract. The recent success of foundation models such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations for Transformers) or GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) on textual data has opened the possibility of expediting scientific information extraction. We propose a framework that enables collaboration between AM and AI experts to continuously extract scientific information from data-driven AM literature. A demonstration tool is implemented based on the proposed framework and a case study is conducted to extract information relevant to the datasets, modeling, sensing, and AM system categories. We show the ability of LLMs (Large Language Models) to expedite the extraction of relevant information from data-driven AM literature. In the future, the framework can be used to extract information from the broader design and manufacturing literature in the engineering discipline.
Authors: Chowdhury Mohammad Abid Rahman, Ghadendra Bhandari, Nasser M Nasrabadi, Aldo H. Romero, Prashnna K. Gyawali
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) models have emerged as powerful tools for accelerating materials discovery and design by enabling accurate predictions of properties from compositional and structural data. These capabilities are vital for developing advanced technologies across fields such as energy, electronics, and biomedicine, potentially reducing the time and resources needed for new material exploration and promoting rapid innovation cycles. Recent efforts have focused on employing advanced ML algorithms, including deep learning - based graph neural network, for property prediction. Additionally, ensemble models have proven to enhance the generalizability and robustness of ML and DL. However, the use of such ensemble strategies in deep graph networks for material property prediction remains underexplored. Our research provides an in-depth evaluation of ensemble strategies in deep learning - based graph neural network, specifically targeting material property prediction tasks. By testing the Crystal Graph Convolutional Neural Network (CGCNN) and its multitask version, MT-CGCNN, we demonstrated that ensemble techniques, especially prediction averaging, substantially improve precision beyond traditional metrics for key properties like formation energy per atom ($\Delta E^{f}$), band gap ($E_{g}$) and density ($\rho$) in 33,990 stable inorganic materials. These findings support the broader application of ensemble methods to enhance predictive accuracy in the field.
Authors: Yuze Zheng, Zixuan Li, Xiangxian Li, Jinxing Liu, Yuqing Wang, Xiangxu Meng, Lei Meng
Abstract: Image classification models often demonstrate unstable performance in real-world applications due to variations in image information, driven by differing visual perspectives of subject objects and lighting discrepancies. To mitigate these challenges, existing studies commonly incorporate additional modal information matching the visual data to regularize the model's learning process, enabling the extraction of high-quality visual features from complex image regions. Specifically, in the realm of multimodal learning, cross-modal alignment is recognized as an effective strategy, harmonizing different modal information by learning a domain-consistent latent feature space for visual and semantic features. However, this approach may face limitations due to the heterogeneity between multimodal information, such as differences in feature distribution and structure. To address this issue, we introduce a Multimodal Alignment and Reconstruction Network (MARNet), designed to enhance the model's resistance to visual noise. Importantly, MARNet includes a cross-modal diffusion reconstruction module for smoothly and stably blending information across different domains. Experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets, Vireo-Food172 and Ingredient-101, demonstrate that MARNet effectively improves the quality of image information extracted by the model. It is a plug-and-play framework that can be rapidly integrated into various image classification frameworks, boosting model performance.
Authors: Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Jon E. Froehlich
Abstract: We present two studies exploring how blind or low-vision (BLV) family members engage with their sighted children's artwork, strategies to support understanding and interpretation, and the potential role of technology, such as AI, therein. Our first study involved 14 BLV individuals, and the second included five groups of BLV individuals with their children. Through semi-structured interviews with AI descriptions of children's artwork and multi-sensory design probes, we found that BLV family members value artwork engagement as a bonding opportunity, preferring the child's storytelling and interpretation over other nonvisual representations. Additionally, despite some inaccuracies, BLV family members felt that AI-generated descriptions could facilitate dialogue with their children and aid self-guided art discovery. We close with specific design considerations for supporting artwork engagement in mixed visual-ability families, including enabling artwork access through various methods, supporting children's corrections of AI output, and distinctions in context vs. content and interpretation vs. description of children's artwork.
Authors: Liang Zhang, Mohammed Yeasin, Jionghao Lin, Felix Havugimana, Xiangen Hu
Abstract: Learning performance data, such as correct or incorrect responses to questions in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is crucial for tracking and assessing the learners' progress and mastery of knowledge. However, the issue of data sparsity, characterized by unexplored questions and missing attempts, hampers accurate assessment and the provision of tailored, personalized instruction within ITSs. This paper proposes using the Generative Adversarial Imputation Networks (GAIN) framework to impute sparse learning performance data, reconstructed into a three-dimensional (3D) tensor representation across the dimensions of learners, questions and attempts. Our customized GAIN-based method computational process imputes sparse data in a 3D tensor space, significantly enhanced by convolutional neural networks for its input and output layers. This adaptation also includes the use of a least squares loss function for optimization and aligns the shapes of the input and output with the dimensions of the questions-attempts matrices along the learners' dimension. Through extensive experiments on six datasets from various ITSs, including AutoTutor, ASSISTments and MATHia, we demonstrate that the GAIN approach generally outperforms existing methods such as tensor factorization and other generative adversarial network (GAN) based approaches in terms of imputation accuracy. This finding enhances comprehensive learning data modeling and analytics in AI-based education.
Authors: Seunghyeop Nam, Tuan Anh Nguyen, Eunmi Choi, Dugki Min
Abstract: This paper introduces SHANGUS, an advanced framework combining Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with heuristic optimization to improve frontier-based exploration efficiency in unknown environments, particularly for intelligent vehicles in autonomous air services, search and rescue operations, and space exploration robotics. SHANGUS harnesses DRL's adaptability and heuristic prioritization, markedly enhancing exploration efficiency, reducing completion time, and minimizing travel distance. The strategy involves a frontier selection node to identify unexplored areas and a DRL navigation node using the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm for robust path planning and dynamic obstacle avoidance. Extensive experiments in ROS2 and Gazebo simulation environments show SHANGUS surpasses representative traditional methods like the Nearest Frontier (NF), Novel Frontier-Based Exploration Algorithm (CFE), and Goal-Driven Autonomous Exploration (GDAE) algorithms, especially in complex scenarios, excelling in completion time, travel distance, and exploration rate. This scalable solution is suitable for real-time autonomous navigation in fields such as industrial automation, autonomous driving, household robotics, and space exploration. Future research will integrate additional sensory inputs and refine heuristic functions to further boost SHANGUS's efficiency and robustness.
Authors: Mengyao Lyu, Tianxiang Hao, Xinhao Xu, Hui Chen, Zijia Lin, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding
Abstract: Domain Adaptation (DA) facilitates knowledge transfer from a source domain to a related target domain. This paper investigates a practical DA paradigm, namely Source data-Free Active Domain Adaptation (SFADA), where source data becomes inaccessible during adaptation, and a minimum amount of annotation budget is available in the target domain. Without referencing the source data, new challenges emerge in identifying the most informative target samples for labeling, establishing cross-domain alignment during adaptation, and ensuring continuous performance improvements through the iterative query-and-adaptation process. In response, we present learn from the learnt (LFTL), a novel paradigm for SFADA to leverage the learnt knowledge from the source pretrained model and actively iterated models without extra overhead. We propose Contrastive Active Sampling to learn from the hypotheses of the preceding model, thereby querying target samples that are both informative to the current model and persistently challenging throughout active learning. During adaptation, we learn from features of actively selected anchors obtained from previous intermediate models, so that the Visual Persistence-guided Adaptation can facilitate feature distribution alignment and active sample exploitation. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmarks show that our LFTL achieves state-of-the-art performance, superior computational efficiency and continuous improvements as the annotation budget increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/lyumengyao/lftl.
Authors: Harsh Trivedi, Tushar Khot, Mareike Hartmann, Ruskin Manku, Vinty Dong, Edward Li, Shashank Gupta, Ashish Sabharwal, Niranjan Balasubramanian
Abstract: Autonomous agents that address day-to-day digital tasks (e.g., ordering groceries for a household), must not only operate multiple apps (e.g., notes, messaging, shopping app) via APIs, but also generate rich code with complex control flow in an iterative manner based on their interaction with the environment. However, existing benchmarks for tool use are inadequate, as they only cover tasks that require a simple sequence of API calls. To remedy this gap, we built $\textbf{AppWorld Engine}$, a high-quality execution environment (60K lines of code) of 9 day-to-day apps operable via 457 APIs and populated with realistic digital activities simulating the lives of ~100 fictitious users. We then created $\textbf{AppWorld Benchmark}$ (40K lines of code), a suite of 750 natural, diverse, and challenging autonomous agent tasks requiring rich and interactive code generation. It supports robust programmatic evaluation with state-based unit tests, allowing for different ways of completing a task while also checking for unexpected changes, i.e., collateral damage. The state-of-the-art LLM, GPT-4o, solves only ~49% of our 'normal' tasks and ~30% of 'challenge' tasks, while other models solve at least 16% fewer. This highlights the benchmark's difficulty and AppWorld's potential to push the frontiers of interactive coding agents. The project website is available at https://appworld.dev/.
URLs: https://appworld.dev/.
Authors: Jun Wang, Ying Yuan, Haichuan Che, Haozhi Qi, Yi Ma, Jitendra Malik, Xiaolong Wang
Abstract: In-hand manipulation of pen-like objects is an important skill in our daily lives, as many tools such as hammers and screwdrivers are similarly shaped. However, current learning-based methods struggle with this task due to a lack of high-quality demonstrations and the significant gap between simulation and the real world. In this work, we push the boundaries of learning-based in-hand manipulation systems by demonstrating the capability to spin pen-like objects. We first use reinforcement learning to train an oracle policy with privileged information and generate a high-fidelity trajectory dataset in simulation. This serves two purposes: 1) pre-training a sensorimotor policy in simulation; 2) conducting open-loop trajectory replay in the real world. We then fine-tune the sensorimotor policy using these real-world trajectories to adapt it to the real world dynamics. With less than 50 trajectories, our policy learns to rotate more than ten pen-like objects with different physical properties for multiple revolutions. We present a comprehensive analysis of our design choices and share the lessons learned during development.
Authors: Sparsh Gupta, Debanjan Konar, Vaneet Aggarwal
Abstract: Non-local operations play a crucial role in computer vision enabling the capture of long-range dependencies through weighted sums of features across the input, surpassing the constraints of traditional convolution operations that focus solely on local neighborhoods. Non-local operations typically require computing pairwise relationships between all elements in a set, leading to quadratic complexity in terms of time and memory. Due to the high computational and memory demands, scaling non-local neural networks to large-scale problems can be challenging. This article introduces a hybrid quantum-classical scalable non-local neural network, referred to as Quantum Non-Local Neural Network (QNL-Net), to enhance pattern recognition. The proposed QNL-Net relies on inherent quantum parallelism to allow the simultaneous processing of a large number of input features enabling more efficient computations in quantum-enhanced feature space and involving pairwise relationships through quantum entanglement. We benchmark our proposed QNL-Net with other quantum counterparts to binary classification with datasets MNIST and CIFAR-10. The simulation findings showcase our QNL-Net achieves cutting-edge accuracy levels in binary image classification among quantum classifiers while utilizing fewer qubits.
Authors: Shu Ishida, Jo\~ao F. Henriques
Abstract: This work compares ways of extending Reinforcement Learning algorithms to Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with options. One view of options is as temporally extended action, which can be realized as a memory that allows the agent to retain historical information beyond the policy's context window. While option assignment could be handled using heuristics and hand-crafted objectives, learning temporally consistent options and associated sub-policies without explicit supervision is a challenge. Two algorithms, PPOEM and SOAP, are proposed and studied in depth to address this problem. PPOEM applies the forward-backward algorithm (for Hidden Markov Models) to optimize the expected returns for an option-augmented policy. However, this learning approach is unstable during on-policy rollouts. It is also unsuited for learning causal policies without the knowledge of future trajectories, since option assignments are optimized for offline sequences where the entire episode is available. As an alternative approach, SOAP evaluates the policy gradient for an optimal option assignment. It extends the concept of the generalized advantage estimation (GAE) to propagate option advantages through time, which is an analytical equivalent to performing temporal back-propagation of option policy gradients. This option policy is only conditional on the history of the agent, not future actions. Evaluated against competing baselines, SOAP exhibited the most robust performance, correctly discovering options for POMDP corridor environments, as well as on standard benchmarks including Atari and MuJoCo, outperforming PPOEM, as well as LSTM and Option-Critic baselines. The open-sourced code is available at https://github.com/shuishida/SoapRL.
Authors: Shakshi Sharma, Anwitaman Datta, Rajesh Sharma
Abstract: Misinformation has emerged as a major societal threat in recent years in general; specifically in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has wrecked havoc, for instance, by fuelling vaccine hesitancy. Cost-effective, scalable solutions for combating misinformation are the need of the hour. This work explored how existing information obtained from social media and augmented with more curated fact checked data repositories can be harnessed to facilitate automated rebuttal of misinformation at scale. While the ideas herein can be generalized and reapplied in the broader context of misinformation mitigation using a multitude of information sources and catering to the spectrum of social media platforms, this work serves as a proof of concept, and as such, it is confined in its scope to only rebuttal of tweets, and in the specific context of misinformation regarding COVID-19. It leverages two publicly available datasets, viz. FaCov (fact-checked articles) and misleading (social media Twitter) data on COVID-19 Vaccination.
Authors: Weizheng Lu, Jing Zhang, Ju Fan, Zihao Fu, Yueguo Chen, Xiaoyong Du
Abstract: Tables, typically two-dimensional and structured to store large amounts of data, are essential in daily activities like database queries, spreadsheet manipulations, web table question answering, and image table information extraction. Automating these table-centric tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs) or Visual Language Models (VLMs) offers significant public benefits, garnering interest from academia and industry. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of table-related tasks, examining both user scenarios and technical aspects. It covers traditional tasks like table question answering as well as emerging fields such as spreadsheet manipulation and table data analysis. We summarize the training techniques for LLMs and VLMs tailored for table processing. Additionally, we discuss prompt engineering, particularly the use of LLM-powered agents, for various table-related tasks. Finally, we highlight several challenges, including processing implicit user intentions and extracting information from various table sources.
Authors: Akbir Khan, John Hughes, Dan Valentine, Laura Ruis, Kshitij Sachan, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Edward Grefenstette, Samuel R. Bowman, Tim Rockt\"aschel, Ethan Perez
Abstract: Common methods for aligning large language models (LLMs) with desired behaviour heavily rely on human-labelled data. However, as models grow increasingly sophisticated, they will surpass human expertise, and the role of human evaluation will evolve into non-experts overseeing experts. In anticipation of this, we ask: can weaker models assess the correctness of stronger models? We investigate this question in an analogous setting, where stronger models (experts) possess the necessary information to answer questions and weaker models (non-experts) lack this information. The method we evaluate is debate, where two LLM experts each argue for a different answer, and a non-expert selects the answer. We find that debate consistently helps both non-expert models and humans answer questions, achieving 76% and 88% accuracy respectively (naive baselines obtain 48% and 60%). Furthermore, optimising expert debaters for persuasiveness in an unsupervised manner improves non-expert ability to identify the truth in debates. Our results provide encouraging empirical evidence for the viability of aligning models with debate in the absence of ground truth.
Authors: Sven Cattell, Avijit Ghosh, Lucie-Aim\'ee Kaffee
Abstract: Harm reporting in Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently lacks a structured process for disclosing and addressing algorithmic flaws, relying largely on an ad-hoc approach. This contrasts sharply with the well-established Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) ecosystem in software security. While global efforts to establish frameworks for AI transparency and collaboration are underway, the unique challenges presented by machine learning (ML) models demand a specialized approach. To address this gap, we propose implementing a Coordinated Flaw Disclosure (CFD) framework tailored to the complexities of ML and AI issues. This paper reviews the evolution of ML disclosure practices, from ad hoc reporting to emerging participatory auditing methods, and compares them with cybersecurity norms. Our framework introduces innovations such as extended model cards, dynamic scope expansion, an independent adjudication panel, and an automated verification process. We also outline a forthcoming real-world pilot of CFD. We argue that CFD could significantly enhance public trust in AI systems. By balancing organizational and community interests, CFD aims to improve AI accountability in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Authors: Xiaowei Yuan, Zhao Yang, Yequan Wang, Shengping Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
Abstract: Large language models internalize enormous parametric knowledge during pre-training. Concurrently, realistic applications necessitate external contextual knowledge to aid models on the underlying tasks. This raises a crucial dilemma known as knowledge conflicts, where the contextual knowledge clashes with the However, existing decoding works are specialized in resolving knowledge conflicts and could inadvertently deteriorate performance in absence of conflicts. In this paper, we propose an adaptive decoding method, termed as contextual information-entropy constraint decoding (COIECD), to discern whether the knowledge conflicts occur and resolve them. It can improve the model's faithfulness to conflicting context, and simultaneously maintain high performance among non- Our experiments show that COIECD exhibits strong performance and robustness over knowledge conflicts in realistic datasets. Code is available.
Authors: Hankz Hankui Zhuo, Xin Chen, Rong Pan
Abstract: Plan synthesis aims to generate a course of actions or policies to transit given initial states to goal states, provided domain models that could be designed by experts or learnt from training data or interactions with the world. Intrigued by the claims of emergent planning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), works have been proposed to investigate the planning effectiveness of LLMs, without considering any utilization of off-the-shelf planning techniques in LLMs. In this paper, we aim to further study the insight of the planning capability of LLMs by investigating the roles of LLMs in off-the-shelf planning frameworks. To do this, we investigate the effectiveness of embedding LLMs into one of the well-known planning frameworks, graph-based planning, proposing a novel LLMs-based planning framework with LLMs embedded in two levels of planning graphs, i.e., mutual constraints generation level and constraints solving level. We empirically exhibit the effectiveness of our proposed framework in various planning domains.
Authors: TJ Dunham, Henry Syahputra
Abstract: The paper presents the performance results of Reactor Mk.1, ARCs flagship large language model, through a benchmarking process analysis. The model utilizes the Lychee AI engine and possesses less than 100 billion parameters, resulting in a combination of efficiency and potency. The Reactor Mk.1 outperformed models such as GPT-4o, Claude Opus, and Llama 3, with achieved scores of 92% on the MMLU dataset, 91% on HumanEval dataset, and 88% on BBH dataset. It excels in both managing difficult jobs and reasoning, establishing as a prominent AI solution in the present cutting-edge AI technology.
Authors: Andr\'e Platzer
Abstract: This perspective piece calls for the study of the new field of Intersymbolic AI, by which we mean the combination of symbolic AI, whose building blocks have inherent significance/meaning, with subsymbolic AI, whose entirety creates significance/effect despite the fact that individual building blocks escape meaning. Canonical kinds of symbolic AI are logic, games and planning. Canonical kinds of subsymbolic AI are (un)supervised machine and reinforcement learning. Intersymbolic AI interlinks the worlds of symbolic AI with its compositional symbolic significance and meaning and of subsymbolic AI with its summative significance or effect to enable culminations of insights from both worlds by going between and across symbolic AI insights with subsymbolic AI techniques that are being helped by symbolic AI principles. For example, Intersymbolic AI may start with symbolic AI to understand a dynamic system, continue with subsymbolic AI to learn its control, and end with symbolic AI to safely use the outcome of the learned subsymbolic AI controller in the dynamic system. The way Intersymbolic AI combines both symbolic and subsymbolic AI to increase the effectiveness of AI compared to either kind of AI alone is likened to the way that the combination of both conscious and subconscious thought increases the effectiveness of human thought compared to either kind of thought alone. Some successful contributions to the Intersymbolic AI paradigm are surveyed here but many more are considered possible by advancing Intersymbolic AI.
Authors: Pooyan Rahmanzadehgervi, Logan Bolton, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Anh Totti Nguyen
Abstract: While large language models with vision capabilities (VLMs), e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, are powering various image-text applications and scoring high on many vision-understanding benchmarks, we find that they are surprisingly still struggling with low-level vision tasks that are easy to humans. Specifically, on BlindTest, our suite of 7 very simple tasks such as identifying (a) whether two circles overlap; (b) whether two lines intersect; (c) which letter is being circled in a word; and (d) counting circles in an Olympic-like logo, four state-of-the-art VLMs are only 58.57% accurate on average. Claude 3.5 Sonnet performs the best at 74.94% accuracy, but this is still far from the human expected accuracy of 100%. Across different image resolutions and line widths, VLMs consistently struggle with tasks that require precise spatial information and recognizing geometric primitives that overlap or are close together. Code and data are available at: https://vlmsareblind.github.io
Authors: Yongchao Huang
Abstract: A new variational inference method, SPH-ParVI, based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant) or sampling using gradients. SPH-ParVI simulates the flow of a fluid under external effects driven by the target density; transient or steady state of the fluid approximates the target density. The continuum fluid is modelled as an interacting particle system (IPS) via SPH, where each particle carries smoothed properties, interacts and evolves as per the Navier-Stokes equations. This mesh-free, Lagrangian simulation method offers fast, flexible, scalable and deterministic sampling and inference for a class of probabilistic models such as those encountered in Bayesian inference and generative modelling.
Authors: Jiexing Gao, Dmitry Rodin, Vasily Motolygin, Denis Zaytsev
Abstract: Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) is a popular approach, which aims to represent entities and relations of a knowledge graph in latent spaces. Their representations are known as embeddings. To measure the plausibility of triplets, score functions are defined over embedding spaces. Despite wide dissemination of KGE in various tasks, KGE methods have limitations in reasoning abilities. In this paper we propose a mathematical framework to compare reasoning abilities of KGE methods. We show that STransE has a higher capability than TransComplEx, and then present new STransCoRe method, which improves the STransE by combining it with the TransCoRe insights, which can reduce the STransE space complexity.
Authors: Gaoyang Pang, Kang Huang, Daniel E. Quevedo, Branka Vucetic, Yonghui Li, Wanchun Liu
Abstract: We consider a joint uplink and downlink scheduling problem of a fully distributed wireless networked control system (WNCS) with a limited number of frequency channels. Using elements of stochastic systems theory, we derive a sufficient stability condition of the WNCS, which is stated in terms of both the control and communication system parameters. Once the condition is satisfied, there exists a stationary and deterministic scheduling policy that can stabilize all plants of the WNCS. By analyzing and representing the per-step cost function of the WNCS in terms of a finite-length countable vector state, we formulate the optimal transmission scheduling problem into a Markov decision process and develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based framework for solving it. To tackle the challenges of a large action space in DRL, we propose novel action space reduction and action embedding methods for the DRL framework that can be applied to various algorithms, including Deep Q-Network (DQN), Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3). Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms benchmark policies.
Authors: Hao-Ren Yao, Luke Breitfeller, Aakanksha Naik, Chunxiao Zhou, Carolyn Rose
Abstract: Event Temporal Relation Extraction (ETRE) is paramount but challenging. Within a discourse, event pairs are situated at different distances or the so-called proximity bands. The temporal ordering communicated about event pairs where at more remote (i.e., ``long'') or less remote (i.e., ``short'') proximity bands are encoded differently. SOTA models have tended to perform well on events situated at either short or long proximity bands, but not both. Nonetheless, real-world, natural texts contain all types of temporal event-pairs. In this paper, we present MulCo: Distilling Multi-Scale Knowledge via Contrastive Learning, a knowledge co-distillation approach that shares knowledge across multiple event pair proximity bands to improve performance on all types of temporal datasets. Our experimental results show that MulCo successfully integrates linguistic cues pertaining to temporal reasoning across both short and long proximity bands and achieves new state-of-the-art results on several ETRE benchmark datasets.
Authors: Yabin Zhang, Jiehong Lin, Ruihuang Li, Kui Jia, Lei Zhang
Abstract: Masked autoencoder has demonstrated its effectiveness in self-supervised point cloud learning. Considering that masking is a kind of corruption, in this work we explore a more general denoising autoencoder for point cloud learning (Point-DAE) by investigating more types of corruptions beyond masking. Specifically, we degrade the point cloud with certain corruptions as input, and learn an encoder-decoder model to reconstruct the original point cloud from its corrupted version. Three corruption families (\ie, density/masking, noise, and affine transformation) and a total of fourteen corruption types are investigated with traditional non-Transformer encoders. Besides the popular masking corruption, we identify another effective corruption family, \ie, affine transformation. The affine transformation disturbs all points globally, which is complementary to the masking corruption where some local regions are dropped. We also validate the effectiveness of affine transformation corruption with the Transformer backbones, where we decompose the reconstruction of the complete point cloud into the reconstructions of detailed local patches and rough global shape, alleviating the position leakage problem in the reconstruction. Extensive experiments on tasks of object classification, few-shot learning, robustness testing, part segmentation, and 3D object detection validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/Point-DAE}.
Authors: James Burgess, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models generate impressive and realistic images, but do they learn to represent the 3D world from only 2D supervision? We demonstrate that yes, certain 3D scene representations are encoded in the text embedding space of models like Stable Diffusion. Our approach, Viewpoint Neural Textual Inversion (ViewNeTI), is to discover 3D view tokens; these tokens control the 3D viewpoint - the rendering pose in a scene - of generated images. Specifically, we train a small neural mapper to take continuous camera viewpoint parameters and predict a view token (a word embedding). This token conditions diffusion generation via cross-attention to produce images with the desired camera viewpoint. Using ViewNeTI as an evaluation tool, we report two findings: first, the text latent space has a continuous view-control manifold for particular 3D scenes; second, we find evidence for a generalized view-control manifold for all scenes. We conclude that since the view token controls the 3D `rendering' viewpoint, there is likely a scene representation embedded in frozen 2D diffusion models. Finally, we exploit the 3D scene representations for 3D vision tasks, namely, view-controlled text-to-image generation, and novel view synthesis from a single image, where our approach sets state-of-the-art for LPIPS. Code available at https://github.com/jmhb0/view_neti
Authors: Yushan Qian, Wei-Nan Zhang, Ting Liu
Abstract: Empathetic dialogue is an indispensable part of building harmonious social relationships and contributes to the development of a helpful AI. Previous approaches are mainly based on fine small-scale language models. With the advent of ChatGPT, the application effect of large language models (LLMs) in this field has attracted great attention. This work empirically investigates the performance of LLMs in generating empathetic responses and proposes three improvement methods of semantically similar in-context learning, two-stage interactive generation, and combination with the knowledge base. Extensive experiments show that LLMs can significantly benefit from our proposed methods and is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both automatic and human evaluations. Additionally, we explore the possibility of GPT-4 simulating human evaluators.
Authors: Min Liu, Gang Yang, Siyuan Luo, Lin Shao
Abstract: Differentiable physics simulation provides an avenue to tackle previously intractable challenges through gradient-based optimization, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of solving robotics-related problems. To apply differentiable simulation in diverse robotic manipulation scenarios, a key challenge is to integrate various materials in a unified framework. We present SoftMAC, a differentiable simulation framework that couples soft bodies with articulated rigid bodies and clothes. SoftMAC simulates soft bodies with the continuum-mechanics-based Material Point Method (MPM). We provide a novel forecast-based contact model for MPM, which effectively reduces penetration without introducing other artifacts like unnatural rebound. To couple MPM particles with deformable and non-volumetric clothes meshes, we also propose a penetration tracing algorithm that reconstructs the signed distance field in local area. Diverging from previous works, SoftMAC simulates the complete dynamics of each modality and incorporates them into a cohesive system with an explicit and differentiable coupling mechanism. The feature empowers SoftMAC to handle a broader spectrum of interactions, such as soft bodies serving as manipulators and engaging with underactuated systems. We conducted comprehensive experiments to validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed differentiable pipeline in downstream robotic manipulation applications. Supplementary materials and videos are available on our project website at https://damianliumin.github.io/SoftMAC.
Authors: Kibum Kim, Kanghoon Yoon, Yeonjun In, Jinyoung Moon, Donghyun Kim, Chanyoung Park
Abstract: Scene graph generation (SGG) models have suffered from inherent problems regarding the benchmark datasets such as the long-tailed predicate distribution and missing annotation problems. In this work, we aim to alleviate the long-tailed problem of SGG by utilizing unannotated triplets. To this end, we introduce a Self-Training framework for SGG (ST-SGG) that assigns pseudo-labels for unannotated triplets based on which the SGG models are trained. While there has been significant progress in self-training for image recognition, designing a self-training framework for the SGG task is more challenging due to its inherent nature such as the semantic ambiguity and the long-tailed distribution of predicate classes. Hence, we propose a novel pseudo-labeling technique for SGG, called Class-specific Adaptive Thresholding with Momentum (CATM), which is a model-agnostic framework that can be applied to any existing SGG models. Furthermore, we devise a graph structure learner (GSL) that is beneficial when adopting our proposed self-training framework to the state-of-the-art message-passing neural network (MPNN)-based SGG models. Our extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of ST-SGG on various SGG models, particularly in enhancing the performance on fine-grained predicate classes.
Authors: Paritosh Parmar, Eric Peh, Basura Fernando
Abstract: We introduce the novel concept of visually Connecting Actions and Their Effects (CATE) in video understanding. CATE can have applications in areas like task planning and learning from demonstration. We identify and explore two different aspects of the concept of CATE: Action Selection (AS) and Effect-Affinity Assessment (EAA), where video understanding models connect actions and effects at semantic and fine-grained levels, respectively. We design various baseline models for AS and EAA. Despite the intuitive nature of the task, we observe that models struggle, and humans outperform them by a large margin. Our experiments show that in solving AS and EAA, models learn intuitive properties like object tracking and pose encoding without explicit supervision. We demonstrate that CATE can be an effective self-supervised task for learning video representations from unlabeled videos. The study aims to showcase the fundamental nature and versatility of CATE, with the hope of inspiring advanced formulations and models.
Authors: Junhong Shen, Neil Tenenholtz, James Brian Hall, David Alvarez-Melis, Nicolo Fusi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating natural language. However, their capabilities wane in highly specialized domains underrepresented in the pretraining corpus, such as physical and biomedical sciences. This work explores how to repurpose general LLMs into effective task solvers for specialized domains. We introduce a novel, model-agnostic framework for learning custom input tags, which are parameterized as continuous vectors appended to the LLM's embedding layer, to condition the LLM. We design two types of input tags: domain tags are used to delimit specialized representations (e.g., chemical formulas) and provide domain-relevant context; function tags are used to represent specific functions (e.g., predicting molecular properties) and compress function-solving instructions. We develop a three-stage protocol to learn these tags using auxiliary data and domain knowledge. By explicitly disentangling task domains from task functions, our method enables zero-shot generalization to unseen problems through diverse combinations of the input tags. It also boosts LLM's performance in various specialized domains, such as predicting protein or chemical properties and modeling drug-target interactions, outperforming expert models tailored to these tasks.
Authors: Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Luyao Niu, Jinyuan Jia, Bill Yuchen Lin, Radha Poovendran
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications such as code generation and chatbot assistance, extensive efforts have been made to align LLM behavior with human values, including safety. Jailbreak attacks, aiming to provoke unintended and unsafe behaviors from LLMs, remain a significant/leading LLM safety threat. In this paper, we aim to defend LLMs against jailbreak attacks by introducing SafeDecoding, a safety-aware decoding strategy for LLMs to generate helpful and harmless responses to user queries. Our insight in developing SafeDecoding is based on the observation that, even though probabilities of tokens representing harmful contents outweigh those representing harmless responses, safety disclaimers still appear among the top tokens after sorting tokens by probability in descending order. This allows us to mitigate jailbreak attacks by identifying safety disclaimers and amplifying their token probabilities, while simultaneously attenuating the probabilities of token sequences that are aligned with the objectives of jailbreak attacks. We perform extensive experiments on five LLMs using six state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks and four benchmark datasets. Our results show that SafeDecoding significantly reduces the attack success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks without compromising the helpfulness of responses to benign user queries. SafeDecoding outperforms six defense methods.
Authors: Kenneth Li, Tianle Liu, Naomi Bashkansky, David Bau, Fernanda Vi\'egas, Hanspeter Pfister, Martin Wattenberg
Abstract: System-prompting is a standard tool for customizing language-model chatbots, enabling them to follow a specific instruction. An implicit assumption in the use of system prompts is that they will be stable, so the chatbot will continue to generate text according to the stipulated instructions for the duration of a conversation. We propose a quantitative benchmark to test this assumption, evaluating instruction stability via self-chats between two instructed chatbots. Testing popular models like LLaMA2-chat-70B and GPT-3.5, we reveal a significant instruction drift within eight rounds of conversations. An empirical and theoretical analysis of this phenomenon suggests the transformer attention mechanism plays a role, due to attention decay over long exchanges. To combat attention decay and instruction drift, we propose a lightweight method called split-softmax, which compares favorably against two strong baselines.
Authors: Mikhail Kazdagli, Mohit Tiwari, Akshat Kumar
Abstract: Cloud computing services provide scalable and cost-effective solutions for data storage, processing, and collaboration. Alongside their growing popularity, concerns related to their security vulnerabilities leading to data breaches and sophisticated attacks such as ransomware are growing. To address these, first, we propose a generic framework to express relations between different cloud objects such as users, datastores, security roles, to model access control policies in cloud systems. Access control misconfigurations are often the primary driver for cloud attacks. Second, we develop a PDDL model for detecting security vulnerabilities which can for example lead to widespread attacks such as ransomware, sensitive data exfiltration among others. A planner can then generate attacks to identify such vulnerabilities in the cloud. Finally, we test our approach on 14 real Amazon AWS cloud configurations of different commercial organizations. Our system can identify a broad range of security vulnerabilities, which state-of-the-art industry tools cannot detect.
Authors: Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
Abstract: Recent developments in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown rapid progress, moving towards the goal of creating versatile MLLMs that understand inputs from various modalities. However, existing methods typically rely on joint training with paired multimodal instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm through the model composition of existing MLLMs to create a new model that retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. Our basic implementation, NaiveMC, demonstrates the effectiveness of this paradigm by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. Furthermore, we introduce DAMC to address parameter interference and mismatch issues during the merging process, thereby enhancing the model performance. To facilitate research in this area, we propose MCUB, a benchmark for assessing ability of MLLMs to understand inputs from diverse modalities. Experiments on this benchmark and four other multimodal understanding tasks show significant improvements over baselines, proving that model composition can create a versatile model capable of processing inputs from multiple modalities.
Authors: Elizaveta Tennant, Stephen Hailes, Mirco Musolesi
Abstract: Growing concerns about safety and alignment of AI systems highlight the importance of embedding moral capabilities in artificial agents: a promising solution is the use of learning from experience, i.e., Reinforcement Learning. In multi-agent (social) environments, complex population-level phenomena may emerge from interactions between individual learning agents. Many of the existing studies rely on simulated social dilemma environments to study the interactions of independent learning agents; however, they tend to ignore the moral heterogeneity that is likely to be present in societies of agents in practice. For example, at different points in time a single learning agent may face opponents who are consequentialist (i.e., focused on maximizing outcomes over time), norm-based (i.e., conforming to specific norms), or virtue-based (i.e., considering a combination of different virtues). The extent to which agents' co-development may be impacted by such moral heterogeneity in populations is not well understood. In this paper, we present a study of the learning dynamics of morally heterogeneous populations interacting in a social dilemma setting. Using an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma environment with a partner selection mechanism, we investigate the extent to which the prevalence of diverse moral agents in populations affects individual agents' learning behaviors and emergent population-level outcomes. We observe several types of non-trivial interactions between pro-social and anti-social agents, and find that certain types of moral agents are able to steer selfish agents towards more cooperative behavior.
Authors: Daniel Fl\"ogel, Lars Fischer, Thomas Rudolf, Tobias Sch\"urmann, S\"oren Hohmann
Abstract: Mobile robots are being used on a large scale in various crowded situations and become part of our society. The socially acceptable navigation behavior of a mobile robot with individual human consideration is an essential requirement for scalable applications and human acceptance. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approaches are recently used to learn a robot's navigation policy and to model the complex interactions between robots and humans. We propose to divide existing DRL-based navigation approaches based on the robot's exhibited social behavior and distinguish between social collision avoidance with a lack of social behavior and socially aware approaches with explicit predefined social behavior. In addition, we propose a novel socially integrated navigation approach where the robot's social behavior is adaptive and emerges from the interaction with humans. The formulation of our approach is derived from a sociological definition, which states that social acting is oriented toward the acting of others. The DRL policy is trained in an environment where other agents interact socially integrated and reward the robot's behavior individually. The simulation results indicate that the proposed socially integrated navigation approach outperforms a socially aware approach in terms of ego navigation performance while significantly reducing the negative impact on all agents within the environment.
Authors: Jimin Mun, Liwei Jiang, Jenny Liang, Inyoung Cheong, Nicole DeCario, Yejin Choi, Tadayoshi Kohno, Maarten Sap
Abstract: General purpose AI, such as ChatGPT, seems to have lowered the barriers for the public to use AI and harness its power. However, the governance and development of AI still remain in the hands of a few, and the pace of development is accelerating without a comprehensive assessment of risks. As a first step towards democratic risk assessment and design of general purpose AI, we introduce PARTICIP-AI, a carefully designed framework for laypeople to speculate and assess AI use cases and their impacts. Our framework allows us to study more nuanced and detailed public opinions on AI through collecting use cases, surfacing diverse harms through risk assessment under alternate scenarios (i.e., developing and not developing a use case), and illuminating tensions over AI development through making a concluding choice on its development. To showcase the promise of our framework towards informing democratic AI development, we run a medium-scale study with inputs from 295 demographically diverse participants. Our analyses show that participants' responses emphasize applications for personal life and society, contrasting with most current AI development's business focus. We also surface diverse set of envisioned harms such as distrust in AI and institutions, complementary to those defined by experts. Furthermore, we found that perceived impact of not developing use cases significantly predicted participants' judgements of whether AI use cases should be developed, and highlighted lay users' concerns of techno-solutionism. We conclude with a discussion on how frameworks like PARTICIP-AI can further guide democratic AI development and governance.
Authors: Lilong Xue, Dan Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in comprehending and generating text, motivating numerous researchers to utilize them for Information Extraction (IE) purposes, including Relation Extraction (RE). Nonetheless, most existing methods are predominantly designed for Sentence-level Relation Extraction (SentRE) tasks, which typically encompass a restricted set of relations and triplet facts within a single sentence. Furthermore, certain approaches resort to treating relations as candidate choices integrated into prompt templates, leading to inefficient processing and suboptimal performance when tackling Document-Level Relation Extraction (DocRE) tasks, which entail handling multiple relations and triplet facts distributed across a given document, posing distinct challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce AutoRE, an end-to-end DocRE model that adopts a novel RE extraction paradigm named RHF (Relation-Head-Facts). Unlike existing approaches, AutoRE does not rely on the assumption of known relation options, making it more reflective of real-world scenarios. Additionally, we have developed an easily extensible RE framework using a Parameters Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) algorithm (QLoRA). Our experiments on the RE-DocRED dataset showcase AutoRE's best performance, achieving state-of-the-art results, surpassing TAG by 10.03\% and 9.03\% respectively on the dev and test set. The code is available at https://github.com/THUDM/AutoRE and the demonstration video is provided at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhKRsZUAxKk.
URLs: https://github.com/THUDM/AutoRE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhKRsZUAxKk.
Authors: You Xie, Hongyi Xu, Guoxian Song, Chao Wang, Yichun Shi, Linjie Luo
Abstract: We propose X-Portrait, an innovative conditional diffusion model tailored for generating expressive and temporally coherent portrait animation. Specifically, given a single portrait as appearance reference, we aim to animate it with motion derived from a driving video, capturing both highly dynamic and subtle facial expressions along with wide-range head movements. As its core, we leverage the generative prior of a pre-trained diffusion model as the rendering backbone, while achieve fine-grained head pose and expression control with novel controlling signals within the framework of ControlNet. In contrast to conventional coarse explicit controls such as facial landmarks, our motion control module is learned to interpret the dynamics directly from the original driving RGB inputs. The motion accuracy is further enhanced with a patch-based local control module that effectively enhance the motion attention to small-scale nuances like eyeball positions. Notably, to mitigate the identity leakage from the driving signals, we train our motion control modules with scaling-augmented cross-identity images, ensuring maximized disentanglement from the appearance reference modules. Experimental results demonstrate the universal effectiveness of X-Portrait across a diverse range of facial portraits and expressive driving sequences, and showcase its proficiency in generating captivating portrait animations with consistently maintained identity characteristics.
Authors: Tianliang Ma, Guangxi Fan, Xuguang Sun, Zhihui Deng, Kainlu Low, Leilai Shao
Abstract: This paper proposes a fast system technology co-optimization (STCO) framework that optimizes power, performance, and area (PPA) for next-generation IC design, addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by novel materials and device architectures. We focus on accelerating the technology level of STCO using AI techniques, by employing graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches for both TCAD simulation and cell library characterization, which are interconnected through a unified compact model, collectively achieving over a 100X speedup over traditional methods. These advancements enable comprehensive STCO iterations with runtime speedups ranging from 1.9X to 14.1X and supports both emerging and traditional technologies.
Authors: Fatemeh Dehrouyeh, Li Yang, Firouz Badrkhani Ajaei, Abdallah Shami
Abstract: As technology advances, the use of Machine Learning (ML) in cybersecurity is becoming increasingly crucial to tackle the growing complexity of cyber threats. While traditional ML models can enhance cybersecurity, their high energy and resource demands limit their applications, leading to the emergence of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) as a more suitable solution for resource-constrained environments. TinyML is widely applied in areas such as smart homes, healthcare, and industrial automation. TinyML focuses on optimizing ML algorithms for small, low-power devices, enabling intelligent data processing directly on edge devices. This paper provides a comprehensive review of common challenges of TinyML techniques, such as power consumption, limited memory, and computational constraints; it also explores potential solutions to these challenges, such as energy harvesting, computational optimization techniques, and transfer learning for privacy preservation. On the other hand, this paper discusses TinyML's applications in advancing cybersecurity for Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructures (EVCIs) as a representative use case. It presents an experimental case study that enhances cybersecurity in EVCI using TinyML, evaluated against traditional ML in terms of reduced delay and memory usage, with a slight trade-off in accuracy. Additionally, the study includes a practical setup using the ESP32 microcontroller in the PlatformIO environment, which provides a hands-on assessment of TinyML's application in cybersecurity for EVCI.
Authors: Halid Ziya Yerebakan, Yoshihisa Shinagawa, Gerardo Hermosillo Valadez
Abstract: Organ segmentation is a fundamental task in medical imaging since it is useful for many clinical automation pipelines. However, some tasks do not require full segmentation. Instead, a classifier can identify the selected organ without segmenting the entire volume. In this study, we demonstrate a classifier based method to obtain organ labels in real time by using a large context size with a sparse data sampling strategy. Although our method operates as an independent classifier at query locations, it can generate full segmentations by querying grid locations at any resolution, offering faster performance than segmentation algorithms. We compared our method with existing segmentation techniques, demonstrating its superior runtime potential for practical applications in medical imaging.
Authors: Dechen Gao, Shuangyu Cai, Hanchu Zhou, Hang Wang, Iman Soltani, Junshan Zhang
Abstract: To safely navigate intricate real-world scenarios, autonomous vehicles must be able to adapt to diverse road conditions and anticipate future events. World model (WM) based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach by learning and predicting the complex dynamics of various environments. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there does not exist an accessible platform for training and testing such algorithms in sophisticated driving environments. To fill this void, we introduce CarDreamer, the first open-source learning platform designed specifically for developing WM based autonomous driving algorithms. It comprises three key components: 1) World model backbone: CarDreamer has integrated some state-of-the-art WMs, which simplifies the reproduction of RL algorithms. The backbone is decoupled from the rest and communicates using the standard Gym interface, so that users can easily integrate and test their own algorithms. 2) Built-in tasks: CarDreamer offers a comprehensive set of highly configurable driving tasks which are compatible with Gym interfaces and are equipped with empirically optimized reward functions. 3) Task development suite: This suite streamlines the creation of driving tasks, enabling easy definition of traffic flows and vehicle routes, along with automatic collection of multi-modal observation data. A visualization server allows users to trace real-time agent driving videos and performance metrics through a browser. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments using built-in tasks to evaluate the performance and potential of WMs in autonomous driving. Thanks to the richness and flexibility of CarDreamer, we also systematically study the impact of observation modality, observability, and sharing of vehicle intentions on AV safety and efficiency. All code and documents are accessible on https://github.com/ucd-dare/CarDreamer.
Authors: Yisu Liu, Jinyang An, Wanqian Zhang, Dayan Wu, Jingzi Gu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang
Abstract: With the development of diffusion-based customization methods like DreamBooth, individuals now have access to train the models that can generate their personalized images. Despite the convenience, malicious users have misused these techniques to create fake images, thereby triggering a privacy security crisis. In light of this, proactive adversarial attacks are proposed to protect users against customization. The adversarial examples are trained to distort the customization model's outputs and thus block the misuse. In this paper, we propose DisDiff (Disrupting Diffusion), a novel adversarial attack method to disrupt the diffusion model outputs. We first delve into the intrinsic image-text relationships, well-known as cross-attention, and empirically find that the subject-identifier token plays an important role in guiding image generation. Thus, we propose the Cross-Attention Erasure module to explicitly "erase" the indicated attention maps and disrupt the text guidance. Besides,we analyze the influence of the sampling process of the diffusion model on Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attack and introduce a novel Merit Sampling Scheduler to adaptively modulate the perturbation updating amplitude in a step-aware manner. Our DisDiff outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 12.75% of FDFR scores and 7.25% of ISM scores across two facial benchmarks and two commonly used prompts on average.
Authors: Jaehee Ryu, Seonhee Cho, Gyubok Lee, Edward Choi
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce EHR-SeqSQL, a novel sequential text-to-SQL dataset for Electronic Health Record (EHR) databases. EHR-SeqSQL is designed to address critical yet underexplored aspects in text-to-SQL parsing: interactivity, compositionality, and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, EHR-SeqSQL is not only the largest but also the first medical text-to-SQL dataset benchmark to include sequential and contextual questions. We provide a data split and the new test set designed to assess compositional generalization ability. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of a multi-turn approach over a single-turn approach in learning compositionality. Additionally, our dataset integrates specially crafted tokens into SQL queries to improve execution efficiency. With EHR-SeqSQL, we aim to bridge the gap between practical needs and academic research in the text-to-SQL domain. EHR-SeqSQL is available \href{https://github.com/seonhee99/EHR-SeqSQL}{at this https URL}.
Authors: Julian C. Sch\"afer-Zimmermann, Vlad Demartsev, Baptiste Averly, Kiran Dhanjal-Adams, Mathieu Duteil, Gabriella Gall, Marius Fai{\ss}, Lily Johnson-Ulrich, Dan Stowell, Marta B. Manser, Marie A. Roch, Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin
Abstract: Bioacoustic research, vital for understanding animal behavior, conservation, and ecology, faces a monumental challenge: analyzing vast datasets where animal vocalizations are rare. While deep learning techniques are becoming standard, adapting them to bioacoustics remains difficult. We address this with animal2vec, an interpretable large transformer model, and a self-supervised training scheme tailored for sparse and unbalanced bioacoustic data. It learns from unlabeled audio and then refines its understanding with labeled data. Furthermore, we introduce and publicly release MeerKAT: Meerkat Kalahari Audio Transcripts, a dataset of meerkat (Suricata suricatta) vocalizations with millisecond-resolution annotations, the largest labeled dataset on non-human terrestrial mammals currently available. Our model outperforms existing methods on MeerKAT and the publicly available NIPS4Bplus birdsong dataset. Moreover, animal2vec performs well even with limited labeled data (few-shot learning). animal2vec and MeerKAT provide a new reference point for bioacoustic research, enabling scientists to analyze large amounts of data even with scarce ground truth information.
Authors: Chang Yu, Yongshun Xu, Jin Cao, Ye Zhang, Yinxin Jin, Mengran Zhu
Abstract: With the proliferation of various online and mobile payment systems, credit card fraud has emerged as a significant threat to financial security. This study focuses on innovative applications of the latest Transformer models for more robust and precise fraud detection. To ensure the reliability of the data, we meticulously processed the data sources, balancing the dataset to address the issue of data sparsity significantly. We also selected highly correlated vectors to strengthen the training process.To guarantee the reliability and practicality of the new Transformer model, we conducted performance comparisons with several widely adopted models, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, Neural Network, and Logistic Regression. We rigorously compared these models using metrics such as Precision, Recall, and F1 Score. Through these detailed analyses and comparisons, we present to the readers a highly efficient and powerful anti-fraud mechanism with promising prospects. The results demonstrate that the Transformer model not only excels in traditional applications but also shows great potential in niche areas like fraud detection, offering a substantial advancement in the field.
Authors: Qi Zheng, Chang Yu, Jin Cao, Yongshun Xu, Qianwen Xing, Yinxin Jin
Abstract: With the rise of various online and mobile payment systems, transaction fraud has become a significant threat to financial security. This study explores the application of advanced machine learning models, specifically based on XGBoost and LightGBM, for developing a more accurate and robust Payment Security Protection Model. To enhance data reliability, we meticulously processed the data sources and applied SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique) to address class imbalance and improve data representation. By selecting highly correlated features, we aimed to strengthen the training process and boost model performance. We conducted thorough performance evaluations of our proposed models, comparing them against traditional methods including Random Forest, Neural Network, and Logistic Regression. Using metrics such as Precision, Recall, and F1 Score, we rigorously assessed their effectiveness. Our detailed analyses and comparisons reveal that the combination of SMOTE with XGBoost and LightGBM offers a highly efficient and powerful mechanism for payment security protection. Moreover, the integration of XGBoost and LightGBM in a Local Ensemble model further demonstrated outstanding performance. After incorporating SMOTE, the new combined model achieved a significant improvement of nearly 6\% over traditional models and around 5\% over its sub-models, showcasing remarkable results.
Authors: Fanmeng Wang, Wentao Guo, Minjie Cheng, Shen Yuan, Hongteng Xu, Zhifeng Gao
Abstract: Polymers are high-molecular-weight compounds constructed by the covalent bonding of numerous identical or similar monomers so that their 3D structures are complex yet exhibit unignorable regularity. Typically, the properties of a polymer, such as plasticity, conductivity, bio-compatibility, and so on, are highly correlated with its 3D structure. However, existing polymer property prediction methods heavily rely on the information learned from polymer SMILES sequences (P-SMILES strings) while ignoring crucial 3D structural information, resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this work, we propose MMPolymer, a novel multimodal multitask pretraining framework incorporating polymer 1D sequential and 3D structural information to encourage downstream polymer property prediction tasks. Besides, considering the scarcity of polymer 3D data, we further introduce the "Star Substitution" strategy to extract 3D structural information effectively. During pretraining, in addition to predicting masked tokens and recovering clear 3D coordinates, MMPolymer achieves the cross-modal alignment of latent representations. Then we further fine-tune the pretrained MMPolymer for downstream polymer property prediction tasks in the supervised learning paradigm. Experiments show that MMPolymer achieves state-of-the-art performance in downstream property prediction tasks. Moreover, given the pretrained MMPolymer, utilizing merely a single modality in the fine-tuning phase can also outperform existing methods, showcasing the exceptional capability of MMPolymer in polymer feature extraction and utilization.
Authors: Sigmund H. H{\o}eg, Lars Tingelstad
Abstract: Diffusion models have been shown to excel in robotic imitation learning by mastering the challenge of modeling complex distributions. However, sampling speed has traditionally not been a priority due to their popularity for image generation, limiting their application to dynamical tasks. While recent work has improved the sampling speed of diffusion-based robotic policies, they are restricted to techniques from the image generation domain. We adapt Temporally Entangled Diffusion (TEDi), a framework specific for trajectory generation, to speed up diffusion-based policies for imitation learning. We introduce TEDi Policy, with novel regimes for training and sampling, and show that it drastically improves the sampling speed while remaining performant when applied to state-of-the-art diffusion-based imitation learning policies.
Authors: Chenxu Wang, Haowei Ming, Jian He, Yao Lu, Junhong Chen
Abstract: Accurate prediction of drug molecule solubility is crucial for therapeutic effectiveness and safety. Traditional methods often miss complex molecular structures, leading to inaccuracies. We introduce the YZS-Model, a deep learning framework integrating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), Transformer architectures, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to enhance prediction precision. GCNs excel at capturing intricate molecular topologies by modeling the relationships between atoms and bonds. Transformers, with their self-attention mechanisms, effectively identify long-range dependencies within molecules, capturing global interactions. LSTMs process sequential data, preserving long-term dependencies and integrating temporal information within molecular sequences. This multifaceted approach leverages the strengths of each component, resulting in a model that comprehensively understands and predicts molecular properties. Trained on 9,943 compounds and tested on an anticancer dataset, the YZS-Model achieved an $R^2$ of 0.59 and an RMSE of 0.57, outperforming benchmark models ($R^2$ of 0.52 and RMSE of 0.61). In an independent test, it demonstrated an RMSE of 1.05, improving accuracy by 45.9%. The integration of these deep learning techniques allows the YZS-Model to learn valuable features from complex data without predefined parameters, handle large datasets efficiently, and adapt to various molecular types. This comprehensive capability significantly improves predictive accuracy and model generalizability. Its precision in solubility predictions can expedite drug development by optimizing candidate selection, reducing costs, and enhancing efficiency. Our research underscores deep learning's transformative potential in pharmaceutical science, particularly for solubility prediction and drug design.
Authors: Mayk Caldas Ramos, Christopher J. Collison, Andrew D. White
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in chemistry, significantly impacting molecule design, property prediction, and synthesis optimization. This review highlights LLM capabilities in these domains and their potential to accelerate scientific discovery through automation. We also review LLM-based autonomous agents: LLMs with a broader set of tools to interact with their surrounding environment. These agents perform diverse tasks such as paper scraping, interfacing with automated laboratories, and synthesis planning. As agents are an emerging topic, we extend the scope of our review of agents beyond chemistry and discuss across any scientific domains. This review covers the recent history, current capabilities, and design of LLMs and autonomous agents, addressing specific challenges, opportunities, and future directions in chemistry. Key challenges include data quality and integration, model interpretability, and the need for standard benchmarks, while future directions point towards more sophisticated multi-modal agents and enhanced collaboration between agents and experimental methods. Due to the quick pace of this field, a repository has been built to keep track of the latest studies: https://github.com/ur-whitelab/LLMs-in-science.
Authors: Jerry Huang
Abstract: Long sequences occur in abundance within real-world scenarios, hence properly modelling them opens numerous down-stream use-cases. Deep neural networks, however, have often struggled with these for a variety of reasons. Recent advances, both in system engineering as well as model design, have enabled the scaling up of model that are purported to support extended context length. In particular, the state-space and linear recurrent neural network families of models hypothetically can entend to infinite sequence lenth. However, is this too good to be true? We conduct an evaluation to show that while such claims may be sound theoretically, there remain large practical gaps that are empirically observed. In particular, recurrent models still suffer in the same settings as long-context LLMs with attention. We further show that different inductive biases have inconsistent extrapolation capabilities, highlighting the need to further study such paradigms and investigate why long-context models seemingly fail to behave as one might expect.
Authors: Chen Xin, Andreas Hartel, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract: Accurate real-time object detection is vital across numerous industrial applications, from safety monitoring to quality control. Traditional approaches, however, are hindered by arduous manual annotation and data collection, struggling to adapt to ever-changing environments and novel target objects. To address these limitations, this paper presents DART, an innovative automated end-to-end pipeline that revolutionizes object detection workflows from data collection to model evaluation. It eliminates the need for laborious human labeling and extensive data collection while achieving outstanding accuracy across diverse scenarios. DART encompasses four key stages: (1) Data Diversification using subject-driven image generation (DreamBooth with SDXL), (2) Annotation via open-vocabulary object detection (Grounding DINO) to generate bounding box and class labels (3) Review of generated images and pseudo-labels by large multimodal models (InternVL-1.5 and GPT-4o) to guarantee credibility, (4) Training of real-time object detectors (YOLOv8 and YOLOv10) using the verified data as ground truth. We apply DART to a self-collected dataset of construction machines named Liebherr Product, which contains over 15K high-quality images across 23 categories. The current instantiation of DART significantly increases average precision (AP) from 0.064 to 0.832. Its modular design ensures easy exchangeability and extensibility, allowing for future algorithm upgrades, seamless integration of new object categories, and adaptability to customized environments without manual labeling and additional data collection. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/chen-xin-94/DART.
Authors: Bunyamin Keles, Murat Gunay, Serdar I. Caglar
Abstract: Machine translation is indispensable in healthcare for enabling the global dissemination of medical knowledge across languages. However, complex medical terminology poses unique challenges to achieving adequate translation quality and accuracy. This study introduces a novel "LLMs-in-the-loop" approach to develop supervised neural machine translation models optimized specifically for medical texts. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities, this research shows that small, specialized models trained on high-quality in-domain (mostly synthetic) data can outperform even vastly larger LLMs. Custom parallel corpora in six languages were compiled from scientific articles, synthetically generated clinical documents, and medical texts. Our LLMs-in-the-loop methodology employs synthetic data generation, rigorous evaluation, and agent orchestration to enhance performance. We developed small medical translation models using the MarianMT base model. We introduce a new medical translation test dataset to standardize evaluation in this domain. Assessed using BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, and BERT scores on this test set, our MarianMT-based models outperform Google Translate, DeepL, and GPT-4-Turbo. Results demonstrate that our LLMs-in-the-loop approach, combined with fine-tuning high-quality, domain-specific data, enables specialized models to outperform general-purpose and some larger systems. This research, part of a broader series on expert small models, paves the way for future healthcare-related AI developments, including deidentification and bio-medical entity extraction models. Our study underscores the potential of tailored neural translation models and the LLMs-in-the-loop methodology to advance the field through improved data generation, evaluation, agent, and modeling techniques.
Authors: Zheni Zeng, Jiayi Chen, Huimin Chen, Yukun Yan, Yuxuan Chen, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Abstract: Large language models exhibit aspects of human-level intelligence that catalyze their application as human-like agents in domains such as social simulations, human-machine interactions, and collaborative multi-agent systems. However, the absence of distinct personalities, such as displaying ingratiating behaviors, inconsistent opinions, and uniform response patterns, diminish LLMs utility in practical applications. Addressing this, the development of personality traits in LLMs emerges as a crucial area of research to unlock their latent potential. Existing methods to personify LLMs generally involve strategies like employing stylized training data for instruction tuning or using prompt engineering to simulate different personalities. These methods only capture superficial linguistic styles instead of the core of personalities and are therefore not stable. In this study, we propose PersLLM, integrating psychology-grounded principles of personality: social practice, consistency, and dynamic development, into a comprehensive training methodology. We incorporate personality traits directly into the model parameters, enhancing the model's resistance to induction, promoting consistency, and supporting the dynamic evolution of personality. Single-agent evaluation validates our method's superiority, as it produces responses more aligned with reference personalities compared to other approaches. Case studies for multi-agent communication highlight its benefits in enhancing opinion consistency within individual agents and fostering collaborative creativity among multiple agents in dialogue contexts, potentially benefiting human simulation and multi-agent cooperation. Additionally, human-agent interaction evaluations indicate that our personified models significantly enhance interactive experiences, underscoring the practical implications of our research.
Authors: Gurpreet Gosal (Charles), Yishi Xu (Charles), Gokul Ramakrishnan (Charles), Rituraj Joshi (Charles), Avraham Sheinin (Charles), Zhiming (Charles), Chen, Biswajit Mishra, Natalia Vassilieva, Joel Hestness, Neha Sengupta, Sunil Kumar Sahu, Bokang Jia, Onkar Pandit, Satheesh Katipomu, Samta Kamboj, Samujjwal Ghosh, Rahul Pal, Parvez Mullah, Soundar Doraiswamy, Mohamed El Karim Chami, Preslav Nakov
Abstract: We present an efficient method for adapting a monolingual Large Language Model (LLM) to another language, addressing challenges of catastrophic forgetting and tokenizer limitations. We focus this study on adapting Llama 2 to Arabic. Our two-stage approach begins with expanding the vocabulary and training only the embeddings matrix, followed by full model continual pre-training on a bilingual corpus. By continually pre-training on a mix of Arabic and English corpora, the model retains its proficiency in English while acquiring capabilities in Arabic. Our approach results in significant improvements in Arabic and slight enhancements in English, demonstrating cost-effective cross-lingual transfer. We perform ablations on embedding initialization techniques, data mix ratios, and learning rates and release a detailed training recipe. To demonstrate generalizability of this approach we also adapted Llama 3 8B to Arabic and Llama 2 13B to Hindi.
Authors: Chaofan Tao, Qian Liu, Longxu Dou, Niklas Muennighoff, Zhongwei Wan, Ping Luo, Min Lin, Ngai Wong
Abstract: Research on scaling large language models (LLMs) has primarily focused on model parameters and training data size, overlooking the role of vocabulary size. We investigate how vocabulary size impacts LLM scaling laws by training models ranging from 33M to 3B parameters on up to 500B characters with various vocabulary configurations. We propose three complementary approaches for predicting the compute-optimal vocabulary size: IsoFLOPs analysis, derivative estimation, and parametric fit of the loss function. Our approaches converge on the same result that the optimal vocabulary size depends on the available compute budget and that larger models deserve larger vocabularies. However, most LLMs use too small vocabulary sizes. For example, we predict that the optimal vocabulary size of Llama2-70B should have been at least 216K, 7 times larger than its vocabulary of 32K. We validate our predictions empirically by training models with 3B parameters across different FLOPs budgets. Adopting our predicted optimal vocabulary size consistently improves downstream performance over commonly used vocabulary sizes. By increasing the vocabulary size from the conventional 32K to 43K, we improve performance on ARC-Challenge from 29.1 to 32.0 with the same 2.3e21 FLOPs. Our work emphasizes the necessity of jointly considering model parameters and vocabulary size for efficient scaling.
Authors: Feiyang Li, Zinan Cao, Qixuan Yu, Xirui Tang
Abstract: For this paper, a prediction study of cloud computing energy consumption was conducted by optimising the data regression algorithm based on the horned lizard optimisation algorithm for Convolutional Neural Networks-Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Units. Firstly, through Spearman correlation analysis of CPU, usage, memory usage, network traffic, power consumption, number of instructions executed, execution time and energy efficiency, we found that power consumption has the highest degree of positive correlation with energy efficiency, while CPU usage has the highest degree of negative correlation with energy efficiency. In our experiments, we introduced a random forest model and an optimisation model based on the horned lizard optimisation algorithm for testing, and the results show that the optimisation algorithm has better prediction results compared to the random forest model. Specifically, the mean square error (MSE) of the optimisation algorithm is 0.01 smaller than that of the random forest model, and the mean absolute error (MAE) is 0.01 smaller than that of the random forest.3 The results of the combined metrics show that the optimisation algorithm performs more accurately and reliably in predicting energy efficiency. This research result provides new ideas and methods to improve the energy efficiency of cloud computing systems. This research not only expands the scope of application in the field of cloud computing, but also provides a strong support for improving the energy use efficiency of the system.
Authors: Yuetan Chu, Yilan Zhang, Zhongyi Han, Changchun Yang, Longxi Zhou, Gongning Luo, Xin Gao
Abstract: Foundation models have recently attracted significant attention for their impressive generalizability across diverse downstream tasks. However, these models are demonstrated to exhibit great limitations in representing high-frequency components and fine-grained details. In many medical imaging tasks, the precise representation of such information is crucial due to the inherently intricate anatomical structures, sub-visual features, and complex boundaries involved. Consequently, the limited representation of prevalent foundation models can result in significant performance degradation or even failure in these tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel pretraining strategy, named Frequency-advanced Representation Autoencoder (Frepa). Through high-frequency masking and low-frequency perturbation combined with adversarial learning, Frepa encourages the encoder to effectively represent and preserve high-frequency components in the image embeddings. Additionally, we introduce an innovative histogram-equalized image masking strategy, extending the Masked Autoencoder approach beyond ViT to other architectures such as Swin Transformer and convolutional networks. We develop Frepa across nine medical modalities and validate it on 32 downstream tasks for both 2D images and 3D volume data. Without fine-tuning, Frepa can outperform other self-supervised pretraining methods and, in some cases, even surpasses task-specific trained models. This improvement is particularly significant for tasks involving fine-grained details, such as achieving up to a +15% increase in DSC for retina vessel segmentation and a +7% increase in IoU for lung nodule detection. Further experiments quantitatively reveal that Frepa enables superior high-frequency representations and preservation in the embeddings, underscoring its potential for developing more generalized and universal medical image foundation models.
Authors: Mariya Hendriksen, Shuo Zhang, Ridho Reinanda, Mohamed Yahya, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke
Abstract: Image-text retrieval (ITR), an important task in information retrieval (IR), is driven by pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) that consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, a significant challenge lies in the brittleness of existing ITR benchmarks. In standard datasets for the task, captions often provide broad summaries of scenes, neglecting detailed information about specific concepts. Additionally, the current evaluation setup assumes simplistic binary matches between images and texts and focuses on intra-modality rather than cross-modal relationships, which can lead to misinterpretations of model performance. Motivated by this gap, in this study, we focus on examining the brittleness of the ITR evaluation pipeline with a focus on concept granularity. We start by analyzing two common benchmarks, MS-COCO and Flickr30k, and compare them with their augmented versions, MS-COCO-FG and Flickr30k-FG, given a specified set of linguistic features capturing concept granularity. We discover that Flickr30k-FG and MS COCO-FG consistently achieve higher scores across all the selected features. To investigate the performance of VLMs on coarse and fine-grained datasets, we introduce a taxonomy of perturbations. We apply these perturbations to the selected datasets. We evaluate four state-of-the-art models - ALIGN, AltCLIP, CLIP, and GroupViT - on the standard and fine-grained datasets under zero-shot conditions, with and without the applied perturbations. The results demonstrate that although perturbations generally degrade model performance, the fine-grained datasets exhibit a smaller performance drop than their standard counterparts. Moreover, the relative performance drop across all setups is consistent across all models and datasets, indicating that the issue lies within the benchmarks. We conclude the paper by providing an agenda for improving ITR evaluation pipelines.
Authors: Orfeas Menis-Mastromichalakis, Giorgos Filandrianos, Jason Liartis, Edmund Dervakos, Giorgos Stamou
Abstract: As machine learning (ML) models and datasets increase in complexity, the demand for methods that enhance explainability and interpretability becomes paramount. Prototypes, by encapsulating essential characteristics within data, offer insights that enable tactical decision-making and enhance transparency. Traditional prototype methods often rely on sub-symbolic raw data and opaque latent spaces, reducing explainability and increasing the risk of misinterpretations. This paper presents a novel framework that utilizes semantic descriptions to define prototypes and provide clear explanations, effectively addressing the shortcomings of conventional methods. Our approach leverages concept-based descriptions to cluster data on the semantic level, ensuring that prototypes not only represent underlying properties intuitively but are also straightforward to interpret. Our method simplifies the interpretative process and effectively bridges the gap between complex data structures and human cognitive processes, thereby enhancing transparency and fostering trust. Our approach outperforms existing widely-used prototype methods in facilitating human understanding and informativeness, as validated through a user survey.
Authors: Rebwar Khalid Muhammed, Ribwar Rashid Aziz, Alla Ahmad Hassan, Aso Mohammed Aladdin, Shaida Jumaah Saydah, Tarik Ahmed. Rashid, Bryar Ahmad Hassan
Abstract: Nowadays, cybersecurity has grown into a more significant and difficult scientific issue. The recog-nition of threats and attacks meant for knowledge and safety on the internet is growing harder to detect. Since cybersecurity guarantees the privacy and security of data sent via the Internet, it is essential, while also providing protection against malicious attacks. Encrypt has grown into an an-swer that has become an essential element of information security systems. To ensure the security of shared data, including text, images, or videos, it is essential to employ various methods and strategies. This study delves into the prevalent cryptographic methods and algorithms utilized for prevention and stream encryption, examining their encoding techniques such as advanced encryp-tion standard (AES), Blowfish, Twofish, Salsa20, and ChaCha20. The primary objective of this re-search is to identify the optimal times and throughputs (speeds) for data encryption and decryption processes. The methodology of this study involved selecting five distinct types of images to com-pare the outcomes of the techniques evaluated in this research. The assessment focused on pro-cessing time and speed parameters, examining visual encoding and decoding using Java as the pri-mary platform. A comparative analysis of several symmetric key ciphers was performed, focusing on handling large datasets. Despite this limitation, comparing different images helped evaluate the techniques' novelty. The results showed that ChaCha20 had the best average time for both encryp-tion and decryption, being over 50% faster than some other algorithms. However, the Twofish algo-rithm had lower throughput during testing. The paper concludes with findings and suggestions for future improvements.
Authors: Benjamin Wilson, Nicholas Autio Mitchell, Jhony Kaesemodel Pontes, James Hays
Abstract: Lidar-based perception pipelines rely on 3D object detection models to interpret complex scenes. While multiple representations for lidar exist, the range-view is enticing since it losslessly encodes the entire lidar sensor output. In this work, we achieve state-of-the-art amongst range-view 3D object detection models without using multiple techniques proposed in past range-view literature. We explore range-view 3D object detection across two modern datasets with substantially different properties: Argoverse 2 and Waymo Open. Our investigation reveals key insights: (1) input feature dimensionality significantly influences the overall performance, (2) surprisingly, employing a classification loss grounded in 3D spatial proximity works as well or better compared to more elaborate IoU-based losses, and (3) addressing non-uniform lidar density via a straightforward range subsampling technique outperforms existing multi-resolution, range-conditioned networks. Our experiments reveal that techniques proposed in recent range-view literature are not needed to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Combining the above findings, we establish a new state-of-the-art model for range-view 3D object detection -- improving AP by 2.2% on the Waymo Open dataset while maintaining a runtime of 10 Hz. We establish the first range-view model on the Argoverse 2 dataset and outperform strong voxel-based baselines. All models are multi-class and open-source. Code is available at https://github.com/benjaminrwilson/range-view-3d-detection.
URLs: https://github.com/benjaminrwilson/range-view-3d-detection.
Authors: Georgi Ganev
Abstract: In this paper, we argue that similarity-based privacy metrics cannot ensure regulatory compliance of synthetic data. Our analysis and counter-examples show that they do not protect against singling out and linkability and, among other fundamental issues, completely ignore the motivated intruder test.
Authors: Pratyusha Maiti, Ashok K. Goel
Abstract: Jill Watson, a virtual teaching assistant powered by LLMs, answers student questions and engages them in extended conversations on courseware provided by the instructors. In this paper, we analyze student interactions with Jill across multiple courses and colleges, focusing on the types and complexity of student questions based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy and tool usage patterns. We find that, by supporting a wide range of cognitive demands, Jill encourages students to engage in sophisticated, higher-order cognitive questions. However, the frequency of usage varies significantly across deployments, and the types of questions asked depend on course-specific contexts. These findings pave the way for future work on AI-driven educational tools tailored to individual learning styles and course structure, potentially enhancing both the teaching and learning experience in classrooms.
Authors: Tim R\"adsch, Annika Reinke, Vivienn Weru, Minu D. Tizabi, Nicholas Heller, Fabian Isensee, Annette Kopp-Schneider, Lena Maier-Hein
Abstract: This paper does not describe a novel method. Instead, it studies an essential foundation for reliable benchmarking and ultimately real-world application of AI-based image analysis: generating high-quality reference annotations. Previous research has focused on crowdsourcing as a means of outsourcing annotations. However, little attention has so far been given to annotation companies, specifically regarding their internal quality assurance (QA) processes. Therefore, our aim is to evaluate the influence of QA employed by annotation companies on annotation quality and devise methodologies for maximizing data annotation efficacy. Based on a total of 57,648 instance segmented images obtained from a total of 924 annotators and 34 QA workers from four annotation companies and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), we derived the following insights: (1) Annotation companies perform better both in terms of quantity and quality compared to the widely used platform MTurk. (2) Annotation companies' internal QA only provides marginal improvements, if any. However, improving labeling instructions instead of investing in QA can substantially boost annotation performance. (3) The benefit of internal QA depends on specific image characteristics. Our work could enable researchers to derive substantially more value from a fixed annotation budget and change the way annotation companies conduct internal QA.
Authors: Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Iain Cruickshank, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in executing tasks based on natural language queries. However, these models, trained on curated datasets, inherently embody biases ranging from racial to national and gender biases. It remains uncertain whether these biases impact the performance of LLMs for certain tasks. In this study, we investigate the political biases of LLMs within the stance classification task, specifically examining whether these models exhibit a tendency to more accurately classify politically-charged stances. Utilizing three datasets, seven LLMs, and four distinct prompting schemes, we analyze the performance of LLMs on politically oriented statements and targets. Our findings reveal a statistically significant difference in the performance of LLMs across various politically oriented stance classification tasks. Furthermore, we observe that this difference primarily manifests at the dataset level, with models and prompting schemes showing statistically similar performances across different stance classification datasets. Lastly, we observe that when there is greater ambiguity in the target the statement is directed towards, LLMs have poorer stance classification accuracy. Code & Dataset: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12938478
Authors: Fakhraddin Alwajih, Gagan Bhatia, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Abstract: Recent advancements have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in generating and understanding image-to-text content. Despite these successes, progress is predominantly limited to English due to the scarcity of high quality multimodal resources in other languages. This limitation impedes the development of competitive models in languages such as Arabic. To alleviate this situation, we introduce an efficient Arabic multimodal assistant, dubbed Dallah, that utilizes an advanced language model based on LLaMA-2 to facilitate multimodal interactions. Dallah demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in Arabic MLLMs. Through fine-tuning six Arabic dialects, Dallah showcases its capability to handle complex dialectal interactions incorporating both textual and visual elements. The model excels in two benchmark tests: one evaluating its performance on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and another specifically designed to assess dialectal responses. Beyond its robust performance in multimodal interaction tasks, Dallah has the potential to pave the way for further development of dialect-aware Arabic MLLMs.
Authors: Nikolaus Howe, Micha{\l} Zajac, Ian McKenzie, Oskar Hollinsworth, Tom Tseng, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Adam Gleave
Abstract: Language model capabilities predictably improve from scaling a model's size and training data. Motivated by this, increasingly large language models have been trained, yielding an array of impressive capabilities. Yet these models are vulnerable to adversarial prompts, such as "jailbreaks" that hijack models to perform undesired behaviors, posing a significant risk of misuse. Prior work indicates that computer vision models become more robust with model and data scaling, raising the question: does language model robustness also improve with scale? We study this question empirically, finding that larger models respond substantially better to adversarial training, but there is little to no benefit from model scale in the absence of explicit defenses.
Authors: Yuxiao Qu, Tianjun Zhang, Naman Garg, Aviral Kumar
Abstract: A central piece in enabling intelligent agentic behavior in foundation models is to make them capable of introspecting upon their behavior, reasoning, and correcting their mistakes as more computation or interaction is available. Even the strongest proprietary large language models (LLMs) do not quite exhibit the ability of continually improving their responses sequentially, even in scenarios where they are explicitly told that they are making a mistake. In this paper, we develop RISE: Recursive IntroSpEction, an approach for fine-tuning LLMs to introduce this capability, despite prior work hypothesizing that this capability may not be possible to attain. Our approach prescribes an iterative fine-tuning procedure, which attempts to teach the model how to alter its response after having executed previously unsuccessful attempts to solve a hard test-time problem, with optionally additional environment feedback. RISE poses fine-tuning for a single-turn prompt as solving a multi-turn Markov decision process (MDP), where the initial state is the prompt. Inspired by principles in online imitation learning and reinforcement learning, we propose strategies for multi-turn data collection and training so as to imbue an LLM with the capability to recursively detect and correct its previous mistakes in subsequent iterations. Our experiments show that RISE enables Llama2, Llama3, and Mistral models to improve themselves with more turns on math reasoning tasks, outperforming several single-turn strategies given an equal amount of inference-time computation. We also find that RISE scales well, often attaining larger benefits with more capable models. Our analysis shows that RISE makes meaningful improvements to responses to arrive at the correct solution for challenging prompts, without disrupting one-turn abilities as a result of expressing more complex distributions.