Authors: Peter Slattery, Alexander K. Saeri, Emily A. C. Grundy, Jess Graham, Michael Noetel, Risto Uuk, James Dao, Soroush Pour, Stephen Casper, Neil Thompson
Abstract: The risks posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are of considerable concern to academics, auditors, policymakers, AI companies, and the public. However, a lack of shared understanding of AI risks can impede our ability to comprehensively discuss, research, and react to them. This paper addresses this gap by creating an AI Risk Repository to serve as a common frame of reference. This comprises a living database of 777 risks extracted from 43 taxonomies, which can be filtered based on two overarching taxonomies and easily accessed, modified, and updated via our website and online spreadsheets. We construct our Repository with a systematic review of taxonomies and other structured classifications of AI risk followed by an expert consultation. We develop our taxonomies of AI risk using a best-fit framework synthesis. Our high-level Causal Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies each risk by its causal factors (1) Entity: Human, AI; (2) Intentionality: Intentional, Unintentional; and (3) Timing: Pre-deployment; Post-deployment. Our mid-level Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental, and (7) AI system safety, failures, & limitations. These are further divided into 23 subdomains. The AI Risk Repository is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to rigorously curate, analyze, and extract AI risk frameworks into a publicly accessible, comprehensive, extensible, and categorized risk database. This creates a foundation for a more coordinated, coherent, and complete approach to defining, auditing, and managing the risks posed by AI systems.
Authors: Zhonghao He, Jascha Achterberg, Katie Collins, Kevin Nejad, Danyal Akarca, Yinzhu Yang, Wes Gurnee, Ilia Sucholutsky, Yuhan Tang, Rebeca Ianov, George Ogden, Chole Li, Kai Sandbrink, Stephen Casper, Anna Ivanova, Grace W. Lindsay
Abstract: As deep learning systems are scaled up to many billions of parameters, relating their internal structure to external behaviors becomes very challenging. Although daunting, this problem is not new: Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have accumulated decades of experience analyzing a particularly complex system - the brain. In this work, we argue that interpreting both biological and artificial neural systems requires analyzing those systems at multiple levels of analysis, with different analytic tools for each level. We first lay out a joint grand challenge among scientists who study the brain and who study artificial neural networks: understanding how distributed neural mechanisms give rise to complex cognition and behavior. We then present a series of analytical tools that can be used to analyze biological and artificial neural systems, organizing those tools according to Marr's three levels of analysis: computation/behavior, algorithm/representation, and implementation. Overall, the multilevel interpretability framework provides a principled way to tackle neural system complexity; links structure, computation, and behavior; clarifies assumptions and research priorities at each level; and paves the way toward a unified effort for understanding intelligent systems, may they be biological or artificial.
Authors: Zhibo Jin, Jiayu Zhang, Zhiyu Zhu, Yuchen Zhang, Jiahao Huang, Jianlong Zhou, Fang Chen
Abstract: Transferable adversarial attacks pose significant threats to deep neural networks, particularly in black-box scenarios where internal model information is inaccessible. Studying adversarial attack methods helps advance the performance of defense mechanisms and explore model vulnerabilities. These methods can uncover and exploit weaknesses in models, promoting the development of more robust architectures. However, current methods for transferable attacks often come with substantial computational costs, limiting their deployment and application, especially in edge computing scenarios. Adversarial generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are characterized by their ability to generate samples without the need for retraining after an initial training phase. GE-AdvGAN, a recent method for transferable adversarial attacks, is based on this principle. In this paper, we propose a novel general framework for gradient editing-based transferable attacks, named GE-AdvGAN+, which integrates nearly all mainstream attack methods to enhance transferability while significantly reducing computational resource consumption. Our experiments demonstrate the compatibility and effectiveness of our framework. Compared to the baseline AdvGAN, our best-performing method, GE-AdvGAN++, achieves an average ASR improvement of 47.8. Additionally, it surpasses the latest competing algorithm, GE-AdvGAN, with an average ASR increase of 5.9. The framework also exhibits enhanced computational efficiency, achieving 2217.7 FPS, outperforming traditional methods such as BIM and MI-FGSM. The implementation code for our GE-AdvGAN+ framework is available at https://github.com/GEAdvGANP
Authors: Boxuan Wang, Haonan Duan, Yanhao Feng, Xu Chen, Yongjie Fu, Zhaobin Mo, Xuan Di
Abstract: Social norm is defined as a shared standard of acceptable behavior in a society. The emergence of social norms fosters coordination among agents without any hard-coded rules, which is crucial for the large-scale deployment of AVs in an intelligent transportation system. This paper explores the application of LLMs in understanding and modeling social norms in autonomous driving games. We introduce LLMs into autonomous driving games as intelligent agents who make decisions according to text prompts. These agents are referred to as LLM-based agents. Our framework involves LLM-based agents playing Markov games in a multi-agent system (MAS), allowing us to investigate the emergence of social norms among individual agents. We aim to identify social norms by designing prompts and utilizing LLMs on textual information related to the environment setup and the observations of LLM-based agents. Using the OpenAI Chat API powered by GPT-4.0, we conduct experiments to simulate interactions and evaluate the performance of LLM-based agents in two driving scenarios: unsignalized intersection and highway platoon. The results show that LLM-based agents can handle dynamically changing environments in Markov games, and social norms evolve among LLM-based agents in both scenarios. In the intersection game, LLM-based agents tend to adopt a conservative driving policy when facing a potential car crash. The advantage of LLM-based agents in games lies in their strong operability and analyzability, which facilitate experimental design.
Authors: Eunji Kim, Siwon Kim, Rahim Entezari, Sungroh Yoon
Abstract: Recent text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion produce photo-realistic images but often show demographic biases. Previous debiasing methods focused on training-based approaches, failing to explore the root causes of bias and overlooking Stable Diffusion's potential for unbiased image generation. In this paper, we demonstrate that Stable Diffusion inherently possesses fairness, which can be unlocked to achieve debiased outputs. Through carefully designed experiments, we identify the excessive bonding between text prompts and the diffusion process as a key source of bias. To address this, we propose a novel approach that perturbs text conditions to unleash Stable Diffusion's intrinsic fairness. Our method effectively mitigates bias without additional tuning, while preserving image-text alignment and image quality.
Authors: Swann Bessa, Darius Dabert, Max Bourgeat, Louis-Martin Rousseau, Quentin Cappart
Abstract: Lagrangian decomposition (LD) is a relaxation method that provides a dual bound for constrained optimization problems by decomposing them into more manageable sub-problems. This bound can be used in branch-and-bound algorithms to prune the search space effectively. In brief, a vector of Lagrangian multipliers is associated with each sub-problem, and an iterative procedure (e.g., a sub-gradient optimization) adjusts these multipliers to find the tightest bound. Initially applied to integer programming, Lagrangian decomposition also had success in constraint programming due to its versatility and the fact that global constraints provide natural sub-problems. However, the non-linear and combinatorial nature of sub-problems in constraint programming makes it computationally intensive to optimize the Lagrangian multipliers with sub-gradient methods at each node of the tree search. This currently limits the practicality of LD as a general bounding mechanism for constraint programming. To address this challenge, we propose a self-supervised learning approach that leverages neural networks to generate multipliers directly, yielding tight bounds. This approach significantly reduces the number of sub-gradient optimization steps required, enhancing the pruning efficiency and reducing the execution time of constraint programming solvers. This contribution is one of the few that leverage learning to enhance bounding mechanisms on the dual side, a critical element in the design of combinatorial solvers. To our knowledge, this work presents the first generic method for learning valid dual bounds in constraint programming.
Authors: Mohammadreza Pourreza, Ruoxi Sun, Hailong Li, Lesly Miculicich, Tomas Pfister, Sercan O. Arik
Abstract: Text-to-SQL systems, which convert natural language queries into SQL commands, have seen significant progress primarily for the SQLite dialect. However, adapting these systems to other SQL dialects like BigQuery and PostgreSQL remains a challenge due to the diversity in SQL syntax and functions. We introduce SQL-GEN, a framework for generating high-quality dialect-specific synthetic data guided by dialect-specific tutorials, and demonstrate its effectiveness in creating training datasets for multiple dialects. Our approach significantly improves performance, by up to 20\%, over previous methods and reduces the gap with large-scale human-annotated datasets. Moreover, combining our synthetic data with human-annotated data provides additional performance boosts of 3.3\% to 5.6\%. We also introduce a novel Mixture of Experts (MoE) initialization method that integrates dialect-specific models into a unified system by merging self-attention layers and initializing the gates with dialect-specific keywords, further enhancing performance across different SQL dialects.
Authors: Irina-Elena Veliche, Zhuangqun Huang, Vineeth Ayyat Kochaniyan, Fuchun Peng, Ozlem Kalinli, Michael L. Seltzer
Abstract: The current public datasets for speech recognition (ASR) tend not to focus specifically on the fairness aspect, such as performance across different demographic groups. This paper introduces a novel dataset, Fair-Speech, a publicly released corpus to help researchers evaluate their ASR models for accuracy across a diverse set of self-reported demographic information, such as age, gender, ethnicity, geographic variation and whether the participants consider themselves native English speakers. Our dataset includes approximately 26.5K utterances in recorded speech by 593 people in the United States, who were paid to record and submit audios of themselves saying voice commands. We also provide ASR baselines, including on models trained on transcribed and untranscribed social media videos and open source models.
Authors: Abhishek Moitra, Abhiroop Bhattacharjee, Youngeun Kim, Priyadarshini Panda
Abstract: Due to the high computation overhead of Vision Transformers (ViTs), In-memory Computing architectures are being researched towards energy-efficient deployment in edge-computing scenarios. Prior works have proposed efficient algorithm-hardware co-design and IMC-architectural improvements to improve the energy-efficiency of IMC-implemented ViTs. However, all prior works have neglected the overhead and co-depencence of attention blocks on the accuracy-energy-delay-area of IMC-implemented ViTs. To this end, we propose TReX- an attention-reuse-driven ViT optimization framework that effectively performs attention reuse in ViT models to achieve optimal accuracy-energy-delay-area tradeoffs. TReX optimally chooses the transformer encoders for attention reuse to achieve near iso-accuracy performance while meeting the user-specified delay requirement. Based on our analysis on the Imagenet-1k dataset, we find that TReX achieves 2.3x (2.19x) EDAP reduction and 1.86x (1.79x) TOPS/mm2 improvement with ~1% accuracy drop in case of DeiT-S (LV-ViT-S) ViT models. Additionally, TReX achieves high accuracy at high EDAP reduction compared to state-of-the-art token pruning and weight sharing approaches. On NLP tasks such as CoLA, TReX leads to 2% higher non-ideal accuracy compared to baseline at 1.6x lower EDAP.
Authors: Guojin Chen, Haoyu Yang, Haoxing Ren, Bei Yu
Abstract: Advancements in chip design and manufacturing have enabled the processing of complex tasks such as deep learning and natural language processing, paving the way for the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). AI, on the other hand, can be leveraged to innovate and streamline semiconductor technology from planning and implementation to manufacturing. In this paper, we present \textit{Intelligent OPC Engineer Assistant}, an AI/LLM-powered methodology designed to solve the core manufacturing-aware optimization problem known as optical proximity correction (OPC). The methodology involves a reinforcement learning-based OPC recipe search and a customized multi-modal agent system for recipe summarization. Experiments demonstrate that our methodology can efficiently build OPC recipes on various chip designs with specially handled design topologies, a task that typically requires the full-time effort of OPC engineers with years of experience.
Authors: Clark Peng, Tolga Din\c{c}er
Abstract: In the domain of time series analysis, particularly in event detection tasks, current methodologies predominantly rely on segmentation-based approaches, which predict the class label for each individual timesteps and use the changepoints of these labels to detect events. However, these approaches may not effectively detect the precise onset and offset of events within the data and suffer from class imbalance problems. This study introduces a generalized regression-based approach to reframe the time-interval-defined event detection problem. Inspired by heatmap regression techniques from computer vision, our approach aims to predict probability densities at event locations rather than class labels across the entire time series. The primary aim of this approach is to improve the accuracy of event detection methods, particularly for long-duration events where identifying the onset and offset is more critical than classifying individual event states. We demonstrate that regression-based approaches outperform segmentation-based methods across various state-of-the-art baseline networks and datasets, offering a more effective solution for specific event detection tasks.
Authors: Ereena Bagga, Ang Yang
Abstract: This research focuses on developing a real-time posture monitoring and risk assessment system for manual lifting tasks using advanced AI and computer vision technologies. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are a significant concern for workers involved in manual lifting, and traditional methods for posture correction are often inadequate due to delayed feedback and lack of personalized assessment. Our proposed solution integrates AI-driven posture detection, detailed keypoint analysis, risk level determination, and real-time feedback delivered through a user-friendly web interface. The system aims to improve posture, reduce the risk of MSDs, and enhance user engagement. The research involves comprehensive data collection, model training, and iterative development to ensure high accuracy and user satisfaction. The solution's effectiveness is evaluated against existing methodologies, demonstrating significant improvements in real-time feedback and risk assessment. This study contributes to the field by offering a novel approach to posture correction that addresses existing gaps and provides practical, immediate benefits to users.
Authors: Yige Li, Hanxun Huang, Yunhan Zhao, Xingjun Ma, Jun Sun
Abstract: Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides across various tasks, but they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where specific triggers in the prompt cause the LLM to generate adversary-desired responses. While most backdoor research has focused on vision or text classification tasks, backdoor attacks in text generation have been largely overlooked. In this work, we introduce \textit{BackdoorLLM}, the first comprehensive benchmark for studying backdoor attacks on LLMs. \textit{BackdoorLLM} features: 1) a repository of backdoor benchmarks with a standardized training pipeline, 2) diverse attack strategies, including data poisoning, weight poisoning, hidden state attacks, and chain-of-thought attacks, 3) extensive evaluations with over 200 experiments on 8 attacks across 7 scenarios and 6 model architectures, and 4) key insights into the effectiveness and limitations of backdoors in LLMs. We hope \textit{BackdoorLLM} will raise awareness of backdoor threats and contribute to advancing AI safety. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/bboylyg/BackdoorLLM}.
Authors: Shuo Yang, Shizhen Li, Yanjun Huang, Hong Chen
Abstract: Autonomous driving systems with self-evolution capabilities have the potential to independently evolve in complex and open environments, allowing to handle more unknown scenarios. However, as a result of the safety-performance trade-off mechanism of evolutionary algorithms, it is difficult to ensure safe exploration without sacrificing the improvement ability. This problem is especially prominent in dynamic traffic scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a safe self-evolution algorithm for autonomous driving based on data-driven risk quantification model. Specifically, a risk quantification model based on the attention mechanism is proposed by modeling the way humans perceive risks during driving, with the idea of achieving safety situation estimation of the surrounding environment through a data-driven approach. To prevent the impact of over-conservative safety guarding policies on the self-evolution capability of the algorithm, a safety-evolutionary decision-control integration algorithm with adjustable safety limits is proposed, and the proposed risk quantization model is integrated into it. Simulation and real-vehicle experiments results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed algorithm can generate safe and reasonable actions in a variety of complex scenarios and guarantee safety without losing the evolutionary potential of learning-based autonomous driving systems.
Authors: Xiaowei Mao, Yan Lin, Shengnan Guo, Yubin Chen, Xingyu Xian, Haomin Wen, Qisen Xu, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification in travel time estimation (TTE) aims to estimate the confidence interval for travel time, given the origin (O), destination (D), and departure time (T). Accurately quantifying this uncertainty requires generating the most likely path and assessing travel time uncertainty along the path. This involves two main challenges: 1) Predicting a path that aligns with the ground truth, and 2) modeling the impact of travel time in each segment on overall uncertainty under varying conditions. We propose DutyTTE to address these challenges. For the first challenge, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning method to improve alignment between the predicted path and the ground truth, providing more accurate travel time information from road segments to improve TTE. For the second challenge, we propose a mixture of experts guided uncertainty quantification mechanism to better capture travel time uncertainty for each segment under varying contexts. Additionally, we calibrate our results using Hoeffding's upper-confidence bound to provide statistical guarantees for the estimated confidence intervals. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.
Authors: Mohsen Asghari Ilani, Saba Moftakhar Tehran, Ashkan Kavei, Hamed Alizadegan
Abstract: This paper explores machine learning (ML) models for classifying lung cancer levels to improve diagnostic accuracy and prognosis. Through parameter tuning and rigorous evaluation, we assess various ML algorithms. Techniques like minimum child weight and learning rate monitoring were used to reduce overfitting and optimize performance. Our findings highlight the robust performance of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models across all phases. Ensemble methods, including voting and bagging, also showed promise in enhancing predictive accuracy and robustness. However, Support Vector Machine (SVM) models with the Sigmoid kernel faced challenges, indicating a need for further refinement. Overall, our study provides insights into ML-based lung cancer classification, emphasizing the importance of parameter tuning to optimize model performance and improve diagnostic accuracy in oncological care.
Authors: Pritam Sil, Parag Chaudhuri, Bhaskaran Raman
Abstract: With recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), there has been growing interest in using state of the art (SOTA) AI solutions to provide assistance in grading handwritten answer sheets. While a few commercial products exist, the question of whether AI-assistance can actually reduce grading effort and time has not yet been carefully considered in published literature. This work introduces an AI-assisted grading pipeline. The pipeline first uses text detection to automatically detect question regions present in a question paper PDF. Next, it uses SOTA text detection methods to highlight important keywords present in the handwritten answer regions of scanned answer sheets to assist in the grading process. We then evaluate a prototype implementation of the AI-assisted grading pipeline deployed on an existing e-learning management platform. The evaluation involves a total of 5 different real-life examinations across 4 different courses at a reputed institute; it consists of a total of 42 questions, 17 graders, and 468 submissions. We log and analyze the grading time for each handwritten answer while using AI assistance and without it. Our evaluations have shown that, on average, the graders take 31% less time while grading a single response and 33% less grading time while grading a single answer sheet using AI assistance.
Authors: Zhou Xiaochen, Liang Xingzhou, Zou Hui, Lu Yi, Qu Jingjing
Abstract: This paper presents DeepDelveAI, a comprehensive dataset specifically curated to identify AI-related research papers from a large-scale academic literature database. The dataset was created using an advanced Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model trained on a binary classification task to distinguish between AI-related and non-AI-related papers. The model was trained and validated on a vast dataset, achieving high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The resulting DeepDelveAI dataset comprises over 9.4 million AI-related papers published since Dartmouth Conference, from 1956 to 2024, providing a crucial resource for analyzing trends, thematic developments, and the evolution of AI research across various disciplines.
Authors: Qika Lin, Yifan Zhu, Xin Mei, Ling Huang, Jingying Ma, Kai He, Zhen Peng, Erik Cambria, Mengling Feng
Abstract: The rapid development of artificial intelligence has constantly reshaped the field of intelligent healthcare and medicine. As a vital technology, multimodal learning has increasingly garnered interest due to data complementarity, comprehensive modeling form, and great application potential. Currently, numerous researchers are dedicating their attention to this field, conducting extensive studies and constructing abundant intelligent systems. Naturally, an open question arises that has multimodal learning delivered universal intelligence in healthcare? To answer the question, we adopt three unique viewpoints for a holistic analysis. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the current progress of medical multimodal learning from the perspectives of datasets, task-oriented methods, and universal foundation models. Based on them, we further discuss the proposed question from five issues to explore the real impacts of advanced techniques in healthcare, from data and technologies to performance and ethics. The answer is that current technologies have NOT achieved universal intelligence and there remains a significant journey to undertake. Finally, in light of the above reviews and discussions, we point out ten potential directions for exploration towards the goal of universal intelligence in healthcare.
Authors: Sumin Han, Jisun An, Dongman Lee
Abstract: For traffic prediction in transportation services such as car-sharing and ride-hailing, mid-term road traffic prediction (within a few hours) is considered essential. However, the existing road-level traffic prediction has mainly studied how significantly micro traffic events propagate to the adjacent roads in terms of short-term prediction. On the other hand, recent attempts have been made to incorporate regional knowledge such as POIs, road characteristics, and real-time social events to help traffic prediction. However, these studies lack in understandings of different modalities of road-level and region-level spatio-temporal correlations and how to combine such knowledge. This paper proposes a novel method that embeds real-time region-level knowledge using POIs, satellite images, and real-time LTE access traces via a regional spatio-temporal module that consists of dynamic convolution and temporal attention, and conducts bipartite spatial transform attention to convert into road-level knowledge. Then the model ingests this embedded knowledge into a road-level attention-based prediction model. Experimental results on real-world road traffic prediction show that our model outperforms the baselines.
Authors: Sumin Han, Jisun An, Youngjun Park, Suji Kim, Kitae Jang, Dongman Lee
Abstract: A reliable short-term transportation demand prediction supports the authorities in improving the capability of systems by optimizing schedules, adjusting fleet sizes, and generating new transit networks. A handful of research efforts incorporate one or a few areal features while learning spatio-temporal correlation, to capture similar demand patterns between similar areas. However, urban characteristics are polymorphic, and they need to be understood by multiple areal features such as land use, sociodemographics, and place-of-interest (POI) distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal multi-feature-aware graph convolutional recurrent network (ST-MFGCRN) that fuses multiple areal features during spatio-temproal understanding. Inside ST-MFGCRN, we devise sentinel attention to calculate the areal similarity matrix by allowing each area to take partial attention if the feature is not useful. We evaluate the proposed model on two real-world transportation datasets, one with our constructed BusDJ dataset and one with benchmark TaxiBJ. Results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines up to 7\% on BusDJ and 8\% on TaxiBJ dataset.
Authors: Bin Wang, Chunyu Xie, Dawei Leng, Yuhui Yin
Abstract: In the field of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), common methods typically involve unfreezing the language model during training to foster profound visual understanding. However, the fine-tuning of such models with vision-language data often leads to a diminution of their natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. To avoid this performance degradation, a straightforward solution is to freeze the language model while developing multimodal competencies. Unfortunately, previous works have not attained satisfactory outcomes. Building on the strategy of freezing the language model, we conduct thorough structural exploration and introduce the Inner-Adaptor Architecture (IAA). Specifically, the architecture incorporates multiple multimodal adaptors at varying depths within the large language model to facilitate direct interaction with the inherently text-oriented transformer layers, thereby enabling the frozen language model to acquire multimodal capabilities. Unlike previous approaches of freezing language models that require large-scale aligned data, our proposed architecture is able to achieve superior performance on small-scale datasets. We conduct extensive experiments to improve the general multimodal capabilities and visual grounding abilities of the MLLM. Our approach remarkably outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across various vision-language benchmarks without sacrificing performance on NLP tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/Inner-Adaptor-Architecture.
URLs: https://github.com/360CVGroup/Inner-Adaptor-Architecture.
Authors: Yilun Liu, Minggui He, Feiyu Yao, Yuhe Ji, Shimin Tao, Jingzhou Du, Duan Li, Jian Gao, Li Zhang, Hao Yang, Boxing Chen, Osamu Yoshie
Abstract: The emergence of text-to-image synthesis (TIS) models has significantly influenced digital image creation by producing high-quality visuals from written descriptions. Yet these models heavily rely on the quality and specificity of textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users who may not be familiar with TIS-model-preferred prompt writing. Existing solutions relieve this via automatic model-preferred prompt generation from user queries. However, this single-turn manner suffers from limited user-centricity in terms of result interpretability and user interactivity. To address these issues, we propose DialPrompt, a multi-turn dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasises user-centricity. DialPrompt is designed to follow a multi-turn guidance workflow, where in each round of dialogue the model queries user with their preferences on possible optimization dimensions before generating the final TIS prompt. To achieve this, we mined 15 essential dimensions for high-quality prompts from advanced users and curated a multi-turn dataset. Through training on this dataset, DialPrompt can improve interpretability by allowing users to understand the correlation between specific phrases and image attributes. Additionally, it enables greater user control and engagement in the prompt generation process, leading to more personalized and visually satisfying outputs. Experiments indicate that DialPrompt achieves a competitive result in the quality of synthesized images, outperforming existing prompt engineering approaches by 5.7%. Furthermore, in our user evaluation, DialPrompt outperforms existing approaches by 46.5% in user-centricity score and is rated 7.9/10 by 19 human reviewers.
Authors: Cl\'ement Contet, Umberto Grandi, J\'er\^ome Mengin
Abstract: We view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to identify minimal subsets of a preference profile that either imply the current winner or explain why a different candidate was not elected. Formal explanations turn out to have strong connections with classical problems studied in computational social choice such as bribery, possible and necessary winner identification, and preference learning. We design algorithms for computing abductive and contrastive explanations for scoring rules. For the Borda rule, we find a lower bound on the size of the smallest abductive explanations, and we conduct simulations to identify correlations between properties of preference profiles and the size of their smallest abductive explanations.
Authors: Chen Chen, Ziyao Liu, Weifeng Jiang, Goh Si Qi, KwoK-Yan Lam
Abstract: AI Safety is an emerging area of critical importance to the safe adoption and deployment of AI systems. With the rapid proliferation of AI and especially with the recent advancement of Generative AI (or GAI), the technology ecosystem behind the design, development, adoption, and deployment of AI systems has drastically changed, broadening the scope of AI Safety to address impacts on public safety and national security. In this paper, we propose a novel architectural framework for understanding and analyzing AI Safety; defining its characteristics from three perspectives: Trustworthy AI, Responsible AI, and Safe AI. We provide an extensive review of current research and advancements in AI safety from these perspectives, highlighting their key challenges and mitigation approaches. Through examples from state-of-the-art technologies, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), we present innovative mechanism, methodologies, and techniques for designing and testing AI safety. Our goal is to promote advancement in AI safety research, and ultimately enhance people's trust in digital transformation.
Authors: Anjana Wijekoon, Nirmalie Wiratunga, David Corsar, Kyle Martin, Ikechukwu Nkisi-Orji, Chamath Palihawadana, Marta Caro-Mart\'inez, Belen D\'iaz-Agudo, Derek Bridge, Anne Liret
Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) can greatly enhance user trust and satisfaction in AI-assisted decision-making processes. Recent findings suggest that a single explainer may not meet the diverse needs of multiple users in an AI system; indeed, even individual users may require multiple explanations. This highlights the necessity for a "multi-shot" approach, employing a combination of explainers to form what we introduce as an "explanation strategy". Tailored to a specific user or a user group, an "explanation experience" describes interactions with personalised strategies designed to enhance their AI decision-making processes. The iSee platform is designed for the intelligent sharing and reuse of explanation experiences, using Case-based Reasoning to advance best practices in XAI. The platform provides tools that enable AI system designers, i.e. design users, to design and iteratively revise the most suitable explanation strategy for their AI system to satisfy end-user needs. All knowledge generated within the iSee platform is formalised by the iSee ontology for interoperability. We use a summative mixed methods study protocol to evaluate the usability and utility of the iSee platform with six design users across varying levels of AI and XAI expertise. Our findings confirm that the iSee platform effectively generalises across applications and its potential to promote the adoption of XAI best practices.
Authors: Chenghua Gao, Min Li, Jianshuo Liu, Junxing Ren, Lin Chen, Haoyu Liu, Bo Meng, Jitao Fu, Wenwen Su
Abstract: Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to retrieve relevant moments of an untrimmed video corresponding to the query. While cross-modal interaction approaches have shown progress in filtering out query-irrelevant information in videos, they assume the precise alignment between the query semantics and the corresponding video moments, potentially overlooking the misunderstanding of the natural language semantics. To address this challenge, we propose a novel model called \textit{QD-VMR}, a query debiasing model with enhanced contextual understanding. Firstly, we leverage a Global Partial Aligner module via video clip and query features alignment and video-query contrastive learning to enhance the cross-modal understanding capabilities of the model. Subsequently, we employ a Query Debiasing Module to obtain debiased query features efficiently, and a Visual Enhancement module to refine the video features related to the query. Finally, we adopt the DETR structure to predict the possible target video moments. Through extensive evaluations of three benchmark datasets, QD-VMR achieves state-of-the-art performance, proving its potential to improve the accuracy of VMR. Further analytical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed module. Our code will be released to facilitate future research.
Authors: Soonwook Park, Donghoon Lee, Hogun Park
Abstract: In the rapidly advancing realm of educational technology, it becomes critical to accurately trace and understand student knowledge states. Conventional Knowledge Tracing (KT) models have mainly focused on binary responses (i.e., correct and incorrect answers) to questions. Unfortunately, they largely overlook the essential information in students' actual answer choices, particularly for Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), which could help reveal each learner's misconceptions or knowledge gaps. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Concept map-driven Response disentanglement method for enhancing Knowledge Tracing (CRKT) model. CRKT benefits KT by directly leveraging answer choices--beyond merely identifying correct or incorrect answers--to distinguish responses with different incorrect choices. We further introduce the novel use of unchosen responses by employing disentangled representations to get insights from options not selected by students. Additionally, CRKT tracks the student's knowledge state at the concept level and encodes the concept map, representing the relationships between them, to better predict unseen concepts. This approach is expected to provide actionable feedback, improving the learning experience. Our comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate CRKT's effectiveness, achieving superior performance in prediction accuracy and interpretability over state-of-the-art models.
Authors: Ruiyang Xu, Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Shing-Chi Cheung, Le Sun
Abstract: Code benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate Large Language Models' (LLMs) coding capabilities. However, there is an unignorable programming language bias in existing code benchmarks -- over 95% code generation benchmarks are dominated by Python, leaving the LLMs' capabilities in other programming languages such as Java and C/C++ unknown. Moreover, coding task bias is also crucial. Most benchmarks focus on code generation capability, while benchmarks for code reasoning (given input, reasoning output; and given output, reasoning input), an essential coding capability, are insufficient. Yet, constructing multi-lingual benchmarks can be expensive and labor-intensive, and codes in contest websites such as Leetcode suffer from data contamination during training. To fill this gap, we propose CRUXEVAL-X, a multi-lingual code reasoning benchmark that contains 19 programming languages. It comprises at least 600 subjects for each language, along with 19K content-consistent tests in total. In particular, the construction pipeline of CRUXEVAL-X works in a fully automated and test-guided manner, which iteratively generates and repairs based on execution feedback. Also, to cross language barriers (e.g., dynamic/static type systems in Python/C++), we formulated various transition rules between language pairs to facilitate translation. Our intensive evaluation of 24 representative LLMs reveals the correlation between language pairs. For example, TypeScript and JavaScript show a significant positive correlation, while Racket has less correlation with other languages. More interestingly, even a model trained solely on Python can achieve at most 34.4% Pass@1 in other languages, revealing the cross-language generalization of LLMs.
Authors: Lianyu Wang, Meng Wang, Huazhu Fu, Daoqiang Zhang
Abstract: Model intellectual property (IP) protection has attracted growing attention as science and technology advancements stem from human intellectual labor and computational expenses. Ensuring IP safety for trainers and owners is of utmost importance, particularly in domains where ownership verification and applicability authorization are required. A notable approach to safeguarding model IP involves proactively preventing the use of well-trained models of authorized domains from unauthorized domains. In this paper, we introduce a novel Compact Un-transferable Pyramid Isolation Domain (CUPI-Domain) which serves as a barrier against illegal transfers from authorized to unauthorized domains. Drawing inspiration from human transitive inference and learning abilities, the CUPI-Domain is designed to obstruct cross-domain transfers by emphasizing the distinctive style features of the authorized domain. This emphasis leads to failure in recognizing irrelevant private style features on unauthorized domains. To this end, we propose novel CUPI-Domain generators, which select features from both authorized and CUPI-Domain as anchors. Then, we fuse the style features and semantic features of these anchors to generate labeled and style-rich CUPI-Domain. Additionally, we design external Domain-Information Memory Banks (DIMB) for storing and updating labeled pyramid features to obtain stable domain class features and domain class-wise style features. Based on the proposed whole method, the novel style and discriminative loss functions are designed to effectively enhance the distinction in style and discriminative features between authorized and unauthorized domains, respectively. Moreover, we provide two solutions for utilizing CUPI-Domain based on whether the unauthorized domain is known: target-specified CUPI-Domain and target-free CUPI-Domain.
Authors: Qiming Zhu, Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Shing-Chi Cheung
Abstract: Code benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), providing insights into their strengths and weaknesses. However, current benchmarks primarily exercise LLMs' capability on common coding tasks (e.g., bubble sort, greatest common divisor), leaving domain-specific coding tasks (e.g., computation, system, cryptography) unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a multi-domain code benchmark, DOMAINEVAL, designed to evaluate LLMs' coding capabilities thoroughly. Our pipeline works in a fully automated manner, enabling a push-bottom construction from code repositories into formatted subjects under study. Interesting findings are observed by evaluating 12 representative LLMs against DOMAINEVAL. We notice that LLMs are generally good at computation tasks while falling short on cryptography and system coding tasks. The performance gap can be as much as 68.94% (80.94% - 12.0%) in some LLMs. We also observe that generating more samples can increase the overall performance of LLMs, while the domain bias may even increase. The contributions of this study include a code generation benchmark dataset DOMAINEVAL, encompassing six popular domains, a fully automated pipeline for constructing code benchmarks, and an identification of the limitations of LLMs in code generation tasks based on their performance on DOMAINEVAL, providing directions for future research improvements. The leaderboard is available at https://domaineval.github.io/.
Authors: Manuel R. Torres, Parisa Zehtabi, Michael Cashmore, Daniele Magazzeni, Manuela Veloso
Abstract: In this work we consider a new interpretation of fairness in decision making problems. Building upon existing fairness formulations, we focus on how to reason over fairness from a temporal perspective, taking into account the fairness of a history of past decisions. After introducing the concept of temporal fairness, we propose three approaches that incorporate temporal fairness in decision making problems formulated as optimization problems. We present a qualitative evaluation of our approach in four different domains and compare the solutions against a baseline approach that does not consider the temporal aspect of fairness.
Authors: Ahmad Pouramini, Hesham Faili
Abstract: In recent years, multi-task prompt tuning has garnered considerable attention for its inherent modularity and potential to enhance parameter-efficient transfer learning across diverse tasks. This paper aims to analyze and improve the performance of multiple tasks by facilitating the transfer of knowledge between their corresponding prompts in a multi-task setting. Our proposed approach decomposes the prompt for each target task into a combination of shared prompts (source prompts) and a task-specific prompt (private prompt). During training, the source prompts undergo fine-tuning and are integrated with the private prompt to drive the target prompt for each task. We present and compare multiple methods for combining source prompts to construct the target prompt, analyzing the roles of both source and private prompts within each method. We investigate their contributions to task performance and offer flexible, adjustable configurations based on these insights to optimize performance. Our empirical findings clearly showcase improvements in accuracy and robustness compared to the conventional practice of prompt tuning and related works. Notably, our results substantially outperform other methods in the field in few-shot settings, demonstrating superior performance in various tasks across GLUE benchmark, among other tasks. This achievement is attained with a significantly reduced amount of training data, making our method a promising one for few-shot settings.
Authors: Qiyao Liang, Ziming Liu, Mitchell Ostrow, Ila Fiete
Abstract: Diffusion models are capable of generating photo-realistic images that combine elements which likely do not appear together in the training set, demonstrating the ability to compositionally generalize. Nonetheless, the precise mechanism of compositionality and how it is acquired through training remains elusive. Inspired by cognitive neuroscientific approaches, we consider a highly reduced setting to examine whether and when diffusion models learn semantically meaningful and factorized representations of composable features. We performed extensive controlled experiments on conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) trained to generate various forms of 2D Gaussian data. We found that the models learn factorized but not fully continuous manifold representations for encoding continuous features of variation underlying the data. With such representations, models demonstrate superior feature compositionality but limited ability to interpolate over unseen values of a given feature. Our experimental results further demonstrate that diffusion models can attain compositionality with few compositional examples, suggesting a more efficient way to train DDPMs. Finally, we connect manifold formation in diffusion models to percolation theory in physics, offering insight into the sudden onset of factorized representation learning. Our thorough toy experiments thus contribute a deeper understanding of how diffusion models capture compositional structure in data.
Authors: Yubin Zang, Zuxing Zhang, Simin Li, Fangzheng Zhang, Hongwei Chen
Abstract: Optical neural networks have long cast attention nowadays. Like other optical structured neural networks, fiber neural networks which utilize the mechanism of light transmission to compute can take great advantages in both computing efficiency and power cost. Though the potential ability of optical fiber was demonstrated via the establishing of fiber neural networks, it will be of great significance of combining both fiber transmission and computing functions so as to cater the needs of future beyond 5G intelligent communication signal processing. Thus, in this letter, the fiber neural networks and their related optical signal processing methods will be both developed. In this way, information derived from the transmitted signals can be directly processed in the optical domain rather than being converted to the electronic domain. As a result, both prominent gains in processing efficiency and power cost can be further obtained. The fidelity of the whole structure and related methods is demonstrated by the task of modulation format recognition which plays important role in fiber optical communications without losing the generality.
Authors: Jaiv Doshi, Ines Novacic, Curtis Fletcher, Mats Borges, Elea Zhong, Mark C. Marino, Jason Gan, Sophia Mager, Dane Sprague, Melinda Xia
Abstract: This paper presents a study on the growing threat of "sleeper social bots," AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their ability to pass as humans on social platforms, where they're embedded like political "sleeper" agents, making them harder to detect and more disruptive. To illustrate the threat these bots pose, our research team at the University of Southern California constructed a demonstration using a private Mastodon server, where ChatGPT-driven bots, programmed with distinct personalities and political viewpoints, engaged in discussions with human participants about a fictional electoral proposition. Our preliminary findings suggest these bots can convincingly pass as human users, actively participate in conversations, and effectively disseminate disinformation. Moreover, they can adapt their arguments based on the responses of human interlocutors, showcasing their dynamic and persuasive capabilities. College students participating in initial experiments failed to identify our bots, underscoring the urgent need for increased awareness and education about the dangers of AI-driven disinformation, and in particular, disinformation spread by bots. The implications of our research point to the significant challenges posed by social bots in the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election and beyond.
Authors: Thomas Helmuth, Edward Pantridge, James Gunder Frazier, Lee Spector
Abstract: Counterexample-driven genetic programming (CDGP) uses specifications provided as formal constraints to generate the training cases used to evaluate evolving programs. It has also been extended to combine formal constraints and user-provided training data to solve symbolic regression problems. Here we show how the ideas underlying CDGP can also be applied using only user-provided training data, without formal specifications. We demonstrate the application of this method, called ``informal CDGP,'' to software synthesis problems. Our results show that informal CDGP finds solutions faster (i.e. with fewer program executions) than standard GP. Additionally, we propose two new variants to informal CDGP, and find that one produces significantly more successful runs on about half of the tested problems. Finally, we study whether the addition of counterexample training cases to the training set is useful by comparing informal CDGP to using a static subsample of the training set, and find that the addition of counterexamples significantly improves performance.
Authors: Yingbin Liang, Xiqing Liu, Haohao Xia, Yiru Cang, Zitao Zheng, Yuanfang Yang
Abstract: In this paper, Pro-HRnet-CNN, an innovative model combining HRNet and void-convolution techniques, is proposed for disease prediction under lung imaging. Through the experimental comparison on the authoritative LIDC-IDRI dataset, we found that compared with the traditional ResNet-50, Pro-HRnet-CNN showed better performance in the feature extraction and recognition of small-size nodules, significantly improving the detection accuracy. Particularly within the domain of detecting smaller targets, the model has exhibited a remarkable enhancement in accuracy, thereby pioneering an innovative avenue for the early identification and prognostication of pulmonary conditions.
Authors: Luyang Luo, Mingxiang Wu, Mei Li, Yi Xin, Qiong Wang, Varut Vardhanabhuti, Winnie CW Chu, Zhenhui Li, Juan Zhou, Pranav Rajpurkar, Hao Chen
Abstract: Breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the imaging technique with the highest sensitivity for detecting breast cancer and is routinely used for women at high risk. Despite the comprehensive multiparametric protocol of breast MRI, existing artificial intelligence-based studies predominantly rely on single sequences and have limited validation. Here we report a large mixture-of-modality-experts model (MOME) that integrates multiparametric MRI information within a unified structure, offering a noninvasive method for personalized breast cancer management. We have curated the largest multiparametric breast MRI dataset, involving 5,205 patients from three hospitals in the north, southeast, and southwest of China, for the development and extensive evaluation of our model. MOME demonstrated accurate and robust identification of breast cancer. It achieved comparable performance for malignancy recognition to that of four senior radiologists and significantly outperformed a junior radiologist, with 0.913 AUROC, 0.948 AUPRC, 0.905 F1 score, and 0.723 MCC. Our findings suggest that MOME could reduce the need for biopsies in BI-RADS 4 patients with a ratio of 7.3%, classify triple-negative breast cancer with an AUROC of 0.709, and predict pathological complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy with an AUROC of 0.694. The model further supports scalable and interpretable inference, adapting to missing modalities and providing decision explanations by highlighting lesions and measuring modality contributions. MOME exemplifies a discriminative, robust, scalable, and interpretable multimodal model, paving the way for noninvasive, personalized management of breast cancer patients based on multiparametric breast imaging data.
Authors: Sai Deepesh Pokala, Marie Bernert, Takuya Nanami, Takashi Kohno, Timoth\'ee L\'evi, Blaise Yvert
Abstract: As neural interfaces become more advanced, there has been an increase in the volume and complexity of neural data recordings. These interfaces capture rich information about neural dynamics that call for efficient, real-time processing algorithms to spontaneously extract and interpret patterns of neural dynamics. Moreover, being able to do so in a fully unsupervised manner is critical as patterns in vast streams of neural data might not be easily identifiable by the human eye. Formal Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have come a long way in performing pattern recognition tasks for various static and sequential pattern recognition applications. However, these networks usually require large labeled datasets for training and have high power consumption preventing their future embedding in active brain implants. An alternative aimed at addressing these issues are Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) which are neuromorphic and use more biologically plausible neurons with evolving membrane potentials. In this context, we introduce here a frugal single-layer SNN designed for fully unsupervised identification and classification of multivariate temporal patterns in continuous data with a sequential approach. We show that, with only a handful number of neurons, this strategy is efficient to recognize highly overlapping multivariate temporal patterns, first on simulated data, and then on Mel Cepstral representations of speech sounds and finally on multichannel neural data. This approach relies on several biologically inspired plasticity rules, including Spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), Short-term plasticity (STP) and intrinsic plasticity (IP). These results pave the way towards highly frugal SNNs for fully unsupervised and online-compatible learning of complex multivariate temporal patterns for future embedding in dedicated very-low power hardware.
Authors: Yu Zhang, Yongxiang Zou, Haoyu Zhang, Zeyu Liu, Houcheng Li, Long Cheng
Abstract: In the field of autonomous systems, accurately predicting the trajectories of nearby vehicles and pedestrians is crucial for ensuring both safety and operational efficiency. This paper introduces a novel methodology for trajectory forecasting based on state-space dynamic system modeling, which endows agents with models that have tangible physical implications. To enhance the precision of state estimations within the dynamic system, the paper also presents a novel modeling technique for control variables. This technique utilizes a newly introduced model, termed "Mixed Mamba," to derive initial control states, thereby improving the predictive accuracy of these variables. Moverover, the proposed approach ingeniously integrates graph neural networks with state-space models, effectively capturing the complexities of multi-agent interactions. This combination provides a robust and scalable framework for forecasting multi-agent trajectories across a range of scenarios. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that this model outperforms several established benchmarks across various metrics and datasets, highlighting its significant potential to advance trajectory forecasting in autonomous systems.
Authors: Andreas Jungherr, Adrian Rauchfleisch, Alexander Wuttke
Abstract: All over the world, political parties, politicians, and campaigns explore how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help them win elections. However, the effects of these activities are unknown. We propose a framework for assessing AI's impact on elections by considering its application in various campaigning tasks. The electoral uses of AI vary widely, carrying different levels of concern and need for regulatory oversight. To account for this diversity, we group AI-enabled campaigning uses into three categories -- campaign operations, voter outreach, and deception. Using this framework, we provide the first systematic evidence from a preregistered representative survey and two preregistered experiments (n=7,635) on how Americans think about AI in elections and the effects of specific campaigning choices. We provide three significant findings. 1) the public distinguishes between different AI uses in elections, seeing AI uses predominantly negative but objecting most strongly to deceptive uses; 2) deceptive AI practices can have adverse effects on relevant attitudes and strengthen public support for stopping AI development; 3) Although deceptive electoral uses of AI are intensely disliked, they do not result in substantial favorability penalties for the parties involved. There is a misalignment of incentives for deceptive practices and their externalities. We cannot count on public opinion to provide strong enough incentives for parties to forgo tactical advantages from AI-enabled deception. There is a need for regulatory oversight and systematic outside monitoring of electoral uses of AI. Still, regulators should account for the diversity of AI uses and not completely disincentivize their electoral use.
Authors: Zhiyu Wu, Jinshi Cui
Abstract: Image-level weak-to-strong consistency serves as the predominant paradigm in semi-supervised learning~(SSL) due to its simplicity and impressive performance. Nonetheless, this approach confines all perturbations to the image level and suffers from the excessive presence of naive samples, thus necessitating further improvement. In this paper, we introduce feature-level perturbation with varying intensities and forms to expand the augmentation space, establishing the image-feature weak-to-strong consistency paradigm. Furthermore, our paradigm develops a triple-branch structure, which facilitates interactions between both types of perturbations within one branch to boost their synergy. Additionally, we present a confidence-based identification strategy to distinguish between naive and challenging samples, thus introducing additional challenges exclusively for naive samples. Notably, our paradigm can seamlessly integrate with existing SSL methods. We apply the proposed paradigm to several representative algorithms and conduct experiments on multiple benchmarks, including both balanced and imbalanced distributions for labeled samples. The results demonstrate a significant enhancement in the performance of existing SSL algorithms.
Authors: Weilong Chen, Wenxuan Xu, Haoran Chen, Xinran Zhang, Zhijin Qin, Yanru Zhang, Zhu Han
Abstract: Underwater communication is essential for environmental monitoring, marine biology research, and underwater exploration. Traditional underwater communication faces limitations like low bandwidth, high latency, and susceptibility to noise, while semantic communication (SC) offers a promising solution by focusing on the exchange of semantics rather than symbols or bits. However, SC encounters challenges in underwater environments, including information loss and difficulties in accurately identifying and transmitting critical information that aligns with the diverse requirements of underwater applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Semantic Communication (SC) framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our framework leverages visual LLMs to perform semantic compression and prioritization of underwater image data according to the query from users. By identifying and encoding key semantic elements within the images, the system selectively transmits high-priority information while applying higher compression rates to less critical regions. On the receiver side, an LLM-based recovery mechanism, along with Global Vision ControlNet and Key Region ControlNet networks, aids in reconstructing the images, thereby enhancing communication efficiency and robustness. Our framework reduces the overall data size to 0.8\% of the original. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, ensuring high-quality, semantically accurate image reconstruction.
Authors: Mohammadreza amiri, GholamAli montazer, Ebrahim Mousavi
Abstract: The E-learning environment offers greater flexibility compared to face-to-face interactions, allowing for adapting educational content to meet learners' individual needs and abilities through personalization and customization of e-content and the educational process. Despite the advantages of this approach, customizing the learning environment can reduce the costs of tutoring systems for similar learners by utilizing the same content and process for co-like learning groups. Various indicators for grouping learners exist, but many of them are conceptual, uncertain, and subject to change over time. In this article, we propose using the Felder-Silverman model, which is based on learning styles, to group similar learners. Additionally, we model the behaviors and actions of e-learners in a network environment using Fuzzy Set Theory (FST). After identifying the learning styles of the learners, co-like learning groups are formed, and each group receives adaptive content based on their preferences, needs, talents, and abilities. By comparing the results of the experimental and control groups, we determine the effectiveness of the proposed grouping method. In terms of "educational success," the weighted average score of the experimental group is 17.65 out of 20, while the control group achieves a score of 12.6 out of 20. Furthermore, the "educational satisfaction" of the experimental group is 67%, whereas the control group's satisfaction level is 37%.
Authors: Zhenyu Lu, Hao Tang
Abstract: Data-Free Class Incremental Learning (DFCIL) aims to enable models to continuously learn new classes while retraining knowledge of old classes, even when the training data for old classes is unavailable. Although explored primarily with image datasets by researchers, this study focuses on investigating DFCIL for skeleton-based gesture classification due to its significant real-world implications, particularly considering the growing prevalence of VR/AR headsets where gestures serve as the primary means of control and interaction. In this work, we made an intriguing observation: skeleton models trained with base classes(even very limited) demonstrate strong generalization capabilities to unseen classes without requiring additional training. Building on this insight, we developed Synthetic Feature Replay (SFR) that can sample synthetic features from class prototypes to replay for old classes and augment for new classes (under a few-shot setting). Our proposed method showcases significant advancements over the state-of-the-art, achieving up to 15% enhancements in mean accuracy across all steps and largely mitigating the accuracy imbalance between base classes and new classes.
Authors: Qiuchang Han, Xingliang Jiang, Yang Zhao, Xudong Wang, Zhijin Li, Renhe Zhang
Abstract: Satellite altimetry has been widely utilized to monitor global sea surface dynamics, enabling investigation of upper ocean variability from basin-scale to localized eddy ranges. However, the sparse spatial resolution of observational altimetry limits our understanding of oceanic submesoscale variability, prevalent at horizontal scales below 0.25o resolution. Here, we introduce a state-of-the-art generative diffusion model to train high-resolution sea surface height (SSH) reanalysis data and demonstrate its advantage in observational SSH downscaling over the eddy-rich Kuroshio Extension region. The diffusion-based model effectively downscales raw satellite-interpolated data from 0.25o resolution to 1/16o, corresponding to approximately 12-km wavelength. This model outperforms other high-resolution reanalysis datasets and neural network-based methods. Also, it successfully reproduces the spatial patterns and power spectra of satellite along-track observations. Our diffusion-based results indicate that eddy kinetic energy at horizontal scales less than 250 km has intensified significantly since 2004 in the Kuroshio Extension region. These findings underscore the great potential of deep learning in reconstructing satellite altimetry and enhancing our understanding of ocean dynamics at eddy scales.
Authors: Sagar Srinivas Sakhinana, Krishna Sai Sudhir Aripirala, Shivam Gupta, Venkataramana Runkana
Abstract: Digital Twin technology creates virtual replicas of physical objects, processes, or systems by replicating their properties, data, and behaviors. This advanced technology offers a range of intelligent functionalities, such as modeling, simulation, and data-driven decision-making, that facilitate design optimization, performance estimation, and monitoring operations. Forecasting plays a pivotal role in Digital Twin technology, as it enables the prediction of future outcomes, supports informed decision-making, minimizes risks, driving improvements in efficiency, productivity, and cost reduction. Recently, Digital Twin technology has leveraged Graph forecasting techniques in large-scale complex sensor networks to enable accurate forecasting and simulation of diverse scenarios, fostering proactive and data-driven decision making. However, existing Graph forecasting techniques lack scalability for many real-world applications. They have limited ability to adapt to non-stationary environments, retain past knowledge, lack a mechanism to capture the higher order spatio-temporal dynamics, and estimate uncertainty in model predictions. To surmount the challenges, we introduce a hybrid architecture that enhances the hypergraph representation learning backbone by incorporating fast adaptation to new patterns and memory-based retrieval of past knowledge. This balance aims to improve the slowly-learned backbone and achieve better performance in adapting to recent changes. In addition, it models the time-varying uncertainty of multi-horizon forecasts, providing estimates of prediction uncertainty. Our forecasting architecture has been validated through ablation studies and has demonstrated promising results across multiple benchmark datasets, surpassing state-ofthe-art forecasting methods by a significant margin.
Authors: Hugo Lauren\c{c}on, Andr\'es Marafioti, Victor Sanh, L\'eo Tronchon
Abstract: The field of vision-language models (VLMs), which take images and texts as inputs and output texts, is rapidly evolving and has yet to reach consensus on several key aspects of the development pipeline, including data, architecture, and training methods. This paper can be seen as a tutorial for building a VLM. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each, addressing the major challenges in the field, and suggesting promising research directions for underexplored areas. We then walk through the practical steps to build Idefics3-8B, a powerful VLM that significantly outperforms its predecessor Idefics2-8B, while being trained efficiently, exclusively on open datasets, and using a straightforward pipeline. These steps include the creation of Docmatix, a dataset for improving document understanding capabilities, which is 240 times larger than previously available datasets. We release the model along with the datasets created for its training.
Authors: Priyanka Kumar
Abstract: Fault detection in automotive engine systems is one of the most promising research areas. Several works have been done in the field of model-based fault diagnosis. Many researchers have discovered more advanced statistical methods and algorithms for better fault detection on any automotive dynamic engine system. The gas turbines/diesel engines produce highly complex and huge data which are highly non-linear. So, researchers should come up with an automated system that is more resilient and robust enough to handle this huge, complex data in highly non-linear dynamic automotive systems. Here, I present an AI-based fault classification and prediction model in the diesel engine that can be applied to any highly non-linear dynamic automotive system. The main contribution of this paper is the AI-based Transformer fault classification and prediction model in the diesel engine concerning the worldwide harmonic light vehicle test procedure (WLTP) driving cycle. This model used 27 input dimensions, 64 hidden dimensions with 2 layers, and 9 heads to create a classifier with 12 output heads (one for fault-free data and 11 different fault types). This model was trained on the UTSA Arc High-Performance Compute (HPC) cluster with 5 NVIDIA V100 GPUs, 40-core CPUs, and 384GB RAM and achieved 70.01 % accuracy on a held test set.
Authors: Nithya Shikarpur, Krishna Maneesha Dendukur, Yusong Wu, Antoine Caillon, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang
Abstract: Hindustani music is a performance-driven oral tradition that exhibits the rendition of rich melodic patterns. In this paper, we focus on generative modeling of singers' vocal melodies extracted from audio recordings, as the voice is musically prominent within the tradition. Prior generative work in Hindustani music models melodies as coarse discrete symbols which fails to capture the rich expressive melodic intricacies of singing. Thus, we propose to use a finely quantized pitch contour, as an intermediate representation for hierarchical audio modeling. We propose GaMaDHaNi, a modular two-level hierarchy, consisting of a generative model on pitch contours, and a pitch contour to audio synthesis model. We compare our approach to non-hierarchical audio models and hierarchical models that use a self-supervised intermediate representation, through a listening test and qualitative analysis. We also evaluate audio model's ability to faithfully represent the pitch contour input using Pearson correlation coefficient. By using pitch contours as an intermediate representation, we show that our model may be better equipped to listen and respond to musicians in a human-AI collaborative setting by highlighting two potential interaction use cases (1) primed generation, and (2) coarse pitch conditioning.
Authors: Ali Falahati, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
Abstract: With the emergence of data marketplaces, the demand for methods to assess the value of data has increased significantly. While numerous techniques have been proposed for this purpose, none have specifically addressed graphs as the main data modality. Graphs are widely used across various fields, ranging from chemical molecules to social networks. In this study, we break down graphs into two main components: structural and featural, and we focus on evaluating data without relying on specific task-related metrics, making it applicable in practical scenarios where validation requirements may be lacking. We introduce a novel framework called blind message passing, which aligns the seller's and buyer's graphs using a shared node permutation based on graph matching. This allows us to utilize the graph Wasserstein distance to quantify the differences in the structural distribution of graph datasets, called the structural disparities. We then consider featural aspects of buyers' and sellers' graphs for data valuation and capture their statistical similarities and differences, referred to as relevance and diversity, respectively. Our approach ensures that buyers and sellers remain unaware of each other's datasets. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the relevance, diversity, and structural disparities of seller data for buyers, particularly in graph-based data valuation scenarios.
Authors: Leizhen Zhang, Lusi Li, Di Wu, Sheng Chen, Yi He
Abstract: Its crux lies in the optimization of a tradeoff between accuracy and fairness of resultant models on the selected feature subset. The technical challenge of our setting is twofold: 1) streaming feature inputs, such that an informative feature may become obsolete or redundant for prediction if its information has been covered by other similar features that arrived prior to it, and 2) non-associational feature correlation, such that bias may be leaked from those seemingly admissible, non-protected features. To overcome this, we propose Streaming Feature Selection with Causal Fairness (SFCF) that builds two causal graphs egocentric to prediction label and protected feature, respectively, striving to model the complex correlation structure among streaming features, labels, and protected information. As such, bias can be eradicated from predictive modeling by removing those features being causally correlated with the protected feature yet independent to the labels. We theorize that the originally redundant features for prediction can later become admissible, when the learning accuracy is compromised by the large number of removed features (non-protected but can be used to reconstruct bias information). We benchmark SFCF\ on five datasets widely used in streaming feature research, and the results substantiate its performance superiority over six rival models in terms of efficiency and sparsity of feature selection and equalized odds of the resultant predictive models.
Authors: Ziwen Kan, Shahbaz Rezaei, Xin liu
Abstract: The popularity of deep learning methods in the time series domain boosts interest in interpretability studies, including counterfactual (CF) methods. CF methods identify minimal changes in instances to alter the model predictions. Despite extensive research, no existing work benchmarks CF methods in the time series domain. Additionally, the results reported in the literature are inconclusive due to the limited number of datasets and inadequate metrics. In this work, we redesign quantitative metrics to accurately capture desirable characteristics in CFs. We specifically redesign the metrics for sparsity and plausibility and introduce a new metric for consistency. Combined with validity, generation time, and proximity, we form a comprehensive metric set. We systematically benchmark 6 different CF methods on 20 univariate datasets and 10 multivariate datasets with 3 different classifiers. Results indicate that the performance of CF methods varies across metrics and among different models. Finally, we provide case studies and a guideline for practical usage.
Authors: Wupadrasta Santosh Kumar, Sayali Rajendra Bhutare, Neelam Sinha, Thomas Gregor Issac
Abstract: This study investigates the causal relationships between Clinical Dementia Ratings (CDR) and its six domain scores across two distinct aging datasets: the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the Longitudinal Aging Study of India (LASI). Using Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) derived from Bayesian network models, we analyze the dependencies among domain scores and their influence on the global CDR. Our approach leverages the PC algorithm to estimate the DAG structures for both datasets, revealing notable differences in causal relationships and edge strengths between the Western and Indian populations. The analysis highlights a stronger dependency of CDR scores on memory functions in both datasets, but with significant variations in edge strengths and node degrees. By contrasting these findings, we aim to elucidate population-specific differences and similarities in dementia progression, providing insights that could inform targeted interventions and improve understanding of dementia across diverse demographic contexts.
Authors: Zhibo Jin, Jiayu Zhang, Zhiyu Zhu, Xinyi Wang, Yiyun Huang, Huaming Chen
Abstract: Adversarial examples are a key method to exploit deep neural networks. Using gradient information, such examples can be generated in an efficient way without altering the victim model. Recent frequency domain transformation has further enhanced the transferability of such adversarial examples, such as spectrum simulation attack. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of frequency domain-based attacks, aligning with similar findings in the spatial domain. Furthermore, such consistency between the frequency and spatial domains provides insights into how gradient-based adversarial attacks induce perturbations across different domains, which is yet to be explored. Hence, we propose a simple, effective, and scalable gradient-based adversarial attack algorithm leveraging the information consistency in both frequency and spatial domains. We evaluate the algorithm for its effectiveness against different models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results compared to other gradient-based algorithms. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LMBTough/FSA.
Authors: Shentong Mo, Paul Pu Liang
Abstract: Biomedical data is inherently multimodal, consisting of electronic health records, medical imaging, digital pathology, genome sequencing, wearable sensors, and more. The application of artificial intelligence tools to these multifaceted sensing technologies has the potential to revolutionize the prognosis, diagnosis, and management of human health and disease. However, current approaches to biomedical AI typically only train and evaluate with one or a small set of medical modalities and tasks. This limitation hampers the development of comprehensive tools that can leverage the rich interconnected information across many heterogeneous biomedical sensors. To address this challenge, we present MultiMed, a benchmark designed to evaluate and enable large-scale learning across a wide spectrum of medical modalities and tasks. MultiMed consists of 2.56 million samples across ten medical modalities such as medical reports, pathology, genomics, and protein data, and is structured into eleven challenging tasks, including disease prognosis, protein structure prediction, and medical question answering. Using MultiMed, we conduct comprehensive experiments benchmarking state-of-the-art unimodal, multimodal, and multitask models. Our analysis highlights the advantages of training large-scale medical models across many related modalities and tasks. Moreover, MultiMed enables studies of generalization across related medical concepts, robustness to real-world noisy data and distribution shifts, and novel modality combinations to improve prediction performance. MultiMed will be publicly available and regularly updated and welcomes inputs from the community.
Authors: Zhuowen Zhao, Xiaoya Chong, Tanny Chavez, Alexander Hexemer
Abstract: We fine-tuned a foundational stable diffusion model using X-ray scattering images and their corresponding descriptions to generate new scientific images from given prompts. However, some of the generated images exhibit significant unrealistic artifacts, commonly known as "hallucinations". To address this issue, we trained various computer vision models on a dataset composed of 60% human-approved generated images and 40% experimental images to detect unrealistic images. The classified images were then reviewed and corrected by human experts, and subsequently used to further refine the classifiers in next rounds of training and inference. Our evaluations demonstrate the feasibility of generating high-fidelity, domain-specific images using a fine-tuned diffusion model. We anticipate that generative AI will play a crucial role in enhancing data augmentation and driving the development of digital twins in scientific research facilities.
Authors: Woojin Shin, Donghwa Kang, Daejin Choi, Brent Kang, Jinkyu Lee, Hyeongboo Baek
Abstract: Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to construct moving trajectories for objects, and modern multi-object trackers mainly utilize the tracking-by-detection methodology. Initial approaches to MOT attacks primarily aimed to degrade the detection quality of the frames under attack, thereby reducing accuracy only in those specific frames, highlighting a lack of \textit{efficiency}. To improve efficiency, recent advancements manipulate object positions to cause persistent identity (ID) switches during the association phase, even after the attack ends within a few frames. However, these position-manipulating attacks have inherent limitations, as they can be easily counteracted by adjusting distance-related parameters in the association phase, revealing a lack of \textit{robustness}. In this paper, we present \textsf{BankTweak}, a novel adversarial attack designed for MOT trackers, which features efficiency and robustness. \textsf{BankTweak} focuses on the feature extractor in the association phase and reveals vulnerability in the Hungarian matching method used by feature-based MOT systems. Exploiting the vulnerability, \textsf{BankTweak} induces persistent ID switches (addressing \textit{efficiency}) even after the attack ends by strategically injecting altered features into the feature banks without modifying object positions (addressing \textit{robustness}). To demonstrate the applicability, we apply \textsf{BankTweak} to three multi-object trackers (DeepSORT, StrongSORT, and MOTDT) with one-stage, two-stage, anchor-free, and transformer detectors. Extensive experiments on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets show that our method substantially surpasses existing attacks, exposing the vulnerability of the tracking-by-detection framework to \textsf{BankTweak}.
Authors: Mengya Hu, Rui Xu, Deren Lei, Yaxi Li, Mingyu Wang, Emily Ching, Eslam Kamal, Alex Deng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable but face latency challenges in real-time applications, such as conducting online hallucination detection. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages a small language model (SLM) classifier for initial detection, followed by a LLM as constrained reasoner to generate detailed explanations for detected hallucinated content. This study optimizes the real-time interpretable hallucination detection by introducing effective prompting techniques that align LLM-generated explanations with SLM decisions. Empirical experiment results demonstrate its effectiveness, thereby enhancing the overall user experience.
Authors: Memoona Aziz, Umair Rahman, Syed Ali Safi, Amir Zaib Abbasi
Abstract: The rapid advancements in AI technologies have revolutionized the production of graphical content across various sectors, including entertainment, advertising, and e-commerce. These developments have spurred the need for robust evaluation methods to assess the quality and realism of AI-generated images. To address this, we conducted three studies. First, we introduced and validated a questionnaire called Visual Verity, which measures photorealism, image quality, and text-image alignment. Second, we applied this questionnaire to assess images from AI models (DALL-E2, DALL-E3, GLIDE, Stable Diffusion) and camera-generated images, revealing that camera-generated images excelled in photorealism and text-image alignment, while AI models led in image quality. We also analyzed statistical properties, finding that camera-generated images scored lower in hue, saturation, and brightness. Third, we evaluated computational metrics' alignment with human judgments, identifying MS-SSIM and CLIP as the most consistent with human assessments. Additionally, we proposed the Neural Feature Similarity Score (NFSS) for assessing image quality. Our findings highlight the need for refining computational metrics to better capture human visual perception, thereby enhancing AI-generated content evaluation.
Authors: Jean Park, Kuk Jin Jang, Basam Alasaly, Sriharsha Mopidevi, Andrew Zolensky, Eric Eaton, Insup Lee, Kevin Johnson
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can simultaneously process visual, textual, and auditory data, capturing insights that complement human analysis. However, existing video question-answering (VidQA) benchmarks and datasets often exhibit a bias toward a single modality, despite the goal of requiring advanced reasoning skills that integrate diverse modalities to answer the queries. In this work, we introduce the modality importance score (MIS) to identify such bias. It is designed to assess which modality embeds the necessary information to answer the question. Additionally, we propose an innovative method using state-of-the-art MLLMs to estimate the modality importance, which can serve as a proxy for human judgments of modality perception. With this MIS, we demonstrate the presence of unimodal bias and the scarcity of genuinely multimodal questions in existing datasets. We further validate the modality importance score with multiple ablation studies to evaluate the performance of MLLMs on permuted feature sets. Our results indicate that current models do not effectively integrate information due to modality imbalance in existing datasets. Our proposed MLLM-derived MIS can guide the curation of modality-balanced datasets that advance multimodal learning and enhance MLLMs' capabilities to understand and utilize synergistic relations across modalities.
Authors: Abhishek Moitra, Abhiroop Bhattacharjee, Yuhang Li, Youngeun Kim, Priyadarshini Panda
Abstract: This review explores the intersection of bio-plausible artificial intelligence in the form of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with the analog In-Memory Computing (IMC) domain, highlighting their collective potential for low-power edge computing environments. Through detailed investigation at the device, circuit, and system levels, we highlight the pivotal synergies between SNNs and IMC architectures. Additionally, we emphasize the critical need for comprehensive system-level analyses, considering the inter-dependencies between algorithms, devices, circuit & system parameters, crucial for optimal performance. An in-depth analysis leads to identification of key system-level bottlenecks arising from device limitations which can be addressed using SNN-specific algorithm-hardware co-design techniques. This review underscores the imperative for holistic device to system design space co-exploration, highlighting the critical aspects of hardware and algorithm research endeavors for low-power neuromorphic solutions.
Authors: Khanh-Binh Nguyen, Chae Jung Park
Abstract: Masked Image Modeling (MIM) is a technique in self-supervised learning that focuses on acquiring detailed visual representations from unlabeled images by estimating the missing pixels in randomly masked sections. It has proven to be a powerful tool for the preliminary training of Vision Transformers (ViTs), yielding impressive results across various tasks. Nevertheless, most MIM methods heavily depend on the random masking strategy to formulate the pretext task. This strategy necessitates numerous trials to ascertain the optimal dropping ratio, which can be resource-intensive, requiring the model to be pre-trained for anywhere between 800 to 1600 epochs. Furthermore, this approach may not be suitable for all datasets. In this work, we propose a new masking strategy that effectively helps the model capture global and local features. Based on this masking strategy, SymMIM, our proposed training pipeline for MIM is introduced. SymMIM achieves a new SOTA accuracy of 85.9\% on ImageNet using ViT-Large and surpasses previous SOTA across downstream tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation tasks, and so on.
Authors: Kanako Esaki, Tadayuki Matsumura, Takeshi Kato, Shunsuke Minusa, Yang Shao, Hiroyuki Mizuno
Abstract: To handle unintended changes in the environment by agents, we propose an environment-centric active inference EC-AIF in which the Markov Blanket of active inference is defined starting from the environment. In normal active inference, the Markov Blanket is defined starting from the agent. That is, first the agent was defined as the entity that performs the "action" such as a robot or a person, then the environment was defined as other people or objects that are directly affected by the agent's "action," and the boundary between the agent and the environment was defined as the Markov Blanket. This agent-centric definition does not allow the agent to respond to unintended changes in the environment caused by factors outside of the defined environment. In the proposed EC-AIF, there is no entity corresponding to an agent. The environment includes all observable things, including people and things conventionally considered to be the environment, as well as entities that perform "actions" such as robots and people. Accordingly, all states, including robots and people, are included in inference targets, eliminating unintended changes in the environment. The EC-AIF was applied to a robot arm and validated with an object transport task by the robot arm. The results showed that the robot arm successfully transported objects while responding to changes in the target position of the object and to changes in the orientation of another robot arm.
Authors: Anton Bibin, Anton Dereventsov
Abstract: This paper focuses on a data-centric approach to machine learning applications in the context of Conway's Game of Life. Specifically, we consider the task of training a minimal architecture network to learn the transition rules of Game of Life for a given number of steps ahead, which is known to be challenging due to restrictions on the allowed number of trainable parameters. An extensive quantitative analysis showcases the benefits of utilizing a strategically designed training dataset, with its advantages persisting regardless of other parameters of the learning configuration, such as network initialization weights or optimization algorithm. Importantly, our findings highlight the integral role of domain expert insights in creating effective machine learning applications for constrained real-world scenarios.
Authors: Chester Palen-Michel, Ruixiang Wang, Yipeng Zhang, David Yu, Canran Xu, Zhe Wu
Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing in various applications especially in e-commerce. One crucial step before the application of such LLMs in these fields is to understand and compare the performance in different use cases in such tasks. This paper explored the efficacy of LLMs in the e-commerce domain, focusing on instruction-tuning an open source LLM model with public e-commerce datasets of varying sizes and comparing the performance with the conventional models prevalent in industrial applications. We conducted a comprehensive comparison between LLMs and traditional pre-trained language models across specific tasks intrinsic to the e-commerce domain, namely classification, generation, summarization, and named entity recognition (NER). Furthermore, we examined the effectiveness of the current niche industrial application of very large LLM, using in-context learning, in e-commerce specific tasks. Our findings indicate that few-shot inference with very large LLMs often does not outperform fine-tuning smaller pre-trained models, underscoring the importance of task-specific model optimization.Additionally, we investigated different training methodologies such as single-task training, mixed-task training, and LoRA merging both within domain/tasks and between different tasks. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis, this paper offers valuable insights into the potential effectiveness of LLMs to advance natural language processing capabilities within the e-commerce industry.
Authors: Mark Chignell, Mu-Huan Miles Chung, Jaturong Kongmanee, Khilan Jerath, Abhay Raman
Abstract: The utilization of AI in an increasing number of fields is the latest iteration of a long process, where machines and systems have been replacing humans, or changing the roles that they play, in various tasks. Although humans are often resistant to technological innovation, especially in workplaces, there is a general trend towards increasing automation, and more recently, AI. AI is now capable of carrying out, or assisting with, many tasks that used to be regarded as exclusively requiring human expertise. In this paper we consider the case of tasks that could be performed either by human experts or by AI and locate them on a continuum running from exclusively human task performance at one end to AI autonomy on the other, with a variety of forms of human-AI interaction between those extremes. Implementation of AI is constrained by the context of the systems and workflows that it will be embedded within. There is an urgent need for methods to determine how AI should be used in different situations and to develop appropriate methods of human-AI interaction so that humans and AI can work together effectively to perform tasks. In response to the evolving landscape of AI progress and increasing mastery, we introduce an AI Mastery Lifecycle framework and discuss its implications for human-AI interaction. The framework provides guidance on human-AI task allocation and how human-AI interfaces need to adapt to improvements in AI task performance over time. Within the framework we identify a zone of uncertainty where the issues of human-AI task allocation and user interface design are likely to be most challenging.
Authors: Qinbin Li, Junyuan Hong, Chulin Xie, Jeffrey Tan, Rachel Xin, Junyi Hou, Xavier Yin, Zhun Wang, Dan Hendrycks, Zhangyang Wang, Bo Li, Bingsheng He, Dawn Song
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to numerous domains, significantly advancing applications in data management, mining, and analysis. Their profound capabilities in processing and interpreting complex language data, however, bring to light pressing concerns regarding data privacy, especially the risk of unintentional training data leakage. Despite the critical nature of this issue, there has been no existing literature to offer a comprehensive assessment of data privacy risks in LLMs. Addressing this gap, our paper introduces LLM-PBE, a toolkit crafted specifically for the systematic evaluation of data privacy risks in LLMs. LLM-PBE is designed to analyze privacy across the entire lifecycle of LLMs, incorporating diverse attack and defense strategies, and handling various data types and metrics. Through detailed experimentation with multiple LLMs, LLM-PBE facilitates an in-depth exploration of data privacy concerns, shedding light on influential factors such as model size, data characteristics, and evolving temporal dimensions. This study not only enriches the understanding of privacy issues in LLMs but also serves as a vital resource for future research in the field. Aimed at enhancing the breadth of knowledge in this area, the findings, resources, and our full technical report are made available at https://llm-pbe.github.io/, providing an open platform for academic and practical advancements in LLM privacy assessment.
Authors: Ahnaf Farhan, M. Shahriar Hossain
Abstract: In video analysis, understanding the temporal context is crucial for recognizing object interactions, event patterns, and contextual changes over time. The proposed model leverages adjacency and semantic similarities between objects from neighboring video frames to construct context-aware temporal object embeddings. Unlike traditional methods that rely solely on visual appearance, our temporal embedding model considers the contextual relationships between objects, creating a meaningful embedding space where temporally connected object's vectors are positioned in proximity. Empirical studies demonstrate that our context-aware temporal embeddings can be used in conjunction with conventional visual embeddings to enhance the effectiveness of downstream applications. Moreover, the embeddings can be used to narrate a video using a Large Language Model (LLM). This paper describes the intricate details of the proposed objective function to generate context-aware temporal object embeddings for video data and showcases the potential applications of the generated embeddings in video analysis and object classification tasks.
Authors: JoonHo Lee, JuYoun Son, Juree Seok, Wooseok Jang, Yeong-Dae Kwon
Abstract: Ambiguity in language presents challenges in developing more enhanced language models, particularly in preference learning, where variability among annotators results in inconsistently annotated datasets used for model alignment. To address this issue, we introduce a self-curation method that preprocesses annotated datasets by leveraging proxy models trained directly on these datasets. Our method enhances preference learning by automatically detecting and removing ambiguous annotations within the dataset. The proposed approach is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating a marked improvement in performance across various instruction-following tasks. Our work provides a straightforward and reliable method to overcome annotation inconsistencies, serving as an initial step towards the development of more advanced preference learning techniques.
Authors: Yuxiang Wei, Zhaoxin Qiu, Yingjie Li, Yuke Sun, Xiaoling Li
Abstract: As a key component in boosting online user growth, uplift modeling aims to measure individual user responses (e.g., whether to play the game) to various treatments, such as gaming bonuses, thereby enhancing business outcomes. However, previous research typically considers a single-task, single-treatment setting, where only one treatment exists and the overall treatment effect is measured by a single type of user response. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Treatment Multi-Task (MTMT) uplift network to estimate treatment effects in a multi-task scenario. We identify the multi-treatment problem as a causal inference problem with a tiered response, comprising a base effect (from offering a treatment) and an incremental effect (from offering a specific type of treatment), where the base effect can be numerically much larger than the incremental effect. Specifically, MTMT separately encodes user features and treatments. The user feature encoder uses a multi-gate mixture of experts (MMOE) network to encode relevant user features, explicitly learning inter-task relations. The resultant embeddings are used to measure natural responses per task. Furthermore, we introduce a treatment-user feature interaction module to model correlations between each treatment and user feature. Consequently, we separately measure the base and incremental treatment effect for each task based on the produced treatment-aware representations. Experimental results based on an offline public dataset and an online proprietary dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MTMT in single/multi-treatment and single/multi-task settings. Additionally, MTMT has been deployed in our gaming platform to improve user experience.
Authors: Yusuf Usman, Aadesh Upadhyay, Prashnna Gyawali, Robin Chataut
Abstract: In an era where digital threats are increasingly sophisticated, the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity presents both promising defenses and potent dangers. This paper delves into the escalating threat posed by the misuse of AI, specifically through the use of Large Language Models (LLMs). This study details various techniques like the switch method and character play method, which can be exploited by cybercriminals to generate and automate cyber attacks. Through a series of controlled experiments, the paper demonstrates how these models can be manipulated to bypass ethical and privacy safeguards to effectively generate cyber attacks such as social engineering, malicious code, payload generation, and spyware. By testing these AI generated attacks on live systems, the study assesses their effectiveness and the vulnerabilities they exploit, offering a practical perspective on the risks AI poses to critical infrastructure. We also introduce Occupy AI, a customized, finetuned LLM specifically engineered to automate and execute cyberattacks. This specialized AI driven tool is adept at crafting steps and generating executable code for a variety of cyber threats, including phishing, malware injection, and system exploitation. The results underscore the urgency for ethical AI practices, robust cybersecurity measures, and regulatory oversight to mitigate AI related threats. This paper aims to elevate awareness within the cybersecurity community about the evolving digital threat landscape, advocating for proactive defense strategies and responsible AI development to protect against emerging cyber threats.
Authors: Purushothaman Natarajan, Athira Nambiar
Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized various fields by enabling task automation and reducing human error. However, their internal workings and decision-making processes remain obscure due to their black box nature. Consequently, the lack of interpretability limits the application of these models in high-risk scenarios. To address this issue, the emerging field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to explain and interpret the inner workings of DNNs. Despite advancements, XAI faces challenges such as the semantic gap between machine and human understanding, the trade-off between interpretability and performance, and the need for context-specific explanations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel multimodal framework named VALE Visual and Language Explanation. VALE integrates explainable AI techniques with advanced language models to provide comprehensive explanations. This framework utilizes visual explanations from XAI tools, an advanced zero-shot image segmentation model, and a visual language model to generate corresponding textual explanations. By combining visual and textual explanations, VALE bridges the semantic gap between machine outputs and human interpretation, delivering results that are more comprehensible to users. In this paper, we conduct a pilot study of the VALE framework for image classification tasks. Specifically, Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) are used to identify the most influential regions in classified images. The object of interest is then extracted using the Segment Anything Model (SAM), and explanations are generated using state-of-the-art pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Extensive experimental studies are performed on two datasets: the ImageNet dataset and a custom underwater SONAR image dataset, demonstrating VALEs real-world applicability in underwater image classification.
Authors: Hui Liu, Chen Jia, Fan Shi, Xu Cheng, Mianzhao Wang, Shengyong Chen
Abstract: Detecting cracks with pixel-level precision for key structures is a significant challenge, as existing methods struggle to effectively integrate local textures and pixel dependencies of cracks. Furthermore, these methods often possess numerous parameters and substantial computational requirements, complicating deployment on edge devices. In this paper, we propose a staircase cascaded fusion crack segmentation network (CrackSCF) that generates high-quality crack segmentation maps using minimal computational resources. We constructed a staircase cascaded fusion module that effectively captures local patterns of cracks and long-range dependencies of pixels, and it can suppress background noise well. To reduce the computational resources required by the model, we introduced a lightweight convolution block, which replaces all convolution operations in the network, significantly reducing the required computation and parameters without affecting the network's performance. To evaluate our method, we created a challenging benchmark dataset called TUT and conducted experiments on this dataset and five other public datasets. The experimental results indicate that our method offers significant advantages over existing methods, especially in handling background noise interference and detailed crack segmentation. The F1 and mIoU scores on the TUT dataset are 0.8382 and 0.8473, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance while requiring the least computational resources. The code and dataset is available at https://github.com/Karl1109/CrackSCF.
Authors: Zhenyuan Yang, Xuhui Lin, Qinyi He, Ziye Huang, Zhengliang Liu, Hanqi Jiang, Peng Shu, Zihao Wu, Yiwei Li, Stephen Law, Gengchen Mai, Tianming Liu, Tao Yang
Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models (FMs) has generated heightened interest in their applications that integrate vision and language. This paper investigates the capabilities of ChatGPT-4V and Gemini Pro for Street View Imagery, Built Environment, and Interior by evaluating their performance across various tasks. The assessments include street furniture identification, pedestrian and car counts, and road width measurement in Street View Imagery; building function classification, building age analysis, building height analysis, and building structure classification in the Built Environment; and interior room classification, interior design style analysis, interior furniture counts, and interior length measurement in Interior. The results reveal proficiency in length measurement, style analysis, question answering, and basic image understanding, but highlight limitations in detailed recognition and counting tasks. While zero-shot learning shows potential, performance varies depending on the problem domains and image complexities. This study provides new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of multimodal foundation models for practical challenges in Street View Imagery, Built Environment, and Interior. Overall, the findings demonstrate foundational multimodal intelligence, emphasizing the potential of FMs to drive forward interdisciplinary applications at the intersection of computer vision and language.
Authors: Yafeng Zhang, Zilan Yu, Yuang Huang, Jing Tang
Abstract: Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER), the task of identifying named entities with only a limited amount of labeled data, has gained increasing significance in natural language processing. While existing methodologies have shown some effectiveness, such as enriching label semantics through various prompting modes or employing metric learning techniques, their performance exhibits limited robustness across diverse domains due to the lack of rich knowledge in their pre-trained models. To address this issue, we propose CLLMFS, a Contrastive Learning enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) Framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition, achieving promising results with limited training data. Considering the impact of LLM's internal representations on downstream tasks, CLLMFS integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and contrastive learning mechanisms specifically tailored for few-shot NER. By enhancing the model's internal representations, CLLMFS effectively improves both entity boundary awareness ability and entity recognition accuracy. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance improvements on F1-score ranging from 2.58\% to 97.74\% over existing best-performing methods across several recognized benchmarks. Furthermore, through cross-domain NER experiments conducted on multiple datasets, we have further validated the robust generalization capability of our method. Our code will be released in the near future.
Authors: Purushothaman Natarajan, Athira Nambiar
Abstract: Deep learning techniques have revolutionized image classification by mimicking human cognition and automating complex decision-making processes. However, the deployment of AI systems in the wild, especially in high-security domains such as defence, is curbed by the lack of explainability of the model. To this end, eXplainable AI (XAI) is an emerging area of research that is intended to explore the unexplained hidden black box nature of deep neural networks. This paper explores the application of the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) tool to interpret the underwater image classification results, one of the first works in the domain to the best of our knowledge. Our study delves into the realm of SONAR image classification using a custom dataset derived from diverse sources, including the Seabed Objects KLSG dataset, the camera SONAR dataset, the mine SONAR images dataset, and the SCTD dataset. An extensive analysis of transfer learning techniques for image classification using benchmark Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures such as VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, DenseNet121, etc. is carried out. On top of this classification model, a post-hoc XAI technique, viz. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) are incorporated to provide transparent justifications for the model's decisions by perturbing input data locally to see how predictions change. Furthermore, Submodular Picks LIME (SP-LIME) a version of LIME particular to images, that perturbs the image based on the submodular picks is also extensively studied. To this end, two submodular optimization algorithms i.e. Quickshift and Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) are leveraged towards submodular picks. The extensive analysis of XAI techniques highlights interpretability of the results in a more human-compliant way, thus boosting our confidence and reliability.
Authors: Mohsen Asghari Ilani, Saba Moftakhar Tehran, Ashkan Kavei, Arian Radmehr
Abstract: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose significant challenges to global public health, despite the widespread availability of vaccines. Early detection of the disease remains paramount in curbing its transmission and mitigating its impact on public health systems. In response, this study delves into the application of advanced machine learning (ML) techniques for predicting COVID-19 infection probability. We conducted a rigorous investigation into the efficacy of various ML models, including XGBoost, LGBM, AdaBoost, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, RandomForest, CatBoost, KNN, and Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Leveraging a dataset comprising 4000 samples, with 3200 allocated for training and 800 for testing, our experiment offers comprehensive insights into the performance of these models in COVID-19 prediction. Our findings reveal that Deep Neural Networks (DNN) emerge as the top-performing model, exhibiting superior accuracy and recall metrics. With an impressive accuracy rate of 89%, DNN demonstrates remarkable potential in early COVID-19 detection. This underscores the efficacy of deep learning approaches in leveraging complex data patterns to identify COVID-19 infections accurately. This study underscores the critical role of machine learning, particularly deep learning methodologies, in augmenting early detection efforts amidst the ongoing pandemic. The success of DNN in accurately predicting COVID-19 infection probability highlights the importance of continued research and development in leveraging advanced technologies to combat infectious diseases.
Authors: Songyan Teng, Tianyi Zhang, Simon D'Alfonso, Vassilis Kostakos
Abstract: The proliferation of mobile sensing technologies has enabled the study of various physiological and behavioural phenomena through unobtrusive data collection from smartphone sensors. This approach offers real-time insights into individuals' physical and mental states, creating opportunities for personalised treatment and interventions. However, the potential of analysing the textual content viewed on smartphones to predict affective states remains underexplored. To better understand how the screen text that users are exposed to and interact with can influence their affects, we investigated a subset of data obtained from a digital phenotyping study of Australian university students conducted in 2023. We employed linear regression, zero-shot, and multi-shot prompting using a large language model (LLM) to analyse relationships between screen text and affective states. Our findings indicate that multi-shot prompting substantially outperforms both linear regression and zero-shot prompting, highlighting the importance of context in affect prediction. We discuss the value of incorporating textual and sentiment data for improving affect prediction, providing a basis for future advancements in understanding smartphone use and wellbeing.
Authors: Arun Verma, Indrajit Saha, Makoto Yokoo, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Abstract: This paper considers a novel online fair division problem involving multiple agents in which a learner observes an indivisible item that has to be irrevocably allocated to one of the agents while satisfying a fairness and efficiency constraint. Existing algorithms assume a small number of items with a sufficiently large number of copies, which ensures a good utility estimation for all item-agent pairs. However, such an assumption may not hold in many real-life applications, e.g., an online platform that has a large number of users (items) who only use the platform's service providers (agents) a few times (a few copies of items), which makes it difficult to estimate the utility for all item-agent pairs. To overcome this challenge, we model the online fair division problem using contextual bandits, assuming the utility is an unknown function of the item-agent features. We then propose algorithms for online fair division with sub-linear regret guarantees. Our experimental results also verify the different performance aspects of the proposed algorithms.
Authors: Kaizhao Liang, Bo Liu, Lizhang Chen, Qiang Liu
Abstract: Recently, a wide range of memory-efficient LLM training algorithms have gained substantial popularity. These methods leverage the low-rank structure of gradients to project optimizer states into a subspace using projection matrix found by singular value decomposition (SVD). However, convergence of these algorithms is highly dependent on the update rules of their projection matrix. In this work, we provide the \emph{first} convergence guarantee for arbitrary update rules of projection matrix. This guarantee is generally applicable to optimizers that can be analyzed with Hamiltonian Descent, including most common ones, such as LION, Adam. Inspired by our theoretical understanding, we propose Online Subspace Descent, a new family of subspace descent optimizer without SVD. Instead of updating the projection matrix with eigenvectors, Online Subspace Descent updates the projection matrix with online PCA. Online Subspace Descent is flexible and introduces only minimum overhead to training. We show that for the task of pretraining LLaMA models ranging from 60M to 7B parameters on the C4 dataset, Online Subspace Descent achieves lower perplexity and better downstream tasks performance than state-of-the-art low-rank training methods across different settings and narrows the gap with full-rank baselines.
Authors: Sharmila S P, Aruna Tiwari, Narendra S Chaudhari
Abstract: Providing security for information is highly critical in the current era with devices enabled with smart technology, where assuming a day without the internet is highly impossible. Fast internet at a cheaper price, not only made communication easy for legitimate users but also for cybercriminals to induce attacks in various dimensions to breach privacy and security. Cybercriminals gain illegal access and breach the privacy of users to harm them in multiple ways. Malware is one such tool used by hackers to execute their malicious intent. Development in AI technology is utilized by malware developers to cause social harm. In this work, we intend to show how Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning can be used to detect and mitigate these cyber-attacks induced by malware in specific obfuscated malware. We conducted experiments with memory feature engineering on memory analysis of malware samples. Binary classification can identify whether a given sample is malware or not, but identifying the type of malware will only guide what next step to be taken for that malware, to stop it from proceeding with its further action. Hence, we propose a multi-class classification model to detect the three types of obfuscated malware with an accuracy of 89.07% using the Classic Random Forest algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, there is very little amount of work done in classifying multiple obfuscated malware by a single model. We also compared our model with a few state-of-the-art models and found it comparatively better.
Authors: Linwei Chen, Ying Fu, Lin Gu, Chenggang Yan, Tatsuya Harada, Gao Huang
Abstract: Dense image prediction tasks demand features with strong category information and precise spatial boundary details at high resolution. To achieve this, modern hierarchical models often utilize feature fusion, directly adding upsampled coarse features from deep layers and high-resolution features from lower levels. In this paper, we observe rapid variations in fused feature values within objects, resulting in intra-category inconsistency due to disturbed high-frequency features. Additionally, blurred boundaries in fused features lack accurate high frequency, leading to boundary displacement. Building upon these observations, we propose Frequency-Aware Feature Fusion (FreqFusion), integrating an Adaptive Low-Pass Filter (ALPF) generator, an offset generator, and an Adaptive High-Pass Filter (AHPF) generator. The ALPF generator predicts spatially-variant low-pass filters to attenuate high-frequency components within objects, reducing intra-class inconsistency during upsampling. The offset generator refines large inconsistent features and thin boundaries by replacing inconsistent features with more consistent ones through resampling, while the AHPF generator enhances high-frequency detailed boundary information lost during downsampling. Comprehensive visualization and quantitative analysis demonstrate that FreqFusion effectively improves feature consistency and sharpens object boundaries. Extensive experiments across various dense prediction tasks confirm its effectiveness. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FreqFusion.
Authors: Peter Jonsson, Victor Lagerkvist, George Osipov
Abstract: The constraint satisfaction problem asks to decide if a set of constraints over a relational structure $\mathcal{A}$ is satisfiable (CSP$(\mathcal{A})$). We consider CSP$(\mathcal{A} \cup \mathcal{B})$ where $\mathcal{A}$ is a structure and $\mathcal{B}$ is an alien structure, and analyse its (parameterized) complexity when at most $k$ alien constraints are allowed. We establish connections and obtain transferable complexity results to several well-studied problems that previously escaped classification attempts. Our novel approach, utilizing logical and algebraic methods, yields an FPT versus pNP dichotomy for arbitrary finite structures and sharper dichotomies for Boolean structures and first-order reducts of $(\mathbb{N},=)$ (equality CSPs), together with many partial results for general $\omega$-categorical structures.
Authors: Fabian Denoodt, Bart de Boer, Jos\'e Oramas
Abstract: We introduce Smooth InfoMax (SIM), a novel method for self-supervised representation learning that incorporates an interpretability constraint into the learned representations at various depths of the neural network. SIM's architecture is split up into probabilistic modules, each locally optimized using the InfoNCE bound. Inspired by VAEs, the representations from these modules are designed to be samples from Gaussian distributions and are further constrained to be close to the standard normal distribution. This results in a smooth and predictable space, enabling traversal of the latent space through a decoder for easier post-hoc analysis of the learned representations. We evaluate SIM's performance on sequential speech data, showing that it performs competitively with its less interpretable counterpart, Greedy InfoMax (GIM). Moreover, we provide insights into SIM's internal representations, demonstrating that the contained information is less entangled throughout the representation and more concentrated in a smaller subset of the dimensions. This further highlights the improved interpretability of SIM.
Authors: Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yixuan Ma, Kaitao Qiu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
Abstract: Although achieving promising performance, recent analyses show that current generative large language models (LLMs) may still capture dataset biases and utilize them for generation, leading to poor generalizability and harmfulness of LLMs. However, due to the diversity of dataset biases and the over-optimization problem, previous prior-knowledge-based debiasing methods and fine-tuning-based debiasing methods may not be suitable for current LLMs. To address this issue, we explore combining active learning with the causal mechanisms and propose a casual-guided active learning (CAL) framework, which utilizes LLMs itself to automatically and autonomously identify informative biased samples and induce the bias patterns. Then a cost-effective and efficient in-context learning based method is employed to prevent LLMs from utilizing dataset biases during generation. Experimental results show that CAL can effectively recognize typical biased instances and induce various bias patterns for debiasing LLMs.
Authors: Alexandre Pitti, Kohei Nakajima, Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Abstract: The body morphology plays an important role in the way information is perceived and processed by an agent. We address an information theory (IT) account on how the precision of sensors, the accuracy of motors, their placement, the body geometry, shape the information structure in robots and computational codes. As an original idea, we envision the robot's body as a physical communication channel through which information is conveyed, in and out, despite intrinsic noise and material limitations. Following this, entropy, a measure of information and uncertainty, can be used to maximize the efficiency of robot design and of algorithmic codes per se. This is known as the principle of Entropy Maximization (PEM) introduced in biology by Barlow in 1969. The Shannon's source coding theorem provides then a framework to compare different types of bodies in terms of sensorimotor information. In line with PME, we introduce a special class of efficient codes used in IT that reached the Shannon limits in terms of information capacity for error correction and robustness against noise, and parsimony. These efficient codes, which exploit insightfully quantization and randomness, permit to deal with uncertainty, redundancy and compacity. These features can be used for perception and control in intelligent systems. In various examples and closing discussions, we reflect on the broader implications of our framework that we called Informational Embodiment to motor theory and bio-inspired robotics, touching upon concepts like motor synergies, reservoir computing, and morphological computation. These insights can contribute to a deeper understanding of how information theory intersects with the embodiment of intelligence in both natural and artificial systems.
Authors: Yosuke Miyanishi, Minh Le Nguyen
Abstract: The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) usage has highlighted the importance of gradient-free in-context learning (ICL). However, interpreting their inner workings remains challenging. This paper introduces a novel multimodal contrastive in-context learning framework to enhance our understanding of ICL in LLMs. First, we present a contrastive learning-based interpretation of ICL in real-world settings, marking the distance of the key-value representation as the differentiator in ICL. Second, we develop an analytical framework to address biases in multimodal input formatting for real-world datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ICL examples where baseline performance is poor, even when they are represented in unseen formats. Lastly, we propose an on-the-fly approach for ICL (Anchored-by-Text ICL) that demonstrates effectiveness in detecting hateful memes, a task where typical ICL struggles due to resource limitations. Extensive experiments on multimodal datasets reveal that our approach significantly improves ICL performance across various scenarios, such as challenging tasks and resource-constrained environments. Moreover, it provides valuable insights into the mechanisms of in-context learning in LLMs. Our findings have important implications for developing more interpretable, efficient, and robust multimodal AI systems, especially in challenging tasks and resource-constrained environments.
Authors: Art\=uras Nakvosas, Povilas Daniu\v{s}is, Vytas Mulevi\v{c}ius
Abstract: In this paper, we propose and describe the first open Llama2 large language models (LLMs) for the Lithuanian language, including an accompanying question/answer (Q/A) dataset and translations of popular LLM benchmarks. We provide a brief review of open regional LLMs and detailed information on the proposed LLMs and their training process. We also conduct an empirical evaluation, comparing the perplexities of the proposed LLMs with those of other modern open LLMs. In addition, benchmarking the proposed LLMs against language understanding tasks reveals that high-quality pretraining datasets may be essential for achieving models that perform efficiently on these benchmarks. The full realisations of the described LLMs are available in the accompanying open repository~\url{https://huggingface.co/neurotechnology}.
Authors: Xiangxiang Shen, Zheng Wan, Lingfeng Wen, Licheng Sun, Ou Yang Ming Jie, Xuan Tang, Xian Zeng, Mingsong Chen, Xiao He, Xian Wei
Abstract: To date, the International Zeolite Association Structure Commission (IZA-SC) has cataloged merely 255 distinct zeolite structures, with millions of theoretically possible structures yet to be discovered. The synthesis of a specific zeolite typically necessitates the use of an organic structure-directing agent (OSDA), since the selectivity for a particular zeolite is largely determined by the affinity between the OSDA and the zeolite. Therefore, finding the best affinity OSDA-zeolite pair is the key to the synthesis of targeted zeolite. However, OSDA-zeolite pairs frequently exhibit complex geometric structures, i.e., a complex crystal structure formed by a large number of atoms. Although some existing machine learning methods can represent the periodicity of crystals, they cannot accurately represent crystal structures with local variability. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Zeoformer, which can effectively represent coarse-grained crystal periodicity and fine-grained local variability. Zeoformer reconstructs the unit cell centered around each atom and encodes the pairwise distances between this central atom and other atoms within the reconstructed unit cell. The introduction of pairwise distances within the reconstructed unit cell more effectively represents the overall structure of the unit cell and the differences between different unit cells, enabling the model to more accurately and efficiently predict the properties of OSDA-zeolite pairs and general crystal structures. Through comprehensive evaluation, our Zeoformer model demonstrates the best performance on OSDA-zeolite pair datasets and two types of crystal material datasets.
Authors: Jo\~ao Lucas Martins, Jo\~ao Bravo, Ana Sofia Gomes, Carlos Soares, Pedro Bizarro
Abstract: Financial fraud is the cause of multi-billion dollar losses annually. Traditionally, fraud detection systems rely on rules due to their transparency and interpretability, key features in domains where decisions need to be explained. However, rule systems require significant input from domain experts to create and tune, an issue that rule induction algorithms attempt to mitigate by inferring rules directly from data. We explore the application of these algorithms to fraud detection, where rule systems are constrained to have a low false positive rate (FPR) or alert rate, by proposing RIFF, a rule induction algorithm that distills a low FPR rule set directly from decision trees. Our experiments show that the induced rules are often able to maintain or improve performance of the original models for low FPR tasks, while substantially reducing their complexity and outperforming rules hand-tuned by experts.
Authors: Vuka\v{s}in Stanojevi\'c, Branimir Todorovi\'c
Abstract: Multiple object tracking (MOT) depends heavily on selection of true positive detected bounding boxes. However, this aspect of the problem is mostly overlooked or mitigated by employing two-stage association and utilizing low confidence detections in the second stage. Recently proposed BoostTrack attempts to avoid the drawbacks of multiple stage association approach and use low-confidence detections by applying detection confidence boosting. In this paper, we identify the limitations of the confidence boost used in BoostTrack and propose a method to improve its performance. To construct a richer similarity measure and enable a better selection of true positive detections, we propose to use a combination of shape, Mahalanobis distance and novel soft BIoU similarity. We propose a soft detection confidence boost technique which calculates new confidence scores based on the similarity measure and the previous confidence scores, and we introduce varying similarity threshold to account for lower similarity measure between detections and tracklets which are not regularly updated. The proposed additions are mutually independent and can be used in any MOT algorithm. Combined with the BoostTrack+ baseline, our method achieves near state of the art results on the MOT17 dataset and new state of the art HOTA and IDF1 scores on the MOT20 dataset. The source code is available at: https://github.com/vukasin-stanojevic/BoostTrack .
Authors: Wentao Wu, Fanghua Hong, Xiao Wang, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang
Abstract: Existing vehicle detectors are usually obtained by training a typical detector (e.g., YOLO, RCNN, DETR series) on vehicle images based on a pre-trained backbone (e.g., ResNet, ViT). Some researchers also exploit and enhance the detection performance using pre-trained large foundation models. However, we think these detectors may only get sub-optimal results because the large models they use are not specifically designed for vehicles. In addition, their results heavily rely on visual features, and seldom of they consider the alignment between the vehicle's semantic information and visual representations. In this work, we propose a new vehicle detection paradigm based on a pre-trained foundation vehicle model (VehicleMAE) and a large language model (T5), termed VFM-Det. It follows the region proposal-based detection framework and the features of each proposal can be enhanced using VehicleMAE. More importantly, we propose a new VAtt2Vec module that predicts the vehicle semantic attributes of these proposals and transforms them into feature vectors to enhance the vision features via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on three vehicle detection benchmark datasets thoroughly proved the effectiveness of our vehicle detector. Specifically, our model improves the baseline approach by $+5.1\%$, $+6.2\%$ on the $AP_{0.5}$, $AP_{0.75}$ metrics, respectively, on the Cityscapes dataset.The source code of this work will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/VFM-Det.
Authors: Kai-Wei Chang, Haibin Wu, Yu-Kai Wang, Yuan-Kuei Wu, Hua Shen, Wei-Cheng Tseng, Iu-thing Kang, Shang-Wen Li, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract: Prompting has become a practical method for utilizing pre-trained language models (LMs). This approach offers several advantages. It allows an LM to adapt to new tasks with minimal training and parameter updates, thus achieving efficiency in both storage and computation. Additionally, prompting modifies only the LM's inputs and harnesses the generative capabilities of language models to address various downstream tasks in a unified manner. This significantly reduces the need for human labor in designing task-specific models. These advantages become even more evident as the number of tasks served by the LM scales up. Motivated by the strengths of prompting, we are the first to explore the potential of prompting speech LMs in the domain of speech processing. Recently, there has been a growing interest in converting speech into discrete units for language modeling. Our pioneer research demonstrates that these quantized speech units are highly versatile within our unified prompting framework. Not only can they serve as class labels, but they also contain rich phonetic information that can be re-synthesized back into speech signals for speech generation tasks. Specifically, we reformulate speech processing tasks into speech-to-unit generation tasks. As a result, we can seamlessly integrate tasks such as speech classification, sequence generation, and speech generation within a single, unified prompting framework. The experiment results show that the prompting method can achieve competitive performance compared to the strong fine-tuning method based on self-supervised learning models with a similar number of trainable parameters. The prompting method also shows promising results in the few-shot setting. Moreover, with the advanced speech LMs coming into the stage, the proposed prompting framework attains great potential.
Authors: Tao Yang, Huai-Ning Wu, Jun-Wei Wang
Abstract: In comparison to common quadrotors, the shape change of morphing quadrotors endows it with a more better flight performance but also results in more complex flight dynamics. Generally, it is extremely difficult or even impossible for morphing quadrotors to establish an accurate mathematical model describing their complex flight dynamics. To figure out the issue of flight control design for morphing quadrotors, this paper resorts to a combination of model-free control techniques (e.g., deep reinforcement learning, DRL) and convex combination (CC) technique, and proposes a convex-combined-DRL (cc-DRL) flight control algorithm for position and attitude of a class of morphing quadrotors, where the shape change is realized by the length variation of four arm rods. In the proposed cc-DRL flight control algorithm, proximal policy optimization algorithm that is a model-free DRL algorithm is utilized to off-line train the corresponding optimal flight control laws for some selected representative arm length modes and hereby a cc-DRL flight control scheme is constructed by the convex combination technique. Finally, simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness and merit of the proposed flight control algorithm.
Authors: Yuxiang Wei, Anees Abrol, Reihaneh Hassanzadeh, Vince Calhoun
Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning structured state space models, especially the Mamba architecture, have demonstrated remarkable performance improvements while maintaining linear complexity. In this study, we introduce functional spatiotemporal Mamba (FST-Mamba), a Mamba-based model designed for discovering neurological biomarkers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We focus on dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) derived from fMRI and propose a hierarchical spatiotemporal Mamba-based network that processes spatial and temporal information separately using Mamba-based encoders. Leveraging the topological uniqueness of the FNC matrix, we introduce a component-wise varied-scale aggregation (CVA) mechanism to aggregate connectivity across individual components within brain networks, enabling the model to capture both inter-component and inter-network information. To better handle the FNC data, we develop a new component-specific scanning order. Additionally, we propose symmetric rotary position encoding (SymRope) to encode the relative positions of each functional connection while considering the symmetric nature of the FNC matrix. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the proposed FST-Mamba model on various brain-based classification and regression tasks. Our work reveals the substantial potential of attention-free sequence modeling in brain discovery.
Authors: Ao Zhou, Bin Liu, Jin Wang, Kaiwei Sun, Kelin Liu
Abstract: Class imbalance significantly impacts the performance of multi-label classifiers. Oversampling is one of the most popular approaches, as it augments instances associated with less frequent labels to balance the class distribution. Existing oversampling methods generate feature vectors of synthetic samples through replication or linear interpolation and assign labels through neighborhood information. Linear interpolation typically generates new samples between existing data points, which may result in insufficient diversity of synthesized samples and further lead to the overfitting issue. Deep learning-based methods, such as AutoEncoders, have been proposed to generate more diverse and complex synthetic samples, achieving excellent performance on imbalanced binary or multi-class datasets. In this study, we introduce AEMLO, an AutoEncoder-guided Oversampling technique specifically designed for tackling imbalanced multi-label data. AEMLO is built upon two fundamental components. The first is an encoder-decoder architecture that enables the model to encode input data into a low-dimensional feature space, learn its latent representations, and then reconstruct it back to its original dimension, thus applying to the generation of new data. The second is an objective function tailored to optimize the sampling task for multi-label scenarios. We show that AEMLO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods with extensive empirical studies.
Authors: Zhe Liu, Xiang Huang, Jingyun Zhang, Zhifeng Hao, Li Sun, Hao Peng
Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection in time series is essential in industrial applications, as it significantly reduces the need for manual intervention. Multivariate time series pose a complex challenge due to their feature and temporal dimensions. Traditional methods use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) or Transformers to analyze spatial while RNNs to model temporal dependencies. These methods focus narrowly on one dimension or engage in coarse-grained feature extraction, which can be inadequate for large datasets characterized by intricate relationships and dynamic changes. This paper introduces a novel temporal model built on an enhanced Graph Attention Network (GAT) for multivariate time series anomaly detection called TopoGDN. Our model analyzes both time and feature dimensions from a fine-grained perspective. First, we introduce a multi-scale temporal convolution module to extract detailed temporal features. Additionally, we present an augmented GAT to manage complex inter-feature dependencies, which incorporates graph topology into node features across multiple scales, a versatile, plug-and-play enhancement that significantly boosts the performance of GAT. Our experimental results confirm that our approach surpasses the baseline models on four datasets, demonstrating its potential for widespread application in fields requiring robust anomaly detection. The code is available at https://github.com/ljj-cyber/TopoGDN.
Authors: Bernhard Hilpert, Claudio Alves da Silva, Leon Christidis, Chirag Bhuvaneshwara, Patrick Gebhard, Fabrizio Nunnari, Dimitra Tsovaltzi
Abstract: Self-awareness is a critical factor in social human-human interaction and, hence, in social HCI interaction. Increasing self-awareness through mirrors or video recordings is common in face-to-face trainings, since it influences antecedents of self-awareness like explicit identification and implicit affective identification (affinity). However, increasing self-awareness has been scarcely examined in virtual trainings with virtual avatars, which allow for adjusting the similarity, e.g. to avoid negative effects of self-consciousness. Automatic visual similarity in avatars is an open issue related to high costs. It is important to understand which features need to be manipulated and which degree of similarity is necessary for self-awareness to leverage the added value of using avatars for self-awareness. This article examines the relationship between avatar visual similarity and increasing self-awareness in virtual training environments. We define visual similarity based on perceptually important facial features for human-human identification and develop a theory-based methodology to systematically manipulate visual similarity of virtual avatars and support self-awareness. Three personalized versions of virtual avatars with varying degrees of visual similarity to participants were created (weak, medium and strong facial features manipulation). In a within-subject study (N=33), we tested effects of degree of similarity on perceived similarity, explicit identification and implicit affective identification (affinity). Results show significant differences between the weak similarity manipulation, and both the strong manipulation and the random avatar for all three antecedents of self-awareness. An increasing degree of avatar visual similarity influences antecedents of self-awareness in virtual environments.
Authors: Mingyu Xiao, Runze Chen, Haiyong Luo, Fang Zhao, Juan Wang, Xuepeng Ma
Abstract: Map-free relocalization technology is crucial for applications in autonomous navigation and augmented reality, but relying on pre-built maps is often impractical. It faces significant challenges due to limitations in matching methods and the inherent lack of scale in monocular images. These issues lead to substantial rotational and metric errors and even localization failures in real-world scenarios. Large matching errors significantly impact the overall relocalization process, affecting both rotational and translational accuracy. Due to the inherent limitations of the camera itself, recovering the metric scale from a single image is crucial, as this significantly impacts the translation error. To address these challenges, we propose a map-free relocalization method enhanced by instance knowledge and depth knowledge. By leveraging instance-based matching information to improve global matching results, our method significantly reduces the possibility of mismatching across different objects. The robustness of instance knowledge across the scene helps the feature point matching model focus on relevant regions and enhance matching accuracy. Additionally, we use estimated metric depth from a single image to reduce metric errors and improve scale recovery accuracy. By integrating methods dedicated to mitigating large translational and rotational errors, our approach demonstrates superior performance in map-free relocalization techniques.
Authors: Marco Gori
Abstract: This paper gives an introduction to \textit{Cognidynamics}, that is to the dynamics of cognitive systems driven by optimal objectives imposed over time when they interact either with a defined virtual or with a real-world environment. The proposed theory is developed in the general framework of dynamic programming which leads to think of computational laws dictated by classic Hamiltonian equations. Those equations lead to the formulation of a neural propagation scheme in cognitive agents modeled by dynamic neural networks which exhibits locality in both space and time, thus contributing the longstanding debate on biological plausibility of learning algorithms like Backpropagation. We interpret the learning process in terms of energy exchange with the environment and show the crucial role of energy dissipation and its links with focus of attention mechanisms and conscious behavior.
Authors: Chenguang Lu
Abstract: The Variational Bayesian method (VB) is used to solve the probability distributions of latent variables with the minimum free energy criterion. This criterion is not easy to understand, and the computation is complex. For these reasons, this paper proposes the Semantic Variational Bayes' method (SVB). The Semantic Information Theory the author previously proposed extends the rate-distortion function R(D) to the rate-fidelity function R(G), where R is the minimum mutual information for given semantic mutual information G. SVB came from the parameter solution of R(G), where the variational and iterative methods originated from Shannon et al.'s research on the rate-distortion function. The constraint functions SVB uses include likelihood, truth, membership, similarity, and distortion functions. SVB uses the maximum information efficiency (G/R) criterion, including the maximum semantic information criterion for optimizing model parameters and the minimum mutual information criterion for optimizing the Shannon channel. For the same tasks, SVB is computationally simpler than VB. The computational experiments in the paper include 1) using a mixture model as an example to show that the mixture model converges as G/R increases; 2) demonstrating the application of SVB in data compression with a group of error ranges as the constraint; 3) illustrating how the semantic information measure and SVB can be used for maximum entropy control and reinforcement learning in control tasks with given range constraints, providing numerical evidence for balancing control's purposiveness and efficiency. Further research is needed to apply SVB to neural networks and deep learning.
Authors: Ivan Karpukhin, Andrey Savchenko
Abstract: Forecasting future events over extended periods, known as long-horizon prediction, is a fundamental task in various domains, including retail, finance, healthcare, and social networks. Traditional methods, such as Marked Temporal Point Processes (MTPP), typically use autoregressive models to predict multiple future events. However, these models frequently encounter issues such as converging to constant or repetitive outputs, which significantly limits their effectiveness and applicability. To overcome these limitations, we propose DeTPP (Detection-based Temporal Point Processes), a novel approach inspired by object detection methods from computer vision. DeTPP utilizes a novel matching-based loss function that selectively focuses on reliably predictable events, enhancing both training robustness and inference diversity. Our method sets a new state-of-the-art in long-horizon event prediction, significantly outperforming existing MTPP and next-K approaches. The implementation of DeTPP is publicly available on GitHub.
Authors: Gabriel P\'erez S, Juan C. P\'erez, Motasem Alfarra, Jes\'us Zarzar, Sara Rojas, Bernard Ghanem, Pablo Arbel\'aez
Abstract: This paper presents preliminary work on a novel connection between certified robustness in machine learning and the modeling of 3D objects. We highlight an intriguing link between the Maximal Certified Radius (MCR) of a classifier representing a space's occupancy and the space's Signed Distance Function (SDF). Leveraging this relationship, we propose to use the certification method of randomized smoothing (RS) to compute SDFs. Since RS' high computational cost prevents its practical usage as a way to compute SDFs, we propose an algorithm to efficiently run RS in low-dimensional applications, such as 3D space, by expressing RS' fundamental operations as Gaussian smoothing on pre-computed voxel grids. Our approach offers an innovative and practical tool to compute SDFs, validated through proof-of-concept experiments in novel view synthesis. This paper bridges two previously disparate areas of machine learning, opening new avenues for further exploration and potential cross-domain advancements.
Authors: Ben Batten, Yang Zheng, Alessandro De Palma, Panagiotis Kouvaros, Alessio Lomuscio
Abstract: We address the problem of verifying neural networks against geometric transformations of the input image, including rotation, scaling, shearing, and translation. The proposed method computes provably sound piecewise linear constraints for the pixel values by using sampling and linear approximations in combination with branch-and-bound Lipschitz optimisation. A feature of the method is that it obtains tighter over-approximations of the perturbation region than the present state-of-the-art. We report results from experiments on a comprehensive set of benchmarks. We show that our proposed implementation resolves more verification cases than present approaches while being more computationally efficient.
Authors: Yihao Zhang, John J. Leonard
Abstract: Category-level object pose and shape estimation from a single depth image has recently drawn research attention due to its wide applications in robotics and self-driving. The task is particularly challenging because the three unknowns, object pose, object shape, and model-to-measurement correspondences, are compounded together but only a single view of depth measurements is provided. The vast majority of the prior work heavily relies on data-driven approaches to obtain solutions to at least one of the unknowns and typically two, running with the risk of failing to generalize to unseen domains. The shape representations used in the prior work also mainly focus on point cloud and signed distance field (SDF). In stark contrast to the prior work, we approach the problem using an iterative estimation method that does not require learning from any pose-annotated data. In addition, we adopt a novel mesh-based object active shape model that has not been explored by the previous literature. Our algorithm, named ShapeICP, has its foundation in the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm but is equipped with additional features for the category-level pose and shape estimation task. The results show that even without using any pose-annotated data, ShapeICP surpasses many data-driven approaches that rely on the pose data for training, opening up new solution space for researchers to consider.
Authors: Vasileios Sitokonstantinou, Emiliano D\'iaz Salas Porras, Jordi Cerd\`a Bautista, Maria Piles, Ioannis Athanasiadis, Hannah Kerner, Giulia Martini, Lily-belle Sweet, Ilias Tsoumas, Jakob Zscheischler, Gustau Camps-Valls
Abstract: In a changing climate, sustainable agriculture is essential for food security and environmental health. However, it is challenging to understand the complex interactions among its biophysical, social, and economic components. Predictive machine learning (ML), with its capacity to learn from data, is leveraged in sustainable agriculture for applications like yield prediction and weather forecasting. Nevertheless, it cannot explain causal mechanisms and remains descriptive rather than prescriptive. To address this gap, we propose causal ML, which merges ML's data processing with causality's ability to reason about change. This facilitates quantifying intervention impacts for evidence-based decision-making and enhances predictive model robustness. We showcase causal ML through eight diverse applications that benefit stakeholders across the agri-food chain, including farmers, policymakers, and researchers.
Authors: Guillem Rodr\'iguez Corominas, Maria J. Blesa, Christian Blum
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an acceleration of the exact k-means++ algorithm using geometric information, specifically the Triangle Inequality and additional norm filters, along with a two-step sampling procedure. Our experiments demonstrate that the accelerated version outperforms the standard k-means++ version in terms of the number of visited points and distance calculations, achieving greater speedup as the number of clusters increases. The version utilizing the Triangle Inequality is particularly effective for low-dimensional data, while the additional norm-based filter enhances performance in high-dimensional instances with greater norm variance among points. Additional experiments show the behavior of our algorithms when executed concurrently across multiple jobs and examine how memory performance impacts practical speedup.
Authors: Dineth Jayakody, A V A Malkith, Koshila Isuranda, Vishal Thenuwara, Nisansa de Silva, Sachintha Rajith Ponnamperuma, G G N Sandamali, K L K Sudheera
Abstract: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that focuses on extracting sentiments related to specific aspects within a text, offering deep insights into customer opinions. Traditional sentiment analysis methods, while useful for determining overall sentiment, often miss the implicit opinions about particular product or service features. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the evolution of ABSA methodologies, from lexicon-based approaches to machine learning and deep learning techniques. We emphasize the recent advancements in Transformer-based models, particularly Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and its variants, which have set new benchmarks in ABSA tasks. We focused on finetuning Llama and Mistral models, building hybrid models using the SetFit framework, and developing our own model by exploiting the strengths of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer-based models for aspect term extraction (ATE) and aspect sentiment classification (ASC). Our hybrid model Instruct - DeBERTa uses SOTA InstructABSA for aspect extraction and DeBERTa-V3-baseabsa-V1 for aspect sentiment classification. We utilize datasets from different domains to evaluate our model's performance. Our experiments indicate that the proposed hybrid model significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of sentiment analysis across all experimented domains. As per our findings, our hybrid model Instruct - DeBERTa is the best-performing model for the joint task of ATE and ASC for both SemEval restaurant 2014 and SemEval laptop 2014 datasets separately. By addressing the limitations of existing methodologies, our approach provides a robust solution for understanding detailed consumer feedback, thus offering valuable insights for businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction and product development.
Authors: M. Zomorodi, H. Amini, M. Abbaszadeh, J. Sohrabi, V. Salari, P. Plawiak
Abstract: The process of translating a quantum algorithm into a form suitable for implementation on a quantum computing platform is crucial but yet challenging. This entails specifying quantum operations with precision, a typically intricate task. In this paper, we present an alternative approach: an automated method for synthesizing the functionality of a quantum algorithm into a quantum circuit model representation. Our methodology involves training a neural network model using diverse input-output mappings of the quantum algorithm. We demonstrate that this trained model can effectively generate a quantum circuit model equivalent to the original algorithm. Remarkably, our observations indicate that the trained model achieves near-perfect mapping of unseen inputs to their respective outputs.
Authors: Hongcheng Ding, Xuanze Zhao, Zixiao Jiang, Shamsul Nahar Abdullah, Deshinta Arrova Dewi
Abstract: Accurate forecasting of the EUR/USD exchange rate is crucial for investors, businesses, and policymakers. This paper proposes a novel framework, IUS, that integrates unstructured textual data from news and analysis with structured data on exchange rates and financial indicators to enhance exchange rate prediction. The IUS framework employs large language models for sentiment polarity scoring and exchange rate movement classification of texts. These textual features are combined with quantitative features and input into a Causality-Driven Feature Generator. An Optuna-optimized Bi-LSTM model is then used to forecast the EUR/USD exchange rate. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms benchmark models, reducing MAE by 10.69% and RMSE by 9.56% compared to the best performing baseline. Results also show the benefits of data fusion, with the combination of unstructured and structured data yielding higher accuracy than structured data alone. Furthermore, feature selection using the top 12 important quantitative features combined with the textual features proves most effective. The proposed IUS framework and Optuna-Bi-LSTM model provide a powerful new approach for exchange rate forecasting through multi-source data integration.
Authors: Ad\'an Jos\'e-Garc\'ia, Julie Jacques, Cl\'ement Chauvet, Vincent Sobanski, Clarisse Dhaenens
Abstract: Biclustering is an unsupervised machine-learning approach aiming to cluster rows and columns simultaneously in a data matrix. Several biclustering algorithms have been proposed for handling numeric datasets. However, real-world data mining problems often involve heterogeneous datasets with mixed attributes. To address this challenge, we introduce a biclustering approach called HBIC, capable of discovering meaningful biclusters in complex heterogeneous data, including numeric, binary, and categorical data. The approach comprises two stages: bicluster generation and bicluster model selection. In the initial stage, several candidate biclusters are generated iteratively by adding and removing rows and columns based on the frequency of values in the original matrix. In the second stage, we introduce two approaches for selecting the most suitable biclusters by considering their size and homogeneity. Through a series of experiments, we investigated the suitability of our approach on a synthetic benchmark and in a biomedical application involving clinical data of systemic sclerosis patients. The evaluation comparing our method to existing approaches demonstrates its ability to discover high-quality biclusters from heterogeneous data. Our biclustering approach is a starting point for heterogeneous bicluster discovery, leading to a better understanding of complex underlying data structures.
Authors: Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou
Abstract: The quadratic computational complexity in the self-attention mechanism of popular transformer architectures poses significant challenges for training and inference, particularly in terms of efficiency and memory requirements. Towards addressing these challenges, this paper introduces a novel fast computation method for gradient calculation in multi-layer transformer models. Our approach enables the computation of gradients for the entire multi-layer transformer model in almost linear time $n^{1+o(1)}$, where $n$ is the input sequence length. This breakthrough significantly reduces the computational bottleneck associated with the traditional quadratic time complexity. Our theory holds for any loss function and maintains a bounded approximation error across the entire model. Furthermore, our analysis can hold when the multi-layer transformer model contains many practical sub-modules, such as residual connection, casual mask, and multi-head attention. By improving the efficiency of gradient computation in large language models, we hope that our work will facilitate the more effective training and deployment of long-context language models based on our theoretical results.
Authors: Jonathan Lorraine, Safwan Hossain
Abstract: Neural networks are trained to learn an approximate mapping from an input domain to a target domain. Incorporating prior knowledge about true mappings is critical to learning a useful approximation. With current architectures, it is challenging to enforce structure on the derivatives of the input-output mapping. We propose to use a neural network to directly learn the Jacobian of the input-output function, which allows easy control of the derivative. We focus on structuring the derivative to allow invertibility and also demonstrate that other useful priors, such as $k$-Lipschitz, can be enforced. Using this approach, we can learn approximations to simple functions that are guaranteed to be invertible and easily compute the inverse. We also show similar results for 1-Lipschitz functions.
Authors: Evin Jaff, Yuhao Wu, Ning Zhang, Umar Iqbal
Abstract: LLM app ecosystems are quickly maturing and supporting a wide range of use cases, which requires them to collect excessive user data. Given that the LLM apps are developed by third-parties and that anecdotal evidence suggests LLM platforms currently do not strictly enforce their policies, user data shared with arbitrary third-parties poses a significant privacy risk. In this paper we aim to bring transparency in data practices of LLM apps. As a case study, we study OpenAI's GPT app ecosystem. We develop an LLM-based framework to conduct the static analysis of natural language-based source code of GPTs and their Actions (external services) to characterize their data collection practices. Our findings indicate that Actions collect expansive data about users, including sensitive information prohibited by OpenAI, such as passwords. We find that some Actions, including related to advertising and analytics, are embedded in multiple GPTs, which allow them to track user activities across GPTs. Additionally, co-occurrence of Actions exposes as much as 9.5x more data to them, than it is exposed to individual Actions. Lastly, we develop an LLM-based privacy policy analysis framework to automatically check the consistency of data collection by Actions with disclosures in their privacy policies. Our measurements indicate that the disclosures for most of the collected data types are omitted in privacy policies, with only 5.8% of Actions clearly disclosing their data collection practices.
Authors: Sakhinana Sagar Srinivas, Chidaksh Ravuru, Geethan Sannidhi, Venkataramana Runkana
Abstract: Semiconductor imaging and analysis are critical yet understudied in deep learning, limiting our ability for precise control and optimization in semiconductor manufacturing. We introduce a small-scale multimodal framework for analyzing semiconductor electron microscopy images (MAEMI) through vision-language instruction tuning. We generate a customized instruction-following dataset using large multimodal models on microscopic image analysis. We perform knowledge transfer from larger to smaller models through knowledge distillation, resulting in improved accuracy of smaller models on visual question answering (VQA) tasks. This approach eliminates the need for expensive, human expert-annotated datasets for microscopic image analysis tasks. Enterprises can further finetune MAEMI on their intellectual data, enhancing privacy and performance on low-cost consumer hardware. Our experiments show that MAEMI outperforms traditional methods, adapts to data distribution shifts, and supports high-throughput screening.
Authors: Marie Huynh (Stanford University), Aaron Kline (Stanford University), Saimourya Surabhi (Stanford University), Kaitlyn Dunlap (Stanford University), Onur Cezmi Mutlu (Stanford University), Mohammadmahdi Honarmand (Stanford University), Parnian Azizian (Stanford University), Peter Washington (University of Hawaii at Manoa), Dennis P. Wall (Stanford University)
Abstract: Early detection of autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by social communication challenges, is crucial for timely intervention. Recent advancements have utilized naturalistic home videos captured via the mobile application GuessWhat. Through interactive games played between children and their guardians, GuessWhat has amassed over 3,000 structured videos from 382 children, both diagnosed with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This collection provides a robust dataset for training computer vision models to detect ASD-related phenotypic markers, including variations in emotional expression, eye contact, and head movements. We have developed a protocol to curate high-quality videos from this dataset, forming a comprehensive training set. Utilizing this set, we trained individual LSTM-based models using eye gaze, head positions, and facial landmarks as input features, achieving test AUCs of 86%, 67%, and 78%, respectively. To boost diagnostic accuracy, we applied late fusion techniques to create ensemble models, improving the overall AUC to 90%. This approach also yielded more equitable results across different genders and age groups. Our methodology offers a significant step forward in the early detection of ASD by potentially reducing the reliance on subjective assessments and making early identification more accessibly and equitable.
Authors: Yuhe Liu, Changhua Pei, Longlong Xu, Bohan Chen, Mingze Sun, Zhirui Zhang, Yongqian Sun, Shenglin Zhang, Kun Wang, Haiming Zhang, Jianhui Li, Gaogang Xie, Xidao Wen, Xiaohui Nie, Minghua Ma, Dan Pei
Abstract: Information Technology (IT) Operations (Ops), particularly Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps), is the guarantee for maintaining the orderly and stable operation of existing information systems. According to Gartner's prediction, the use of AI technology for automated IT operations has become a new trend. Large language models (LLMs) that have exhibited remarkable capabilities in NLP-related tasks, are showing great potential in the field of AIOps, such as in aspects of root cause analysis of failures, generation of operations and maintenance scripts, and summarizing of alert information. Nevertheless, the performance of current LLMs in Ops tasks is yet to be determined. In this paper, we present OpsEval, a comprehensive task-oriented Ops benchmark designed for LLMs. For the first time, OpsEval assesses LLMs' proficiency in various crucial scenarios at different ability levels. The benchmark includes 7184 multi-choice questions and 1736 question-answering (QA) formats in English and Chinese. By conducting a comprehensive performance evaluation of the current leading large language models, we show how various LLM techniques can affect the performance of Ops, and discussed findings related to various topics, including model quantification, QA evaluation, and hallucination issues. To ensure the credibility of our evaluation, we invite dozens of domain experts to manually review our questions. At the same time, we have open-sourced 20% of the test QA to assist current researchers in preliminary evaluations of their OpsLLM models. The remaining 80% of the data, which is not disclosed, is used to eliminate the issue of the test set leakage. Additionally, we have constructed an online leaderboard that is updated in real-time and will continue to be updated, ensuring that any newly emerging LLMs will be evaluated promptly. Both our dataset and leaderboard have been made public.
Authors: Dandan Qiao, Huaxia Rui, Qian Xiong
Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has renewed the debate on the important issue of "technology displacement". While prior research has investigated the effect of information technology in general on human labor from a macro perspective, this paper complements the literature by examining the impact of LLMs on freelancers from a micro perspective. Specifically, we leverage the release of ChatGPT to investigate how AI influences freelancers across different online labor markets (OLMs). Employing the Difference-in-Differences method, we discovered two distinct scenarios following ChatGPT's release: 1) the displacement effect of LLMs, featuring reduced work volume and earnings, as is exemplified by the translation & localization OLM; 2) the productivity effect of LLMs, featuring increased work volume and earnings, as is exemplified by the web development OLM. To shed light on the underlying mechanisms, we developed a Cournot-type competition model to highlight the existence of an inflection point for each occupation which separates the timeline of AI progress into a honeymoon phase and a substitution phase. Before AI performance crosses the inflection point, human labor benefits each time AI improves, resulting in the honeymoon phase. However, after AI performance crosses the inflection point, additional AI enhancement hurts human labor. Further analyzing the progression from ChatGPT 3.5 to 4.0, we found three effect scenarios (i.e., productivity to productivity, displacement to displacement, and productivity to displacement), consistent with the inflection point conjecture. Heterogeneous analyses reveal that U.S. web developers tend to benefit more from the release of ChatGPT compared to their counterparts in other regions, and somewhat surprisingly, experienced translators seem more likely to exit the market than less experienced translators after the release of ChatGPT.
Authors: Linzhuang Sun, Yao Dong, Nan Xu, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Yin Luo
Abstract: The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) provides human-centered Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with a glimmer of hope. Empathy serves as a key emotional attribute of humanity, playing an irreplaceable role in human-centered AGI. Despite numerous researches aim to improve the cognitive empathy of models by incorporating external knowledge, there has been limited attention on the sensibility and rationality of the conversation itself, which are vital components of the empathy. However, the rationality information within the conversation is restricted, and previous methods of extending knowledge are subject to semantic conflict and single-role view. In this paper, we design an innovative encoder module inspired by self-presentation theory in sociology, which specifically processes sensibility and rationality sentences in dialogues. And we employ a LLM as a rational brain to decipher profound logical information preserved within the conversation, which assists our model in assessing the balance between sensibility and rationality to produce high-quality empathetic response. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other methods in both automatic and human evaluations.
Authors: Hongqiu Wu, Yan Wang, Xingyuan Liu, Hai Zhao, Min Zhang
Abstract: The Instruction-Driven Game Engine (IDGE) project aims to democratize game development by enabling a large language model (LLM) to follow free-form game rules and autonomously generate game-play processes. The IDGE allows users to create games by issuing simple natural language instructions, which significantly lowers the barrier for game development. We approach the learning process for IDGEs as a Next State Prediction task, wherein the model autoregressively predicts in-game states given player actions. It is a challenging task because the computation of in-game states must be precise; otherwise, slight errors could disrupt the game-play. To address this, we train the IDGE in a curriculum manner that progressively increases the model's exposure to complex scenarios. Our initial progress lies in developing an IDGE for Poker, a universally cherished card game. The engine we've designed not only supports a wide range of poker variants but also allows for high customization of rules through natural language inputs. Furthermore, it also favors rapid prototyping of new games from minimal samples, proposing an innovative paradigm in game development that relies on minimal prompt and data engineering. This work lays the groundwork for future advancements in instruction-driven game creation, potentially transforming how games are designed and played.
Authors: Anna C. Doris, Daniele Grandi, Ryan Tomich, Md Ferdous Alam, Mohammadmehdi Ataei, Hyunmin Cheong, Faez Ahmed
Abstract: This research introduces DesignQA, a novel benchmark aimed at evaluating the proficiency of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending and applying engineering requirements in technical documentation. Developed with a focus on real-world engineering challenges, DesignQA uniquely combines multimodal data-including textual design requirements, CAD images, and engineering drawings-derived from the Formula SAE student competition. Different from many existing MLLM benchmarks, DesignQA contains document-grounded visual questions where the input image and input document come from different sources. The benchmark features automatic evaluation metrics and is divided into segments-Rule Comprehension, Rule Compliance, and Rule Extraction-based on tasks that engineers perform when designing according to requirements. We evaluate state-of-the-art models (at the time of writing) like GPT-4o, GPT-4, Claude-Opus, Gemini-1.0, and LLaVA-1.5 against the benchmark, and our study uncovers the existing gaps in MLLMs' abilities to interpret complex engineering documentation. The MLLMs tested, while promising, struggle to reliably retrieve relevant rules from the Formula SAE documentation, face challenges in recognizing technical components in CAD images, and encounter difficulty in analyzing engineering drawings. These findings underscore the need for multimodal models that can better handle the multifaceted questions characteristic of design according to technical documentation. This benchmark sets a foundation for future advancements in AI-supported engineering design processes. DesignQA is publicly available at: https://github.com/anniedoris/design_qa/.
Authors: Yifan Guo, Zhongqiang Ren, Chen Wang
Abstract: This paper considers a Min-Max Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (MTSP), where the goal is to find a set of tours, one for each agent, to collectively visit all the cities while minimizing the length of the longest tour. Though MTSP has been widely studied, obtaining near-optimal solutions for large-scale problems is still challenging due to its NP-hardness. Recent efforts in data-driven methods face challenges of the need for hard-to-obtain supervision and issues with high variance in gradient estimations, leading to slow convergence and highly suboptimal solutions. We address these issues by reformulating MTSP as a bilevel optimization problem, using the concept of imperative learning (IL). This involves introducing an allocation network that decomposes the MTSP into multiple single-agent traveling salesman problems (TSPs). The longest tour from these TSP solutions is then used to self-supervise the allocation network, resulting in a new self-supervised, bilevel, end-to-end learning framework, which we refer to as imperative MTSP (iMTSP). Additionally, to tackle the high-variance gradient issues during the optimization, we introduce a control variate-based gradient estimation algorithm. Our experiments showed that these innovative designs enable our gradient estimator to converge 20% faster than the advanced reinforcement learning baseline and find up to 80% shorter tour length compared with Google OR-Tools MTSP solver, especially in large-scale problems (e.g. 1000 cities and 15 agents).
Authors: Cheng'an Wei, Yue Zhao, Yujia Gong, Kai Chen, Lu Xiang, Shenchen Zhu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Llama have become prevalent in real-world applications, exhibiting impressive text generation performance. LLMs are fundamentally developed from a scenario where the input data remains static and unstructured. To behave interactively, LLM-based chat systems must integrate prior chat history as context into their inputs, following a pre-defined structure. However, LLMs cannot separate user inputs from context, enabling context injection. This paper introduces a methodology to systematically inject misleading context (i.e., chat history) into LLM conversations without prior knowledge of the target model. We formalize context injection through a response retrieval task and propose an LLM-Guided Genetic Algorithm (LLMGA) to create effective injection prompts, leading the target LLM to recognize injected context as genuine. We explore how context injection can be used to elicit disallowed content, posing risks of illegal actions and inappropriate responses. Our elicitation strategies, including acceptance elicitation and word anonymization, can effectively elicit disallowed responses with success rates reaching 97% on ChatGPT. Comprehensive evaluations on real-world LLMs including ChatGPT and Llama-2/3 demonstrate the efficacy of LLMGA and our injection strategies. We also discuss potential countermeasures that can be adopted for detecting injection and developing more secure models. Our findings provide insights into the challenges associated with the real-world deployment of LLMs for interactive and structured data scenarios.
Authors: Pu Feng, Junkang Liang, Size Wang, Xin Yu, Xin Ji, Yiting Chen, Kui Zhang, Rongye Shi, Wenjun Wu
Abstract: In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) framework is pivotal but struggles due to a gap: global state guidance in training versus reliance on local observations in execution, lacking global signals. Inspired by human societal consensus mechanisms, we introduce the Hierarchical Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (HC-MARL) framework to address this limitation. HC-MARL employs contrastive learning to foster a global consensus among agents, enabling cooperative behavior without direct communication. This approach enables agents to form a global consensus from local observations, using it as an additional piece of information to guide collaborative actions during execution. To cater to the dynamic requirements of various tasks, consensus is divided into multiple layers, encompassing both short-term and long-term considerations. Short-term observations prompt the creation of an immediate, low-layer consensus, while long-term observations contribute to the formation of a strategic, high-layer consensus. This process is further refined through an adaptive attention mechanism that dynamically adjusts the influence of each consensus layer. This mechanism optimizes the balance between immediate reactions and strategic planning, tailoring it to the specific demands of the task at hand. Extensive experiments and real-world applications in multi-robot systems showcase our framework's superior performance, marking significant advancements over baselines.
Authors: Michael Kaup, Cornelius Wolff, Hyerim Hwang, Julius Mayer, Elia Bruni
Abstract: We present a review of popular simulation engines and frameworks used in reinforcement learning (RL) research, aiming to guide researchers in selecting tools for creating simulated physical environments for RL and training setups. It evaluates nine frameworks (Brax, Chrono, Gazebo, MuJoCo, ODE, PhysX, PyBullet, Webots, and Unity) based on their popularity, feature range, quality, usability, and RL capabilities. We highlight the challenges in selecting and utilizing physics engines for RL research, including the need for detailed comparisons and an understanding of each framework's capabilities. Key findings indicate MuJoCo as the leading framework due to its performance and flexibility, despite usability challenges. Unity is noted for its ease of use but lacks scalability and simulation fidelity. The study calls for further development to improve simulation engines' usability and performance and stresses the importance of transparency and reproducibility in RL research. This review contributes to the RL community by offering insights into the selection process for simulation engines, facilitating informed decision-making.
Authors: Anjana Wijekoon, Nirmalie Wiratunga, David Corsar, Kyle Martin, Ikechukwu Nkisi-Orji, Belen D\'iaz-Agudo, Derek Bridge
Abstract: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to improve the transparency of autonomous decision-making through explanations. Recent literature has emphasised users' need for holistic "multi-shot" explanations and the ability to personalise their engagement with XAI systems. We refer to this user-centred interaction as an XAI Experience. Despite advances in creating XAI experiences, evaluating them in a user-centred manner has remained challenging. To address this, we introduce the XAI Experience Quality (XEQ) Scale (pronounced "Seek" Scale), for evaluating the user-centred quality of XAI experiences. Furthermore, XEQ quantifies the quality of experiences across four evaluation dimensions: learning, utility, fulfilment and engagement. These contributions extend the state-of-the-art of XAI evaluation, moving beyond the one-dimensional metrics frequently developed to assess single-shot explanations. In this paper, we present the XEQ scale development and validation process, including content validation with XAI experts as well as discriminant and construct validation through a large-scale pilot study. Out pilot study results offer strong evidence that establishes the XEQ Scale as a comprehensive framework for evaluating user-centred XAI experiences.
Authors: Zidan Wang, Rui Shen, Bradly Stadie
Abstract: We introduce Wonderful Team, a multi-agent visual LLM (VLLM) framework for solving robotics problems in the zero-shot regime. By zero-shot we mean that, for a novel environment, we feed a VLLM an image of the robot's environment and a description of the task, and have the VLLM output the sequence of actions necessary for the robot to complete the task. Prior work on VLLMs in robotics has largely focused on settings where some part of the pipeline is fine-tuned, such as tuning an LLM on robot data or training a separate vision encoder for perception and action generation. Surprisingly, due to recent advances in the capabilities of VLLMs, this type of fine-tuning may no longer be necessary for many tasks. In this work, we show that with careful engineering, we can prompt a single off-the-shelf VLLM to handle all aspects of a robotics task, from high-level planning to low-level location-extraction and action-execution. Wonderful Team builds on recent advances in multi-agent LLMs to partition tasks across an agent hierarchy, making it self-corrective and able to effectively partition and solve even long-horizon tasks. Extensive experiments on VIMABench and real-world robotic environments demonstrate the system's capability to handle a variety of robotic tasks, including manipulation, visual goal-reaching, and visual reasoning, all in a zero-shot manner. These results underscore a key point: vision-language models have progressed rapidly in the past year, and should strongly be considered as a backbone for robotics problems going forward.
Authors: Yoshua Bengio, Michael K. Cohen, Nikolay Malkin, Matt MacDermott, Damiano Fornasiere, Pietro Greiner, Younesse Kaddar
Abstract: Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees? With the long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we consider estimating a context-dependent bound on the probability of violating a given safety specification. Such a risk evaluation would need to be performed at run-time to provide a guardrail against dangerous actions of an AI. Noting that different plausible hypotheses about the world could produce very different outcomes, and because we do not know which one is right, we derive bounds on the safety violation probability predicted under the true but unknown hypothesis. Such bounds could be used to reject potentially dangerous actions. Our main results involve searching for cautious but plausible hypotheses, obtained by a maximization that involves Bayesian posteriors over hypotheses. We consider two forms of this result, in the iid case and in the non-iid case, and conclude with open problems towards turning such theoretical results into practical AI guardrails.
Authors: Hongqiu Wu, Zekai Xu, Tianyang Xu, Jiale Hong, Weiqi Wu, Yan Wang, Hai Zhao, Min Zhang, Zhezhi He
Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the \emph{virtual world}, a cyberspace where people can live in. An ideal virtual world shares great similarity with our real world. One of the crucial aspects is its evolving nature, reflected by individuals' capability to grow and thereby influence the objective world. Such dynamics is unpredictable and beyond the reach of existing systems. For this, we propose a special engine called \textbf{\emph{Delta-Engine}} to drive this virtual world. $\Delta$ associates the world's evolution to the engine's scalability. It consists of a base engine and a neural proxy. The base engine programs the prototype of the virtual world; given a trigger, the neural proxy generates new snippets on the base engine through \emph{incremental prediction}. This paper presents a full-stack introduction to the delta-engine. The key feature of the delta-engine is its scalability to unknown elements within the world, Technically, it derives from the prefect co-work of the neural proxy and the base engine, and the alignment with high-quality data. We introduce an engine-oriented fine-tuning method that embeds the base engine into the proxy. We then discuss the human-LLM collaborative design to produce novel and interesting data efficiently. Eventually, we propose three evaluation principles to comprehensively assess the performance of a delta engine: naive evaluation, incremental evaluation, and adversarial evaluation.
Authors: Hanjun Choi, Hyunsung Kim, Minho Lee, Chang-Jo Kim, Jinsung Yoon, Sang-Ki Ko
Abstract: Many spatiotemporal domains handle multi-agent trajectory data, but in real-world scenarios, collected trajectory data are often partially missing due to various reasons. While existing approaches demonstrate good performance in trajectory imputation, they face challenges in capturing the complex dynamics and interactions between agents due to a lack of physical constraints that govern realistic trajectories, leading to suboptimal results. To address this issue, the paper proposes a Derivative-Based Hybrid Prediction (DBHP) framework that can effectively impute multiple agents' missing trajectories. First, a neural network equipped with Set Transformers produces a naive prediction of missing trajectories while satisfying the permutation-equivariance in terms of the order of input agents. Then, the framework makes alternative predictions leveraging velocity and acceleration information and combines all the predictions with properly determined weights to provide final imputed trajectories. In this way, our proposed framework not only accurately predicts position, velocity, and acceleration values but also enforces the physical relationship between them, eventually improving both the accuracy and naturalness of the predicted trajectories. Accordingly, the experiment results about imputing player trajectories in team sports show that our framework significantly outperforms existing imputation baselines.
Authors: Ziwei Liu, Qidong Liu, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Pengyue Jia, Maolin Wang, Zitao Liu, Yi Chang, Xiangyu Zhao
Abstract: In various domains, Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) have become essential due to their superior capability to discern intricate user preferences. Typically, SRS utilize transformer-based architectures to forecast the subsequent item within a sequence. Nevertheless, the quadratic computational complexity inherent in these models often leads to inefficiencies, hindering the achievement of real-time recommendations. Mamba, a recent advancement, has exhibited exceptional performance in time series prediction, significantly enhancing both efficiency and accuracy. However, integrating Mamba directly into SRS poses several challenges. Its inherently unidirectional nature may constrain the model's capacity to capture the full context of user-item interactions, while its instability in state estimation can compromise its ability to detect short-term patterns within interaction sequences. To overcome these issues, we introduce a new framework named Selective Gated Mamba (SIGMA) for Sequential Recommendation. This framework leverages a Partially Flipped Mamba (PF-Mamba) to construct a bidirectional architecture specifically tailored to improve contextual modeling. Additionally, an input-sensitive Dense Selective Gate (DS Gate) is employed to optimize directional weights and enhance the processing of sequential information in PF-Mamba. For short sequence modeling, we have also developed a Feature Extract GRU (FE-GRU) to efficiently capture short-term dependencies. Empirical results indicate that SIGMA outperforms current models on five real-world datasets. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/ziwliu-cityu/SIMGA to ease reproducibility.
Authors: Shenglin Zhang, Pengtian Zhu, Minghua Ma, Jiagang Wang, Yongqian Sun, Dongwen Li, Jingyu Wang, Qianying Guo, Xiaolei Hua, Lin Zhu, Dan Pei
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at general question-answering (Q&A) but often fall short in specialized domains due to a lack of domain-specific knowledge. Commercial companies face the dual challenges of privacy protection and resource constraints when involving LLMs for fine-tuning. This paper propose a novel framework, Self-Evolution, designed to address these issues by leveraging lightweight open-source LLMs through multiple iterative fine-tuning rounds. To enhance the efficiency of iterative fine-tuning, Self-Evolution employ a strategy that filters and reinforces the knowledge with higher value during the iterative process. We employed Self-Evolution on Qwen1.5-7B-Chat using 4,000 documents containing rich domain knowledge from China Mobile, achieving a performance score 174% higher on domain-specific question-answering evaluations than Qwen1.5-7B-Chat and even 22% higher than Qwen1.5-72B-Chat. Self-Evolution has been deployed in China Mobile's daily operation and maintenance for 117 days, and it improves the efficiency of locating alarms, fixing problems, and finding related reports, with an average efficiency improvement of over 18.6%. In addition, we release Self-Evolution framework code in https://github.com/Zero-Pointer/Self-Evolution.
Authors: Pratyush Kumar, Kuber Vijaykumar Bellad, Bharat Vadlamudi, Aman Chadha
Abstract: With advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), a major use case that has emerged is querying databases in plain English, translating user questions into executable database queries, which has improved significantly. However, real-world datasets often feature a vast array of attributes and complex values, complicating the LLMs task of accurately identifying relevant columns or values from natural language queries. Traditional methods cannot fully relay the datasets size and complexity to the LLM. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that leverages Full-Text Search (FTS) on the input table. This approach not only enables precise detection of specific values and columns but also narrows the search space for language models, thereby enhancing query accuracy. Additionally, it supports a custom auto-complete feature that suggests queries based on the data in the table. This integration significantly refines the interaction between the user and complex datasets, offering a sophisticated solution to the limitations faced by current table querying capabilities. This work is accompanied by an application for both Mac and Windows platforms, which readers can try out themselves on their own data.
Authors: Murtadha Ahmed, Bo Wen, Shengfeng Pan, Jianlin Su, Luo Ao, Yunfeng Liu
Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to associate a text with a set of aspects and infer their respective sentimental polarities. State-of-the-art approaches are built on fine-tuning pre-trained language models, focusing on learning aspect-specific representations from the corpus. However, aspects are often expressed implicitly, making implicit mapping challenging without sufficient labeled examples, which may be scarce in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a unified framework to address aspect categorization and aspect-based sentiment subtasks. We introduce a mechanism to construct an auxiliary-sentence for the implicit aspect using the corpus's semantic information. We then encourage BERT to learn aspect-specific representation in response to this auxiliary-sentence, not the aspect itself. We evaluate our approach on real benchmark datasets for both ABSA and Targeted-ABSA tasks. Our experiments show that it consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in aspect categorization and aspect-based sentiment across all datasets, with considerable improvement margins. The BERT-ASC code is available at https://github.com/amurtadha/BERT-ASC.
Authors: Matej Cief, Branislav Kveton, Michal Kompan
Abstract: Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are recommended and thus logged more frequently than others. This is further perpetuated when recommending a list of items, as the action space is combinatorial. To address this challenge, we study pessimistic off-policy optimization for learning to rank. The key idea is to compute lower confidence bounds on parameters of click models and then return the list with the highest pessimistic estimate of its value. This approach is computationally efficient, and we analyze it. We study its Bayesian and frequentist variants and overcome the limitation of unknown prior by incorporating empirical Bayes. To show the empirical effectiveness of our approach, we compare it to off-policy optimizers that use inverse propensity scores or neglect uncertainty. Our approach outperforms all baselines and is both robust and general.
Authors: Jakob Schoeffer, Johannes Jakubik, Michael Voessing, Niklas Kuehl, Gerhard Satzger
Abstract: In AI-assisted decision-making, a central promise of having a human-in-the-loop is that they should be able to complement the AI system by overriding its wrong recommendations. In practice, however, we often see that humans cannot assess the correctness of AI recommendations and, as a result, adhere to wrong or override correct advice. Different ways of relying on AI recommendations have immediate, yet distinct, implications for decision quality. Unfortunately, reliance and decision quality are often inappropriately conflated in the current literature on AI-assisted decision-making. In this work, we disentangle and formalize the relationship between reliance and decision quality, and we characterize the conditions under which human-AI complementarity is achievable. To illustrate how reliance and decision quality relate to one another, we propose a visual framework and demonstrate its usefulness for interpreting empirical findings, including the effects of interventions like explanations. Overall, our research highlights the importance of distinguishing between reliance behavior and decision quality in AI-assisted decision-making.
Authors: Zhixian Wang, Qingsong Wen, Chaoli Zhang, Liang Sun, Yi Wang
Abstract: Electrical load forecasting plays a crucial role in decision-making for power systems, including unit commitment and economic dispatch. The integration of renewable energy sources and the occurrence of external events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have rapidly increased uncertainties in load forecasting. The uncertainties in load forecasting can be divided into two types: epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty. Separating these types of uncertainties can help decision-makers better understand where and to what extent the uncertainty is, thereby enhancing their confidence in the following decision-making. This paper proposes a diffusion-based Seq2Seq structure to estimate epistemic uncertainty and employs the robust additive Cauchy distribution to estimate aleatoric uncertainty. Our method not only ensures the accuracy of load forecasting but also demonstrates the ability to separate the two types of uncertainties and be applicable to different levels of loads. The relevant code can be found at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DiffLoad-4714/}.
Authors: Avrim Blum, Princewill Okoroafor, Aadirupa Saha, Kevin Stangl
Abstract: We consider the vulnerability of fairness-constrained learning to small amounts of malicious noise in the training data. Konstantinov and Lampert (2021) initiated the study of this question and presented negative results showing there exist data distributions where for several fairness constraints, any proper learner will exhibit high vulnerability when group sizes are imbalanced. Here, we present a more optimistic view, showing that if we allow randomized classifiers, then the landscape is much more nuanced. For example, for Demographic Parity we show we can incur only a $\Theta(\alpha)$ loss in accuracy, where $\alpha$ is the malicious noise rate, matching the best possible even without fairness constraints. For Equal Opportunity, we show we can incur an $O(\sqrt{\alpha})$ loss, and give a matching $\Omega(\sqrt{\alpha})$lower bound. In contrast, Konstantinov and Lampert (2021) showed for proper learners the loss in accuracy for both notions is $\Omega(1)$. The key technical novelty of our work is how randomization can bypass simple "tricks" an adversary can use to amplify his power. We also consider additional fairness notions including Equalized Odds and Calibration. For these fairness notions, the excess accuracy clusters into three natural regimes $O(\alpha)$,$O(\sqrt{\alpha})$ and $O(1)$. These results provide a more fine-grained view of the sensitivity of fairness-constrained learning to adversarial noise in training data.
Authors: Nico Daheim, Thomas M\"ollenhoff, Edoardo Maria Ponti, Iryna Gurevych, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan
Abstract: Models trained on different datasets can be merged by a weighted-averaging of their parameters, but why does it work and when can it fail? Here, we connect the inaccuracy of weighted-averaging to mismatches in the gradients and propose a new uncertainty-based scheme to improve the performance by reducing the mismatch. The connection also reveals implicit assumptions in other schemes such as averaging, task arithmetic, and Fisher-weighted averaging. Our new method gives consistent improvements for large language models and vision transformers, both in terms of performance and robustness to hyperparameters. Code available here.
Authors: Qiugang Zhan, Ran Tao, Xiurui Xie, Guisong Liu, Malu Zhang, Huajin Tang, Yang Yang
Abstract: In recent years, studies on image generation models of spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained the attention of many researchers. Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as one of the most popular image generation models, have attracted a lot of work exploring their SNN implementation. Due to the constrained binary representation in SNNs, existing SNN VAE methods implicitly construct the latent space by an elaborated autoregressive network and use the network outputs as the sampling variables. However, this unspecified implicit representation of the latent space will increase the difficulty of generating high-quality images and introduces additional network parameters. In this paper, we propose an efficient spiking variational autoencoder (ESVAE) that constructs an interpretable latent space distribution and design a reparameterizable spiking sampling method. Specifically, we construct the prior and posterior of the latent space as a Poisson distribution using the firing rate of the spiking neurons. Subsequently, we propose a reparameterizable Poisson spiking sampling method, which is free from the additional network. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted, and the experimental results show that the proposed ESVAE outperforms previous SNN VAE methods in reconstructed & generated images quality. In addition, experiments demonstrate that ESVAE's encoder is able to retain the original image information more efficiently, and the decoder is more robust. The source code is available at https://github.com/QgZhan/ESVAE.
Authors: Guang Lin, Chao Li, Jianhai Zhang, Toshihisa Tanaka, Qibin Zhao
Abstract: The deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to well-designed adversarial attacks. The most successful defense technique based on adversarial training (AT) can achieve optimal robustness against particular attacks but cannot generalize well to unseen attacks. Another effective defense technique based on adversarial purification (AP) can enhance generalization but cannot achieve optimal robustness. Meanwhile, both methods share one common limitation on the degraded standard accuracy. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel pipeline to acquire the robust purifier model, named Adversarial Training on Purification (AToP), which comprises two components: perturbation destruction by random transforms (RT) and purifier model fine-tuned (FT) by adversarial loss. RT is essential to avoid overlearning to known attacks, resulting in the robustness generalization to unseen attacks, and FT is essential for the improvement of robustness. To evaluate our method in an efficient and scalable way, we conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNette to demonstrate that our method achieves optimal robustness and exhibits generalization ability against unseen attacks.
Authors: Qi Hu, Weifeng Jiang, Haoran Li, Zihao Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Qianren Mao, Yangqiu Song, Lixin Fan, Jianxin Li
Abstract: The increasing demand for large-scale language models (LLMs) has highlighted the importance of efficient data retrieval mechanisms. Neural graph databases (NGDBs) have emerged as a promising approach to storing and querying graph-structured data in neural space, enabling the retrieval of relevant information for LLMs. However, existing NGDBs are typically designed to operate on a single graph, limiting their ability to reason across multiple graphs. Furthermore, the lack of support for multi-source graph data in existing NGDBs hinders their ability to capture the complexity and diversity of real-world data. In many applications, data is distributed across multiple sources, and the ability to reason across these sources is crucial for making informed decisions. This limitation is particularly problematic when dealing with sensitive graph data, as directly sharing and aggregating such data poses significant privacy risks. As a result, many applications that rely on NGDBs are forced to choose between compromising data privacy or sacrificing the ability to reason across multiple graphs. To address these limitations, we propose Federated Neural Graph Database (FedNGDB), a novel framework that enables reasoning over multi-source graph-based data while preserving privacy. FedNGDB leverages federated learning to collaboratively learn graph representations across multiple sources, enriching relationships between entities and improving the overall quality of the graph data. Unlike existing methods, FedNGDB can handle complex graph structures and relationships, making it suitable for various downstream tasks.
Authors: Phuc Phan, Hieu Tran, Long Phan
Abstract: We propose a straightforward approach called Distillation Contrastive Decoding (DCD) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. In contrast to previous approaches that relied on smaller amateur models or analysis of hidden state differences, DCD employs Contrastive Chain-of-thought Prompting and advanced distillation techniques, including Dropout and Quantization. This approach effectively addresses the limitations of Contrastive Decoding (CD), which typically requires both an expert and an amateur model, thus increasing computational resource demands. By integrating contrastive prompts with distillation, DCD obviates the need for an amateur model and reduces memory usage. Our evaluations demonstrate that DCD significantly enhances LLM performance across a range of reasoning benchmarks, surpassing both CD and existing methods in the GSM8K and StrategyQA datasets.
Authors: Haining Pan, Nayantara Mudur, Will Taranto, Maria Tikhanovskaya, Subhashini Venugopalan, Yasaman Bahri, Michael P. Brenner, Eun-Ah Kim
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an unprecedented ability to perform complex tasks in multiple domains, including mathematical and scientific reasoning. We demonstrate that with carefully designed prompts, LLMs can accurately carry out key calculations in research papers in theoretical physics. We focus on a broadly used approximation method in quantum physics: the Hartree-Fock method, requiring an analytic multi-step calculation deriving approximate Hamiltonian and corresponding self-consistency equations. To carry out the calculations using LLMs, we design multi-step prompt templates that break down the analytic calculation into standardized steps with placeholders for problem-specific information. We evaluate GPT-4's performance in executing the calculation for 15 research papers from the past decade, demonstrating that, with correction of intermediate steps, it can correctly derive the final Hartree-Fock Hamiltonian in 13 cases and makes minor errors in 2 cases. Aggregating across all research papers, we find an average score of 87.5 (out of 100) on the execution of individual calculation steps. Overall, the requisite skill for doing these calculations is at the graduate level in quantum condensed matter theory. We further use LLMs to mitigate the two primary bottlenecks in this evaluation process: (i) extracting information from papers to fill in templates and (ii) automatic scoring of the calculation steps, demonstrating good results in both cases. The strong performance is the first step for developing algorithms that automatically explore theoretical hypotheses at an unprecedented scale.
Authors: Salome Kazeminia, Max Joosten, Dragan Bosnacki, Carsten Marr
Abstract: Automated disease diagnosis using medical image analysis relies on deep learning, often requiring large labeled datasets for supervised model training. Diseases like Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) pose challenges due to scarce and costly annotations on a single-cell level. Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) addresses weakly labeled scenarios but necessitates powerful encoders typically trained with labeled data. In this study, we explore Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) as a pre-training approach for MIL-based AML subtype classification from blood smears, removing the need for labeled data during encoder training. We investigate the three state-of-the-art SSL methods SimCLR, SwAV, and DINO, and compare their performance against supervised pre-training. Our findings show that SSL-pretrained encoders achieve comparable performance, showcasing the potential of SSL in MIL. This breakthrough offers a cost-effective and data-efficient solution, propelling the field of AI-based disease diagnosis.
Authors: Mert \"Ozer, Maximilian Weiherer, Martin Hundhausen, Bernhard Egger
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) quickly evolved as the new de-facto standard for the task of novel view synthesis when trained on a set of RGB images. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of neural scene representations, such as NeRFs, in the context of multi-modal learning. Specifically, we present four different strategies of how to incorporate a second modality, other than RGB, into NeRFs: (1) training from scratch independently on both modalities; (2) pre-training on RGB and fine-tuning on the second modality; (3) adding a second branch; and (4) adding a separate component to predict (color) values of the additional modality. We chose thermal imaging as second modality since it strongly differs from RGB in terms of radiosity, making it challenging to integrate into neural scene representations. For the evaluation of the proposed strategies, we captured a new publicly available multi-view dataset, ThermalMix, consisting of six common objects and about 360 RGB and thermal images in total. We employ cross-modality calibration prior to data capturing, leading to high-quality alignments between RGB and thermal images. Our findings reveal that adding a second branch to NeRF performs best for novel view synthesis on thermal images while also yielding compelling results on RGB. Finally, we also show that our analysis generalizes to other modalities, including near-infrared images and depth maps. Project page: https://mert-o.github.io/ThermalNeRF/.
Authors: Guang Lin, Zerui Tao, Jianhai Zhang, Toshihisa Tanaka, Qibin Zhao
Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) based adversarial purification (AP) has shown to be the most powerful alternative to adversarial training (AT). However, these methods neglect the fact that pre-trained diffusion models themselves are not robust to adversarial attacks as well. Additionally, the diffusion process can easily destroy semantic information and generate a high quality image but totally different from the original input image after the reverse process, leading to degraded standard accuracy. To overcome these issues, a natural idea is to harness adversarial training strategy to retrain or fine-tune the pre-trained diffusion model, which is computationally prohibitive. We propose a novel robust reverse process with adversarial guidance, which is independent of given pre-trained DMs and avoids retraining or fine-tuning the DMs. This robust guidance can not only ensure to generate purified examples retaining more semantic content but also mitigate the accuracy-robustness trade-off of DMs for the first time, which also provides DM-based AP an efficient adaptive ability to new attacks. Extensive experiments are conducted on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet to demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results and exhibits generalization against different attacks.
Authors: Yizheng Huang, Jimmy Huang
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) merges retrieval methods with deep learning advancements to address the static limitations of large language models (LLMs) by enabling the dynamic integration of up-to-date external information. This methodology, focusing primarily on the text domain, provides a cost-effective solution to the generation of plausible but possibly incorrect responses by LLMs, thereby enhancing the accuracy and reliability of their outputs through the use of real-world data. As RAG grows in complexity and incorporates multiple concepts that can influence its performance, this paper organizes the RAG paradigm into four categories: pre-retrieval, retrieval, post-retrieval, and generation, offering a detailed perspective from the retrieval viewpoint. It outlines RAG's evolution and discusses the field's progression through the analysis of significant studies. Additionally, the paper introduces evaluation methods for RAG, addressing the challenges faced and proposing future research directions. By offering an organized framework and categorization, the study aims to consolidate existing research on RAG, clarify its technological underpinnings, and highlight its potential to broaden the adaptability and applications of LLMs.
Authors: Lihao Gan, Xin Man, Chenghong Zhang, Jie Shao
Abstract: Weather forecasting is a crucial task for meteorologic research, with direct social and economic impacts. Recently, data-driven weather forecasting models based on deep learning have shown great potential, achieving superior performance compared with traditional numerical weather prediction methods. However, these models often require massive training data and computational resources. In this paper, we propose EWMoE, an effective model for accurate global weather forecasting, which requires significantly less training data and computational resources. Our model incorporates three key components to enhance prediction accuracy: 3D absolute position embedding, a core Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layer, and two specific loss functions. We conduct our evaluation on the ERA5 dataset using only two years of training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EWMoE outperforms current models such as FourCastNet and ClimaX at all forecast time, achieving competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art models Pangu-Weather and GraphCast in evaluation metrics such as Anomaly Correlation Coefficient (ACC) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Additionally, ablation studies indicate that applying the MoE architecture to weather forecasting offers significant advantages in improving accuracy and resource efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Tomoyi/EWMoE.
Authors: Jiayi Chen, Chunhua Deng
Abstract: With the advancement of video analysis technology, the multi-object tracking (MOT) problem in complex scenes involving pedestrians is gaining increasing importance. This challenge primarily involves two key tasks: pedestrian detection and re-identification. While significant progress has been achieved in pedestrian detection tasks in recent years, enhancing the effectiveness of re-identification tasks remains a persistent challenge. This difficulty arises from the large total number of pedestrian samples in multi-object tracking datasets and the scarcity of individual instance samples. Motivated by recent rapid advancements in meta-learning techniques, we introduce MAML MOT, a meta-learning-based training approach for multi-object tracking. This approach leverages the rapid learning capability of meta-learning to tackle the issue of sample scarcity in pedestrian re-identification tasks, aiming to improve the model's generalization performance and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high accuracy on mainstream datasets in the MOT Challenge. This offers new perspectives and solutions for research in the field of pedestrian multi-object tracking.
Authors: Zonghui Yang, Shijian Gao, Xiang Cheng
Abstract: Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology is essential for supporting vehicular networks. However, the communication channel in this scenario exhibits time variations, and the potential targets may move rapidly, resulting in double dynamics. This nature poses a challenge for real-time precoder design. While optimization-based solutions are widely researched, they are complex and heavily rely on perfect channel-related information, which is impractical in double dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose using constrained deep reinforcement learning to facilitate dynamic updates to the ISAC precoder. Additionally, the primal dual-deep deterministic policy gradient and Wolpertinger architecture are tailored to efficiently train the algorithm under complex constraints and varying numbers of users. The proposed scheme not only adapts to the dynamics based on observations but also leverages environmental information to enhance performance and reduce complexity. Its superiority over existing candidates has been validated through experiments.
Authors: Zhengqing Miao, Meirong Zhao
Abstract: Motor imagery (MI) based EEG represents a frontier in enabling direct neural control of external devices and advancing neural rehabilitation. This study introduces a novel time embedding technique, termed traveling-wave based time embedding, utilized as a pseudo channel to enhance the decoding accuracy of MI-EEG signals across various neural network architectures. Unlike traditional neural network methods that fail to account for the temporal dynamics in MI-EEG in individual difference, our approach captures time-related changes for different participants based on a priori knowledge. Through extensive experimentation with multiple participants, we demonstrate that this method not only improves classification accuracy but also exhibits greater adaptability to individual differences compared to position encoding used in Transformer architecture. Significantly, our results reveal that traveling-wave based time embedding crucially enhances decoding accuracy, particularly for participants typically considered "EEG-illiteracy". As a novel direction in EEG research, the traveling-wave based time embedding not only offers fresh insights for neural network decoding strategies but also expands new avenues for research into attention mechanisms in neuroscience and a deeper understanding of EEG signals.
Authors: Ciro Beneduce, Bruno Lepri, Massimiliano Luca
Abstract: Predicting the locations an individual will visit in the future is crucial for solving many societal issues like disease diffusion and reduction of pollution. However, next-location predictors require a significant amount of individual-level information that may be scarce or unavailable in some scenarios (e.g., cold-start). Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown good generalization and reasoning capabilities and are rich in geographical knowledge, allowing us to believe that these models can act as zero-shot next-location predictors. We tested more than 15 LLMs on three real-world mobility datasets and we found that LLMs can obtain accuracies up to 36.2%, a significant relative improvement of almost 640% when compared to other models specifically designed for human mobility. We also test for data contamination and explored the possibility of using LLMs as text-based explainers for next-location prediction, showing that, regardless of the model size, LLMs can explain their decision.
Authors: Chujie Gao, Qihui Zhang, Dongping Chen, Yue Huang, Siyuan Wu, Zhengyan Fu, Yao Wan, Xiangliang Zhang, Lichao Sun
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various industries due to their exceptional generative capabilities. However, for safe and effective real-world deployments, ensuring honesty and helpfulness is critical. This paper addresses the question: Can we prioritize the helpfulness of LLMs while preserving their honesty? To begin with, we establish exhaustive principles aimed at guaranteeing the honesty of LLM. Additionally, we introduce a novel dataset, referred to as HoneSet, comprising 930 queries spanning six categories meticulously crafted to assess an LLM's capacity for maintaining honesty. Subsequently, we present two approaches to augmenting honesty and helpfulness in LLMs: a training-free enhancement and a fine-tuning-based improvement. The training-free approach, which is based on curiosity-driven prompting, empowers LLMs to articulate internal confusion and uncertainty regarding queries, thereby optimizing their responses. Conversely, the fine-tuning-based method employs a two-stage process inspired by curriculum learning: initially instructing LLMs to discern between honest and dishonest responses, then refining their training to enhance helpfulness. Experiments conducted on nine prominent LLMs demonstrate a significant improvement in alignment with honesty across all models through the implementation of our proposed enhancements. Particularly noteworthy is the 65.3% enhancement observed in Llama3-8b and the remarkable 124.7% improvement in Mistral-7b, as measured by the H$^{2}$ (honest and helpful) assessment. We believe that our work can pave the way for developing more trustworthy LLMs for real-world applications.
Authors: Quandong Wang, Yuxuan Yuan, Xiaoyu Yang, Ruike Zhang, Kang Zhao, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Daniel Povey, Bin Wang
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various fields, the efficiency of training and inference remains a major challenge. To address this issue, we propose SUBLLM, short for Subsampling-Upsampling-Bypass Large Language Model, an innovative architecture that extends the core decoder-only framework by incorporating subsampling, upsampling, and bypass modules. The subsampling modules are responsible for shortening the sequence, while the upsampling modules restore the sequence length, and the bypass modules enhance convergence. In comparison to LLaMA, the proposed SUBLLM exhibits significant enhancements in both training and inference speeds as well as memory usage, while maintaining competitive few-shot performance. During training, SUBLLM increases speeds by 26% and cuts memory by 10GB per GPU. In inference, it boosts speeds by up to 37% and reduces memory by 1GB per GPU. The training and inference speeds can be enhanced by 34% and 52% respectively when the context window is expanded to 8192. Our code is available at https://github.com/XiaoMi/subllm.
Authors: Ruitao Xie, Jingbang Chen, Limai Jiang, Rui Xiao, Yi Pan, Yunpeng Cai
Abstract: Image classification is a primary task in data analysis where explainable models are crucially demanded in various applications. Although amounts of methods have been proposed to obtain explainable knowledge from the black-box classifiers, these approaches lack the efficiency of extracting global knowledge regarding the classification task, thus is vulnerable to local traps and often leads to poor accuracy. In this study, we propose a generative explanation model that combines the advantages of global and local knowledge for explaining image classifiers. We develop a representation learning method called class association embedding (CAE), which encodes each sample into a pair of separated class-associated and individual codes. Recombining the individual code of a given sample with altered class-associated code leads to a synthetic real-looking sample with preserved individual characters but modified class-associated features and possibly flipped class assignments. A building-block coherency feature extraction algorithm is proposed that efficiently separates class-associated features from individual ones. The extracted feature space forms a low-dimensional manifold that visualizes the classification decision patterns. Explanation on each individual sample can be then achieved in a counter-factual generation manner which continuously modifies the sample in one direction, by shifting its class-associated code along a guided path, until its classification outcome is changed. We compare our method with state-of-the-art ones on explaining image classification tasks in the form of saliency maps, demonstrating that our method achieves higher accuracies. The code is available at https://github.com/xrt11/XAI-CODE.
Authors: Alona Levy-Jurgenson, Zohar Yakhini
Abstract: Generative models have seen significant advancements in recent years, yet often remain challenging and costly to train and use. We introduce Generative Topological Networks (GTNs) -- a new class of generative models that addresses these shortcomings. GTNs are trained deterministically using a simple supervised learning approach grounded in topology theory. GTNs are fast to train, and require only a single forward pass in a standard feedforward neural network to generate samples. We demonstrate the strengths of GTNs on several datasets, including MNIST, CelebA and the Hands and Palm Images dataset. Finally, the theory behind GTNs offers insights into how to train generative models for improved performance. Code and weights are available at: https://github.com/alonalj/GTN
Authors: Achintya Kundu, Rhui Dih Lee, Laura Wynter, Raghu Kiran Ganti, Mayank Mishra
Abstract: Padding is often used in tuning LLM models by adding special tokens to shorter training examples to match the length of the longest sequence in each batch. While this ensures uniformity for batch processing, it introduces inefficiencies by including irrelevant padding tokens in the computation and wastes GPU resources. Hugging Face SFT trainer has always offered the option to use packing to combine multiple training examples, allowing for maximal utilization of GPU resources. However, up till now, it did not offer proper masking of each packed training example. This capability has now been added to Hugging Face Transformers 4.44. We analyse this new feature and show the benefits across different variations of packing.
Authors: Emman Haider, Daniel Perez-Becker, Thomas Portet, Piyush Madan, Amit Garg, Atabak Ashfaq, David Majercak, Wen Wen, Dongwoo Kim, Ziyi Yang, Jianwen Zhang, Hiteshi Sharma, Blake Bullwinkel, Martin Pouliot, Amanda Minnich, Shiven Chawla, Solianna Herrera, Shahed Warreth, Maggie Engler, Gary Lopez, Nina Chikanov, Raja Sekhar Rao Dheekonda, Bolor-Erdene Jagdagdorj, Roman Lutz, Richard Lundeen, Tori Westerhoff, Pete Bryan, Christian Seifert, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Andrew Berkley, Alex Kessler
Abstract: Recent innovations in language model training have demonstrated that it is possible to create highly performant models that are small enough to run on a smartphone. As these models are deployed in an increasing number of domains, it is critical to ensure that they are aligned with human preferences and safety considerations. In this report, we present our methodology for safety aligning the Phi-3 series of language models. We utilized a "break-fix" cycle, performing multiple rounds of dataset curation, safety post-training, benchmarking, red teaming, and vulnerability identification to cover a variety of harm areas in both single and multi-turn scenarios. Our results indicate that this approach iteratively improved the performance of the Phi-3 models across a wide range of responsible AI benchmarks. Finally, we include additional red teaming strategies and evaluations that were used to test the safety behavior of Phi-3.5-mini and Phi-3.5-MoE, which were optimized for multilingual capabilities.
Authors: Desta Haileselassie Hagos, Rick Battle, Danda B. Rawat
Abstract: The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a new era of Natural Language Processing (NLP), introducing unprecedented capabilities that are revolutionizing various domains. This paper explores the current state of these cutting-edge technologies, demonstrating their remarkable advancements and wide-ranging applications. Our paper contributes to providing a holistic perspective on the technical foundations, practical applications, and emerging challenges within the evolving landscape of Generative AI and LLMs. We believe that understanding the generative capabilities of AI systems and the specific context of LLMs is crucial for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to collaboratively shape the responsible and ethical integration of these technologies into various domains. Furthermore, we identify and address main research gaps, providing valuable insights to guide future research endeavors within the AI research community.
Authors: Yizhang Jin, Jian Li, Jiangning Zhang, Jianlong Hu, Zhenye Gan, Xin Tan, Yong Liu, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Lizhuang Ma
Abstract: Visual Spatial Description (VSD) aims to generate texts that describe the spatial relationships between objects within images. Traditional visual spatial relationship classification (VSRC) methods typically output the spatial relationship between two objects in an image, often neglecting world knowledge and lacking general language capabilities. In this paper, we propose a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Visual Spatial Description, named LLaVA-VSD, which is designed for the classification, description, and open-ended description of visual spatial relationships. Specifically, the model first constructs a VSD instruction-following dataset using given figure-caption pairs for the three tasks. It then employs LoRA to fine-tune a Large Language and Vision Assistant for VSD, which has 13 billion parameters and supports high-resolution images. Finally, a large language model (Qwen-2) is used to refine the generated sentences, enhancing their diversity and accuracy. LLaVA-VSD demonstrates excellent multimodal conversational capabilities and can follow open-ended instructions to assist with inquiries about object relationships in images.
Authors: Flora B\"owing, Patrick Gildersleve
Abstract: The disparity between news stories valued by journalists and those preferred by readers, known as the "News Gap", is well-documented. However, the difference in expectations regarding news related user-generated content is less studied. Comment sections, hosted by news websites, are popular venues for reader engagement, yet still subject to editorial decisions. It is thus important to understand journalist vs reader comment preferences and how these are served by various comment ranking algorithms that represent discussions differently. We analyse 1.2 million comments from Austrian newspaper Der Standard to understand the "News Comment Gap" and the effects of different ranking algorithms. We find that journalists prefer positive, timely, complex, direct responses, while readers favour comments similar to article content from elite authors. We introduce the versatile Feature-Oriented Ranking Utility Metric (FORUM) to assess the impact of different ranking algorithms and find dramatic differences in how they prioritise the display of comments by sentiment, topical relevance, lexical diversity, and readability. Journalists can exert substantial influence over the discourse through both curatorial and algorithmic means. Understanding these choices' implications is vital in fostering engaging and civil discussions while aligning with journalistic objectives, especially given the increasing legal scrutiny and societal importance of online discourse.
Authors: Meghyn Bienvenu, Katsumi Inoue, Daniil Kozhemiachenko
Abstract: We explore the problem of explaining observations starting from a classically inconsistent theory by adopting a paraconsistent framework. We consider two expansions of the well-known Belnap--Dunn paraconsistent four-valued logic $\mathsf{BD}$: $\mathsf{BD}_\circ$ introduces formulas of the form $\circ\phi$ (the information on $\phi$ is reliable), while $\mathsf{BD}_\triangle$ augments the language with $\triangle\phi$'s (there is information that $\phi$ is true). We define and motivate the notions of abduction problems and explanations in $\mathsf{BD}_\circ$ and $\mathsf{BD}_\triangle$ and show that they are not reducible to one another. We analyse the complexity of standard abductive reasoning tasks (solution recognition, solution existence, and relevance / necessity of hypotheses) in both logics. Finally, we show how to reduce abduction in $\mathsf{BD}_\circ$ and $\mathsf{BD}_\triangle$ to abduction in classical propositional logic, thereby enabling the reuse of existing abductive reasoning procedures.
Authors: Arwen Bradley, Preetum Nakkiran
Abstract: We investigate the theoretical foundations of classifier-free guidance (CFG). CFG is the dominant method of conditional sampling for text-to-image diffusion models, yet unlike other aspects of diffusion, it remains on shaky theoretical footing. In this paper, we disprove common misconceptions, by showing that CFG interacts differently with DDPM (Ho et al., 2020) and DDIM (Song et al., 2021), and neither sampler with CFG generates the gamma-powered distribution $p(x|c)^\gamma p(x)^{1-\gamma}$. Then, we clarify the behavior of CFG by showing that it is a kind of predictor-corrector method (Song et al., 2020) that alternates between denoising and sharpening, which we call predictor-corrector guidance (PCG). We prove that in the SDE limit, CFG is actually equivalent to combining a DDIM predictor for the conditional distribution together with a Langevin dynamics corrector for a gamma-powered distribution (with a carefully chosen gamma). Our work thus provides a lens to theoretically understand CFG by embedding it in a broader design space of principled sampling methods.
Authors: Manjil Karki, Pratik Shakya, Sandesh Acharya, Ravi Pandit, Dinesh Gothe
Abstract: Voice cloning is a prominent feature in personalized speech interfaces. A neural vocal cloning system can mimic someone's voice using just a few audio samples. Both speaker encoding and speaker adaptation are topics of research in the field of voice cloning. Speaker adaptation relies on fine-tuning a multi-speaker generative model, which involves training a separate model to infer a new speaker embedding used for speaker encoding. Both methods can achieve excellent performance, even with a small number of cloning audios, in terms of the speech's naturalness and similarity to the original speaker. Speaker encoding approaches are more appropriate for low-resource deployment since they require significantly less memory and have a faster cloning time than speaker adaption, which can offer slightly greater naturalness and similarity. The main goal is to create a vocal cloning system that produces audio output with a Nepali accent or that sounds like Nepali. For the further advancement of TTS, the idea of transfer learning was effectively used to address several issues that were encountered in the development of this system, including the poor audio quality and the lack of available data.
Authors: Max Vargas, Reilly Cannon, Andrew Engel, Anand D. Sarwate, Tony Chiang
Abstract: The construction of high-quality numerical features is critical to any quantitative data analysis. Feature engineering has been historically addressed by carefully hand-crafting data representations based on domain expertise. This work views the internal representations of modern deep neural networks (DNNs), called embeddings, as an automated form of traditional feature engineering. For trained DNNs, we show that these embeddings can reveal interpretable, high-level concepts in unstructured sample data. We use these embeddings in natural language and computer vision tasks to uncover both inherent heterogeneity in the underlying data and human-understandable explanations for it. In particular, we find empirical evidence that there is inherent separability between real data and that generated from AI models.
Authors: Yiquan Wu, Bo Tang, Chenyang Xi, Yu Yu, Pengyu Wang, Yifei Liu, Kun Kuang, Haiying Deng, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Peng Cheng, Zhonghao Wang, Yi Wang, Yi Luo, Mingchuan Yang
Abstract: Commentary provides readers with a deep understanding of events by presenting diverse arguments and evidence. However, creating commentary is a time-consuming task, even for skilled commentators. Large language models (LLMs) have simplified the process of natural language generation, but their direct application in commentary creation still faces challenges due to unique task requirements. These requirements can be categorized into two levels: 1) fundamental requirements, which include creating well-structured and logically consistent narratives, and 2) advanced requirements, which involve generating quality arguments and providing convincing evidence. In this paper, we introduce Xinyu, an efficient LLM-based system designed to assist commentators in generating Chinese commentaries. To meet the fundamental requirements, we deconstruct the generation process into sequential steps, proposing targeted strategies and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for each step. To address the advanced requirements, we present an argument ranking model for arguments and establish a comprehensive evidence database that includes up-to-date events and classic books, thereby strengthening the substantiation of the evidence with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology. To evaluate the generated commentaries more fairly, corresponding to the two-level requirements, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation metric that considers five distinct perspectives in commentary generation. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of our proposed system. We also observe a significant increase in the efficiency of commentators in real-world scenarios, with the average time spent on creating a commentary dropping from 4 hours to 20 minutes. Importantly, such an increase in efficiency does not compromise the quality of the commentaries.
Authors: Yanda Li, Chi Zhang, Wanqi Yang, Bin Fu, Pei Cheng, Xin Chen, Ling Chen, Yunchao Wei
Abstract: With the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), LLM-driven visual agents are increasingly impacting software interfaces, particularly those with graphical user interfaces. This work introduces a novel LLM-based multimodal agent framework for mobile devices. This framework, capable of navigating mobile devices, emulates human-like interactions. Our agent constructs a flexible action space that enhances adaptability across various applications including parser, text and vision descriptions. The agent operates through two main phases: exploration and deployment. During the exploration phase, functionalities of user interface elements are documented either through agent-driven or manual explorations into a customized structured knowledge base. In the deployment phase, RAG technology enables efficient retrieval and update from this knowledge base, thereby empowering the agent to perform tasks effectively and accurately. This includes performing complex, multi-step operations across various applications, thereby demonstrating the framework's adaptability and precision in handling customized task workflows. Our experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate the framework's superior performance, confirming its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Our code will be open source soon.