Authors: Pranay Thangeda, Trevor S. Betz, Michael N. Grussing, Melkior Ornik
Abstract: Efficient management of infrastructure systems is crucial for economic stability, sustainability, and public safety. However, infrastructure management is challenging due to the vast scale of systems, stochastic deterioration of components, partial observability, and resource constraints. While data-driven approaches like reinforcement learning (RL) offer a promising avenue for optimizing management policies, their application to infrastructure has been limited by the lack of suitable simulation environments. We introduce InfraLib, a comprehensive framework for modeling and analyzing infrastructure management problems. InfraLib employs a hierarchical, stochastic approach to realistically model infrastructure systems and their deterioration. It supports practical functionality such as modeling component unavailability, cyclical budgets, and catastrophic failures. To facilitate research, InfraLib provides tools for expert data collection, simulation-driven analysis, and visualization. We demonstrate InfraLib's capabilities through case studies on a real-world road network and a synthetic benchmark with 100,000 components.
Authors: Emir Demirovi\'c, Christian Schilling, Anna Lukina
Abstract: Decision trees, owing to their interpretability, are attractive as control policies for (dynamical) systems. Unfortunately, constructing, or synthesising, such policies is a challenging task. Previous approaches do so by imitating a neural-network policy, approximating a tabular policy obtained via formal synthesis, employing reinforcement learning, or modelling the problem as a mixed-integer linear program. However, these works may require access to a hard-to-obtain accurate policy or a formal model of the environment (within reach of formal synthesis), and may not provide guarantees on the quality or size of the final tree policy. In contrast, we present an approach to synthesise optimal decision-tree policies given a black-box environment and specification, and a discretisation of the tree predicates, where optimality is defined with respect to the number of steps to achieve the goal. Our approach is a specialised search algorithm which systematically explores the (exponentially large) space of decision trees under the given discretisation. The key component is a novel pruning mechanism that significantly reduces the search space. Our approach represents a conceptually novel way of synthesising small decision-tree policies with optimality guarantees even for black-box environments with black-box specifications.
Authors: Yu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Zhihu Wang, Heyuan Huang, Ming Fan, Yubo Zhang, Zhixing Wang, Haijun Wang, Ting Liu
Abstract: The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm has emerged as a critical approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, despite their widespread adoption and success, CoT methods often exhibit instability due to their inability to consistently ensure the quality of generated reasoning paths, leading to sub-optimal reasoning performance. To address this challenge, we propose the \textbf{Strategic Chain-of-Thought} (SCoT), a novel methodology designed to refine LLM performance by integrating strategic knowledge prior to generating intermediate reasoning steps. SCoT employs a two-stage approach within a single prompt: first eliciting an effective problem-solving strategy, which is then used to guide the generation of high-quality CoT paths and final answers. Our experiments across eight challenging reasoning datasets demonstrate significant improvements, including a 21.05\% increase on the GSM8K dataset and 24.13\% on the Tracking\_Objects dataset, respectively, using the Llama3-8b model. Additionally, we extend the SCoT framework to develop a few-shot method with automatically matched demonstrations, yielding even stronger results. These findings underscore the efficacy of SCoT, highlighting its potential to substantially enhance LLM performance in complex reasoning tasks.
Authors: Zhengzhuo Xu, Bowen Qu, Yiyan Qi, Sinan Du, Chengjin Xu, Chun Yuan, Jian Guo
Abstract: Automatic chart understanding is crucial for content comprehension and document parsing. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in chart understanding through domain-specific alignment and fine-tuning. However, the application of alignment training within the chart domain is still underexplored. To address this, we propose ChartMoE, which employs the mixture of expert (MoE) architecture to replace the traditional linear projector to bridge the modality gap. Specifically, we train multiple linear connectors through distinct alignment tasks, which are utilized as the foundational initialization parameters for different experts. Additionally, we introduce ChartMoE-Align, a dataset with over 900K chart-table-JSON-code quadruples to conduct three alignment tasks (chart-table/JSON/code). Combined with the vanilla connector, we initialize different experts in four distinct ways and adopt high-quality knowledge learning to further refine the MoE connector and LLM parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the MoE connector and our initialization strategy, e.g., ChartMoE improves the accuracy of the previous state-of-the-art from 80.48% to 84.64% on the ChartQA benchmark.
Authors: Yassir Lairgi, Ludovic Moncla, R\'emy Cazabet, Khalid Benabdeslem, Pierre Cl\'eau
Abstract: Most available data is unstructured, making it challenging to access valuable information. Automatically building Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is crucial for structuring data and making it accessible, allowing users to search for information effectively. KGs also facilitate insights, inference, and reasoning. Traditional NLP methods, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction, are key in information retrieval but face limitations, including the use of predefined entity types and the need for supervised learning. Current research leverages large language models' capabilities, such as zero- or few-shot learning. However, unresolved and semantically duplicated entities and relations still pose challenges, leading to inconsistent graphs and requiring extensive post-processing. Additionally, most approaches are topic-dependent. In this paper, we propose iText2KG, a method for incremental, topic-independent KG construction without post-processing. This plug-and-play, zero-shot method is applicable across a wide range of KG construction scenarios and comprises four modules: Document Distiller, Incremental Entity Extractor, Incremental Relation Extractor, and Graph Integrator and Visualization. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to baseline methods across three scenarios: converting scientific papers to graphs, websites to graphs, and CVs to graphs.
Authors: Jingwei Zhang, Thomas Lampe, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Martin Riedmiller
Abstract: We propose an agent architecture that automates parts of the common reinforcement learning experiment workflow, to enable automated mastery of control domains for embodied agents. To do so, it leverages a VLM to perform some of the capabilities normally required of a human experimenter, including the monitoring and analysis of experiment progress, the proposition of new tasks based on past successes and failures of the agent, decomposing tasks into a sequence of subtasks (skills), and retrieval of the skill to execute - enabling our system to build automated curricula for learning. We believe this is one of the first proposals for a system that leverages a VLM throughout the full experiment cycle of reinforcement learning. We provide a first prototype of this system, and examine the feasibility of current models and techniques for the desired level of automation. For this, we use a standard Gemini model, without additional fine-tuning, to provide a curriculum of skills to a language-conditioned Actor-Critic algorithm, in order to steer data collection so as to aid learning new skills. Data collected in this way is shown to be useful for learning and iteratively improving control policies in a robotics domain. Additional examination of the ability of the system to build a growing library of skills, and to judge the progress of the training of those skills, also shows promising results, suggesting that the proposed architecture provides a potential recipe for fully automated mastery of tasks and domains for embodied agents.
Authors: Stylianos Loukas Vasileiou, William Yeoh
Abstract: We present TRACE-cs, a novel hybrid system that combines symbolic reasoning with large language models (LLMs) to address contrastive queries in scheduling problems. TRACE-cs leverages SAT solving techniques to encode scheduling constraints and generate explanations for user queries, while utilizing an LLM to process the user queries into logical clauses as well as refine the explanations generated by the symbolic solver to natural language sentences. By integrating these components, our approach demonstrates the potential of combining symbolic methods with LLMs to create explainable AI agents with correctness guarantees.
Authors: Gautham Ramachandran, Rick Yang
Abstract: Current approaches to automated code generation often rely on monolithic models that lack real-time adaptability and scalability. This limitation is particularly evident in complex programming tasks that require dynamic adjustment and efficiency. The integration of neuroscience principles into Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to revolutionize automated code generation. This paper presents CortexCompile, a novel modular system inspired by the specialized functions of the human brain's cortical regions. By emulating the distinct roles of the Prefrontal Cortex, Parietal Cortex, Temporal Lobe, and Motor Cortex, CortexCompile achieves significant advancements in scalability, efficiency, and adaptability compared to traditional monolithic models like GPT-4o. The system's architecture features a Task Orchestration Agent that manages dynamic task delegation and parallel processing, facilitating the generation of highly accurate and optimized code across increasingly complex programming tasks. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that CortexCompile consistently outperforms GPT-4o in development time, accuracy, and user satisfaction, particularly in tasks involving real-time strategy games and first-person shooters. These findings underscore the viability of neuroscience-inspired architectures in addressing the limitations of current NLP models, paving the way for more efficient and human-like AI systems.
Authors: Dominykas Seputis, Serghei Mihailov, Soham Chatterjee, Zehao Xiao
Abstract: Large pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of image classification tasks, without requiring retraining. Few-shot CLIP is competitive with existing specialized architectures that were trained on the downstream tasks. Recent research demonstrates that the performance of CLIP can be further improved using lightweight adaptation approaches. However, previous methods adapt different modalities of the CLIP model individually, ignoring the interactions and relationships between visual and textual representations. In this work, we propose Multi-Modal Adapter, an approach for Multi-Modal adaptation of CLIP. Specifically, we add a trainable Multi-Head Attention layer that combines text and image features to produce an additive adaptation of both. Multi-Modal Adapter demonstrates improved generalizability, based on its performance on unseen classes compared to existing adaptation methods. We perform additional ablations and investigations to validate and interpret the proposed approach.
Authors: Shunichi Akatsuka, Yaemi Teramoto, Aaron Courville
Abstract: In the coming years, AI agents will be used for making more complex decisions, including in situations involving many different groups of people. One big challenge is that AI agent tends to act in its own interest, unlike humans who often think about what will be the best for everyone in the long run. In this paper, we explore a method to get self-interested agents to work towards goals that benefit society as a whole. We propose a method to add a manager agent to mediate agent interactions by assigning incentives to certain actions. We tested our method with a supply-chain management problem and showed that this framework (1) increases the raw reward by 22.2%, (2) increases the agents' reward by 23.8%, and (3) increases the manager's reward by 20.1%.
Authors: Gabriel Y. Arteaga, Thomas B. Sch\"on, Nicolas Pielawski
Abstract: Uncertainty estimation is a necessary component when implementing AI in high-risk settings, such as autonomous cars, medicine, or insurances. Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen a surge in popularity in recent years, but they are subject to hallucinations, which may cause serious harm in high-risk settings. Despite their success, LLMs are expensive to train and run: they need a large amount of computations and memory, preventing the use of ensembling methods in practice. In this work, we present a novel method that allows for fast and memory-friendly training of LLM ensembles. We show that the resulting ensembles can detect hallucinations and are a viable approach in practice as only one GPU is needed for training and inference.
Authors: Junwei Liu, Kaixin Wang, Yixuan Chen, Xin Peng, Zhenpeng Chen, Lingming Zhang, Yiling Lou
Abstract: The recent advance in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shaped a new paradigm of AI agents, i.e., LLM-based agents. Compared to standalone LLMs, LLM-based agents substantially extend the versatility and expertise of LLMs by enhancing LLMs with the capabilities of perceiving and utilizing external resources and tools. To date, LLM-based agents have been applied and shown remarkable effectiveness in Software Engineering (SE). The synergy between multiple agents and human interaction brings further promise in tackling complex real-world SE problems. In this work, we present a comprehensive and systematic survey on LLM-based agents for SE. We collect 106 papers and categorize them from two perspectives, i.e., the SE and agent perspectives. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in this critical domain. The repository of this survey is at https://github.com/FudanSELab/Agent4SE-Paper-List.
Authors: Christiaan Viviers, Amaan Valiuddin, Francisco Caetano, Lemar Abdi, Lena Filatova, Peter de With, Fons van der Sommen
Abstract: Detecting Out-of-Distribution~(OOD) sensory data and covariate distribution shift aims to identify new test examples with different high-level image statistics to the captured, normal and In-Distribution (ID) set. Existing OOD detection literature largely focuses on semantic shift with little-to-no consensus over covariate shift. Generative models capture the ID data in an unsupervised manner, enabling them to effectively identify samples that deviate significantly from this learned distribution, irrespective of the downstream task. In this work, we elucidate the ability of generative models to detect and quantify domain-specific covariate shift through extensive analyses that involves a variety of models. To this end, we conjecture that it is sufficient to detect most occurring sensory faults (anomalies and deviations in global signals statistics) by solely modeling high-frequency signal-dependent and independent details. We propose a novel method, CovariateFlow, for OOD detection, specifically tailored to covariate heteroscedastic high-frequency image-components using conditional Normalizing Flows (cNFs). Our results on CIFAR10 vs. CIFAR10-C and ImageNet200 vs. ImageNet200-C demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by accurately detecting OOD covariate shift. This work contributes to enhancing the fidelity of imaging systems and aiding machine learning models in OOD detection in the presence of covariate shift.
Authors: Min Wu, Xiaofu Li, Haoze Wu, Clark Barrett
Abstract: Building on VeriX (Verified eXplainability, arXiv:2212.01051), a system for producing optimal verified explanations for machine learning model outputs, we present VeriX+, which significantly improves both the size and the generation time of verified explanations. We introduce a bound propagation-based sensitivity technique to improve the size, and a binary search-based traversal with confidence ranking for improving time -- the two techniques are orthogonal and can be used independently or together. We also show how to adapt the QuickXplain (Junker 2004) algorithm to our setting to provide a trade-off between size and time. Experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements on both metrics, e.g., a size reduction of 38% on the GTSRB dataset and a time reduction of 90% on MNIST. We also explore applications of our verified explanations and show that explanation size is a useful proxy for both incorrectness detection and out-of-distribution detection.
Authors: Shehan Perera, Yunus Erzurumlu, Deepak Gulati, Alper Yilmaz
Abstract: Skin cancer segmentation poses a significant challenge in medical image analysis. Numerous existing solutions, predominantly CNN-based, face issues related to a lack of global contextual understanding. Alternatively, some approaches resort to large-scale Transformer models to bridge the global contextual gaps, but at the expense of model size and computational complexity. Finally many Transformer based approaches rely primarily on CNN based decoders overlooking the benefits of Transformer based decoding models. Recognizing these limitations, we address the need efficient lightweight solutions by introducing MobileUNETR, which aims to overcome the performance constraints associated with both CNNs and Transformers while minimizing model size, presenting a promising stride towards efficient image segmentation. MobileUNETR has 3 main features. 1) MobileUNETR comprises of a lightweight hybrid CNN-Transformer encoder to help balance local and global contextual feature extraction in an efficient manner; 2) A novel hybrid decoder that simultaneously utilizes low-level and global features at different resolutions within the decoding stage for accurate mask generation; 3) surpassing large and complex architectures, MobileUNETR achieves superior performance with 3 million parameters and a computational complexity of 1.3 GFLOP resulting in 10x and 23x reduction in parameters and FLOPS, respectively. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on four publicly available skin lesion segmentation datasets, including ISIC 2016, ISIC 2017, ISIC 2018, and PH2 datasets. The code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/OSUPCVLab/MobileUNETR.git
Authors: Paul Christiano, Jacob Hilton, Victor Lecomte, Mark Xu
Abstract: We introduce a formal notion of defendability against backdoors using a game between an attacker and a defender. In this game, the attacker modifies a function to behave differently on a particular input known as the "trigger", while behaving the same almost everywhere else. The defender then attempts to detect the trigger at evaluation time. If the defender succeeds with high enough probability, then the function class is said to be defendable. The key constraint on the attacker that makes defense possible is that the attacker's strategy must work for a randomly-chosen trigger. Our definition is simple and does not explicitly mention learning, yet we demonstrate that it is closely connected to learnability. In the computationally unbounded setting, we use a voting algorithm of Hanneke et al. (2022) to show that defendability is essentially determined by the VC dimension of the function class, in much the same way as PAC learnability. In the computationally bounded setting, we use a similar argument to show that efficient PAC learnability implies efficient defendability, but not conversely. On the other hand, we use indistinguishability obfuscation to show that the class of polynomial size circuits is not efficiently defendable. Finally, we present polynomial size decision trees as a natural example for which defense is strictly easier than learning. Thus, we identify efficient defendability as a notable intermediate concept in between efficient learnability and obfuscation.
Authors: Juan A. Berrios Moya
Abstract: The rapid global aging trend has led to an increase in dementia cases, including Alzheimer's disease, underscoring the urgent need for early and accurate diagnostic methods. Traditional diagnostic techniques, such as cognitive tests, neuroimaging, and biomarker analysis, face significant limitations in sensitivity, accessibility, and cost, particularly in the early stages. This study explores the potential of machine learning (ML) as a transformative approach to enhance early dementia detection by leveraging ML models to analyze and integrate complex multimodal datasets, including cognitive assessments, neuroimaging, and genetic information. A comprehensive review of existing literature was conducted to evaluate various ML models, including supervised learning, deep learning, and advanced techniques such as ensemble learning and transformer models, assessing their accuracy, interpretability, and potential for clinical integration. The findings indicate that while ML models show significant promise in improving diagnostic precision and enabling earlier interventions, challenges remain in their generalizability, interpretability, and ethical deployment. This research concludes by outlining future directions aimed at enhancing the clinical utility of ML models in dementia detection, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration and ethically sound frameworks to improve early detection and intervention strategies for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.
Authors: Jie Ma, Zhitao Gao, Qi Chai, Wangchun Sun, Pinghui Wang, Hongbin Pei, Jing Tao, Lingyun Song, Jun Liu, Chen Zhang, Lizhen Cui
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) may suffer from hallucinations in real-world applications due to the lack of relevant knowledge. In contrast, knowledge graphs encompass extensive, multi-relational structures that store a vast array of symbolic facts. Consequently, integrating LLMs with knowledge graphs has been extensively explored, with Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) serving as a critical touchstone for the integration. This task requires LLMs to answer natural language questions by retrieving relevant triples from knowledge graphs. However, existing methods face two significant challenges: \textit{excessively long reasoning paths distracting from the answer generation}, and \textit{false-positive relations hindering the path refinement}. In this paper, we propose an iterative interactive KGQA framework that leverages the interactive learning capabilities of LLMs to perform reasoning and Debating over Graphs (DoG). Specifically, DoG employs a subgraph-focusing mechanism, allowing LLMs to perform answer trying after each reasoning step, thereby mitigating the impact of lengthy reasoning paths. On the other hand, DoG utilizes a multi-role debate team to gradually simplify complex questions, reducing the influence of false-positive relations. This debate mechanism ensures the reliability of the reasoning process. Experimental results on five public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our architecture. Notably, DoG outperforms the state-of-the-art method ToG by 23.7\% and 9.1\% in accuracy on WebQuestions and GrailQA, respectively. Furthermore, the integration experiments with various LLMs on the mentioned datasets highlight the flexibility of DoG. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/reml-group/DoG}.
Authors: Weiwei Gu, Suresh Kondepudi, Lixiao Huang, Nakul Gopalan
Abstract: Continual and interactive robot learning is a challenging problem as the robot is present with human users who expect the robot to learn novel skills to solve novel tasks perpetually with sample efficiency. In this work we present a framework for robots to query and learn visuo-motor robot skills and task relevant information via natural language dialog interactions with human users. Previous approaches either focus on improving the performance of instruction following agents, or passively learn novel skills or concepts. Instead, we used dialog combined with a language-skill grounding embedding to query or confirm skills and/or tasks requested by a user. To achieve this goal, we developed and integrated three different components for our agent. Firstly, we propose a novel visual-motor control policy ACT with Low Rank Adaptation (ACT-LoRA), which enables the existing SoTA ACT model to perform few-shot continual learning. Secondly, we develop an alignment model that projects demonstrations across skill embodiments into a shared embedding allowing us to know when to ask questions and/or demonstrations from users. Finally, we integrated an existing LLM to interact with a human user to perform grounded interactive continual skill learning to solve a task. Our ACT-LoRA model learns novel fine-tuned skills with a 100% accuracy when trained with only five demonstrations for a novel skill while still maintaining a 74.75% accuracy on pre-trained skills in the RLBench dataset where other models fall significantly short. We also performed a human-subjects study with 8 subjects to demonstrate the continual learning capabilities of our combined framework. We achieve a success rate of 75% in the task of sandwich making with the real robot learning from participant data demonstrating that robots can learn novel skills or task knowledge from dialogue with non-expert users using our approach.
Authors: Zuquan Peng, Yuanyuan He, Jianbing Ni, Ben Niu
Abstract: Neural networks (NN) classification models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) are vulnerable to the Universal Adversarial Triggers (UAT) attack that triggers a model to produce a specific prediction for any input. DARCY borrows the "honeypot" concept to bait multiple trapdoors, effectively detecting the adversarial examples generated by UAT. Unfortunately, we find a new UAT generation method, called IndisUAT, which produces triggers (i.e., tokens) and uses them to craft adversarial examples whose feature distribution is indistinguishable from that of the benign examples in a randomly-chosen category at the detection layer of DARCY. The produced adversarial examples incur the maximal loss of predicting results in the DARCY-protected models. Meanwhile, the produced triggers are effective in black-box models for text generation, text inference, and reading comprehension. Finally, the evaluation results under NN models for NLP tasks indicate that the IndisUAT method can effectively circumvent DARCY and penetrate other defenses. For example, IndisUAT can reduce the true positive rate of DARCY's detection by at least 40.8% and 90.6%, and drop the accuracy by at least 33.3% and 51.6% in the RNN and CNN models, respectively. IndisUAT reduces the accuracy of the BERT's adversarial defense model by at least 34.0%, and makes the GPT-2 language model spew racist outputs even when conditioned on non-racial context.
Authors: Zhuowei Chen, Lianxi Wang, Yuben Wu, Xinfeng Liao, Yujia Tian, Junyang Zhong
Abstract: Sentiment classification (SC) often suffers from low-resource challenges such as domain-specific contexts, imbalanced label distributions, and few-shot scenarios. The potential of the diffusion language model (LM) for textual data augmentation (DA) remains unexplored, moreover, textual DA methods struggle to balance the diversity and consistency of new samples. Most DA methods either perform logical modifications or rephrase less important tokens in the original sequence with the language model. In the context of SC, strong emotional tokens could act critically on the sentiment of the whole sequence. Therefore, contrary to rephrasing less important context, we propose DiffusionCLS to leverage a diffusion LM to capture in-domain knowledge and generate pseudo samples by reconstructing strong label-related tokens. This approach ensures a balance between consistency and diversity, avoiding the introduction of noise and augmenting crucial features of datasets. DiffusionCLS also comprises a Noise-Resistant Training objective to help the model generalize. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various low-resource scenarios including domain-specific and domain-general problems. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our framework's modules, and visualization studies highlight optimal deployment conditions, reinforcing our conclusions.
Authors: Mingze Gao, Jingyu Liu, Mingda Li, Jiangtao Xie, Qingbin Liu, Bo Zhao, Xi Chen, Hui Xiong
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved performance across various image-language applications. Recently, there has been a growing interest in adapting image pre-trained MLLMs for video-related tasks. However, most efforts concentrate on enhancing the vision encoder and projector components, while the core part, Large Language Models (LLMs), remains comparatively under-explored. In this paper, we propose two strategies to enhance the model's capability in video understanding tasks by improving inter-layer attention computation in LLMs. Specifically, the first approach focuses on the enhancement of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) with Temporal-Aware Dual RoPE, which introduces temporal position information to strengthen the MLLM's temporal modeling capabilities while preserving the relative position relationships of both visual and text tokens. The second approach involves enhancing the Attention Mask with the Frame-wise Block Causal Attention Mask, a simple yet effective method that broadens visual token interactions within and across video frames while maintaining the causal inference mechanism. Based on these proposed methods, we adapt LLaVA for video understanding tasks, naming it Temporal-Considered LLaVA (TC-LLaVA). Our TC-LLaVA achieves new state-of-the-art performance across various video understanding benchmarks with only supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on video-related datasets.
Authors: Jianguo Zhang, Tian Lan, Ming Zhu, Zuxin Liu, Thai Hoang, Shirley Kokane, Weiran Yao, Juntao Tan, Akshara Prabhakar, Haolin Chen, Zhiwei Liu, Yihao Feng, Tulika Awalgaonkar, Rithesh Murthy, Eric Hu, Zeyuan Chen, Ran Xu, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
Abstract: Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant research interest. However, the open-source community faces many challenges in developing specialized models for agent tasks, driven by the scarcity of high-quality agent datasets and the absence of standard protocols in this area. We introduce and publicly release xLAM, a series of large action models designed for AI agent tasks. The xLAM series includes five models with both dense and mixture-of-expert architectures, ranging from 1B to 8x22B parameters, trained using a scalable, flexible pipeline that unifies, augments, and synthesizes diverse datasets to enhance AI agents' generalizability and performance across varied environments. Our experimental results demonstrate that xLAM consistently delivers exceptional performance across multiple agent ability benchmarks, notably securing the 1st position on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, outperforming GPT-4, Claude-3, and many other models in terms of tool use. By releasing the xLAM series, we aim to advance the performance of open-source LLMs for autonomous AI agents, potentially accelerating progress and democratizing access to high-performance models for agent tasks. Models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-models-65f00e2a0a63bbcd1c2dade4
URLs: https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-models-65f00e2a0a63bbcd1c2dade4
Authors: Tao Huang
Abstract: One trending application of LLM (large language model) is to use it for content moderation in online platforms. Most current studies on this application have focused on the metric of accuracy - the extent to which LLM makes correct decisions about content. This article argues that accuracy is insufficient and misleading, because it fails to grasp the distinction between easy cases and hard cases as well as the inevitable trade-offs in achieving higher accuracy. Closer examination reveals that content moderation is a constitutive part of platform governance, the key of which is to gain and enhance legitimacy. Instead of making moderation decisions correct, the chief goal of LLM is to make them legitimate. In this regard, this article proposes a paradigm shift from the single benchmark of accuracy towards a legitimacy-based framework of evaluating the performance of LLM moderators. The framework suggests that for easy cases, the key is to ensure accuracy, speed and transparency, while for hard cases, what matters is reasoned justification and user participation. Examined under this framework, LLM's real potential in moderation is not accuracy improvement. Rather, LLM can better contribute in four other aspects: to conduct screening of hard cases from easy cases, to provide quality explanations for moderation decisions, to assist human reviewers in getting more contextual information, and to facilitate user participation in a more interactive way. Using normative theories from law and social sciences to critically assess the new technological application, this article seeks to redefine LLM's role in content moderation and redirect relevant research in this field.
Authors: Jamshaid Ul Rahman, Nimra
Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are regarded as state-of-the-art tools for addressing highly nonlinear problems based on partial differential equations. Despite their broad range of applications, PINNs encounter several performance challenges, including issues related to efficiency, minimization of computational cost, and enhancement of accuracy. Burgers' equation, a fundamental equation in fluid dynamics that is extensively used in PINNs, provides flexible results with the Adam optimizer that does not account for past gradients. This paper introduces a novel strategy for solving Burgers' equation by incorporating DiffGrad with PINNs, a method that leverages the difference between current and immediately preceding gradients to enhance performance. A comprehensive computational analysis is conducted using optimizers such as Adam, Adamax, RMSprop, and DiffGrad to evaluate and compare their effectiveness. Our approach includes visualizing the solutions over space at various time intervals to demonstrate the accuracy of the network. The results show that DiffGrad not only improves the accuracy of the solution but also reduces training time compared to the other optimizers.
Authors: Dawei Dai, Hao Zhu, Shuyin Xia, Guoyin Wang
Abstract: In actual scenarios, whether manually or automatically annotated, label noise is inevitably generated in the training data, which can affect the effectiveness of deep CNN models. The popular solutions require data cleaning or designing additional optimizations to punish the data with mislabeled data, thereby enhancing the robustness of models. However, these methods come at the cost of weakening or even losing some data during the training process. As we know, content is the inherent attribute of an image that does not change with changes in annotations. In this study, we propose a general granular-ball computing (GBC) module that can be embedded into a CNN model, where the classifier finally predicts the label of granular-ball ($gb$) samples instead of each individual samples. Specifically, considering the classification task: (1) in forward process, we split the input samples as $gb$ samples at feature-level, each of which can correspond to multiple samples with varying numbers and share one single label; (2) during the backpropagation process, we modify the gradient allocation strategy of the GBC module to enable it to propagate normally; and (3) we develop an experience replay policy to ensure the stability of the training process. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the robustness of CNN models with no additional data or optimization.
Authors: Hanlin Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Jian Wang, Wenjie Li
Abstract: Language models are exhibiting increasing capability in knowledge utilization and reasoning. However, when applied as agents in embodied environments, they often suffer from misalignment between their intrinsic knowledge and environmental knowledge, leading to infeasible actions. Traditional environment alignment methods, such as supervised learning on expert trajectories and reinforcement learning, face limitations in covering environmental knowledge and achieving efficient convergence, respectively. Inspired by human learning, we propose Exploration-based Error Correction Learning (E2CL), a novel framework that leverages exploration-induced errors and environmental feedback to enhance environment alignment for LM-based agents. E2CL incorporates teacher-guided and teacher-free exploration to gather environmental feedback and correct erroneous actions. The agent learns to provide feedback and self-correct, thereby enhancing its adaptability to target environments. Evaluations in the Virtualhome environment demonstrate that E2CL-trained agents outperform those trained by baseline methods and exhibit superior self-correction capabilities.
Authors: Chanjun Park, Hyeonwoo Kim
Abstract: This paper conducts a longitudinal study over eleven months to address the limitations of prior research on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard, which have relied on empirical studies with restricted observation periods of only five months. By extending the analysis duration, we aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the progression in developing Korean large language models (LLMs). Our study is guided by three primary research questions: (1) What are the specific challenges in improving LLM performance across diverse tasks on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard over time? (2) How does model size impact task performance correlations across various benchmarks? (3) How have the patterns in leaderboard rankings shifted over time on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard?. By analyzing 1,769 models over this period, our research offers a comprehensive examination of the ongoing advancements in LLMs and the evolving nature of evaluation frameworks.
Authors: Jinhee Kim, Taesung Kim, Jaegul Choo
Abstract: Recent advances in interactive keypoint estimation methods have enhanced accuracy while minimizing user intervention. However, these methods require user input for error correction, which can be costly in vertebrae keypoint estimation where inaccurate keypoints are densely clustered or overlap. We introduce a novel approach, KeyBot, specifically designed to identify and correct significant and typical errors in existing models, akin to user revision. By characterizing typical error types and using simulated errors for training, KeyBot effectively corrects these errors and significantly reduces user workload. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on three public datasets confirm that KeyBot significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in interactive vertebrae keypoint estimation. The source code and demo video are available at: https://ts-kim.github.io/KeyBot/
Authors: Jing Cui, Yishi Xu, Zhewei Huang, Shuchang Zhou, Jianbin Jiao, Junge Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence and machine learning through their advanced text processing and generating capabilities. However, their widespread deployment has raised significant safety and reliability concerns. Established vulnerabilities in deep neural networks, coupled with emerging threat models, may compromise security evaluations and create a false sense of security. Given the extensive research in the field of LLM security, we believe that summarizing the current state of affairs will help the research community better understand the present landscape and inform future developments. This paper reviews current research on LLM vulnerabilities and threats, and evaluates the effectiveness of contemporary defense mechanisms. We analyze recent studies on attack vectors and model weaknesses, providing insights into attack mechanisms and the evolving threat landscape. We also examine current defense strategies, highlighting their strengths and limitations. By contrasting advancements in attack and defense methodologies, we identify research gaps and propose future directions to enhance LLM security. Our goal is to advance the understanding of LLM safety challenges and guide the development of more robust security measures.
Authors: Henrique Da Silva Gameiro, Andrei Kucharavy, Ljiljana Dolamic
Abstract: With the emergence of widely available powerful LLMs, disinformation generated by large Language Models (LLMs) has become a major concern. Historically, LLM detectors have been touted as a solution, but their effectiveness in the real world is still to be proven. In this paper, we focus on an important setting in information operations -- short news-like posts generated by moderately sophisticated attackers. We demonstrate that existing LLM detectors, whether zero-shot or purpose-trained, are not ready for real-world use in that setting. All tested zero-shot detectors perform inconsistently with prior benchmarks and are highly vulnerable to sampling temperature increase, a trivial attack absent from recent benchmarks. A purpose-trained detector generalizing across LLMs and unseen attacks can be developed, but it fails to generalize to new human-written texts. We argue that the former indicates domain-specific benchmarking is needed, while the latter suggests a trade-off between the adversarial evasion resilience and overfitting to the reference human text, with both needing evaluation in benchmarks and currently absent. We believe this suggests a re-consideration of current LLM detector benchmarking approaches and provides a dynamically extensible benchmark to allow it (https://github.com/Reliable-Information-Lab-HEVS/dynamic_llm_detector_benchmark).
URLs: https://github.com/Reliable-Information-Lab-HEVS/dynamic_llm_detector_benchmark).
Authors: DongNyeong Heo, Daniela Noemi Rim, Heeyoul Choi
Abstract: Causal language modeling (CLM) serves as the foundational framework underpinning remarkable successes of recent large language models (LLMs). Despite its success, the training approach for next word prediction poses a potential risk of causing the model to overly focus on local dependencies within a sentence. While prior studies have been introduced to predict future N words simultaneously, they were primarily applied to tasks such as masked language modeling (MLM) and neural machine translation (NMT). In this study, we introduce a simple N-gram prediction framework for the CLM task. Moreover, we introduce word difference representation (WDR) as a surrogate and contextualized target representation during model training on the basis of N-gram prediction framework. To further enhance the quality of next word prediction, we propose an ensemble method that incorporates the future N words' prediction results. Empirical evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets encompassing CLM and NMT tasks demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed methods over the conventional CLM.
Authors: Jingyu Zhang, Wenqing Zhang, Chaoyi Tan, Xiangtian Li, Qianyi Sun
Abstract: It is very important to detect traffic signs efficiently and accurately in autonomous driving systems. However, the farther the distance, the smaller the traffic signs. Existing object detection algorithms can hardly detect these small scaled signs.In addition, the performance of embedded devices on vehicles limits the scale of detection models.To address these challenges, a YOLO PPA based traffic sign detection algorithm is proposed in this paper.The experimental results on the GTSDB dataset show that compared to the original YOLO, the proposed method improves inference efficiency by 11.2%. The mAP 50 is also improved by 93.2%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed YOLO PPA.
Authors: Xin Jiang, Xiang Li, Wenjia Ma, Xuezhi Fang, Yiqun Yao, Naitong Yu, Xuying Meng, Peng Han, Jing Li, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) represented by GPT family have achieved remarkable success. The characteristics of LLMs lie in their ability to accommodate a wide range of tasks through a generative approach. However, the flexibility of their output format poses challenges in controlling and harnessing the model's outputs, thereby constraining the application of LLMs in various domains. In this work, we present Sketch, an innovative toolkit designed to streamline LLM operations across diverse fields. Sketch comprises the following components: (1) a suite of task description schemas and prompt templates encompassing various NLP tasks; (2) a user-friendly, interactive process for building structured output LLM services tailored to various NLP tasks; (3) an open-source dataset for output format control, along with tools for dataset construction; and (4) an open-source model based on LLaMA3-8B-Instruct that adeptly comprehends and adheres to output formatting instructions. We anticipate this initiative to bring considerable convenience to LLM users, achieving the goal of ''plug-and-play'' for various applications. The components of Sketch will be progressively open-sourced at https://github.com/cofe-ai/Sketch.
Authors: Francisco de Arriba-P\'erez, Silvia Garc\'ia-M\'endez
Abstract: Based on official estimates, 50 million people worldwide are affected by dementia, and this number increases by 10 million new patients every year. Without a cure, clinical prognostication and early intervention represent the most effective ways to delay its progression. To this end, Artificial Intelligence and computational linguistics can be exploited for natural language analysis, personalized assessment, monitoring, and treatment. However, traditional approaches need more semantic knowledge management and explicability capabilities. Moreover, using Large Language Models (LLMs) for cognitive decline diagnosis is still scarce, even though these models represent the most advanced way for clinical-patient communication using intelligent systems. Consequently, we leverage an LLM using the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in a chatbot solution to provide interpretable Machine Learning prediction of cognitive decline in real-time. Linguistic-conceptual features are exploited for appropriate natural language analysis. Through explainability, we aim to fight potential biases of the models and improve their potential to help clinical workers in their diagnosis decisions. More in detail, the proposed pipeline is composed of (i) data extraction employing NLP-based prompt engineering; (ii) stream-based data processing including feature engineering, analysis, and selection; (iii) real-time classification; and (iv) the explainability dashboard to provide visual and natural language descriptions of the prediction outcome. Classification results exceed 80 % in all evaluation metrics, with a recall value for the mental deterioration class about 85 %. To sum up, we contribute with an affordable, flexible, non-invasive, personalized diagnostic system to this work.
Authors: Yan Ru Pei, Ritik Shrivastava, FNU Sidharth
Abstract: We present aTENNuate, a simple deep state-space autoencoder configured for efficient online raw speech enhancement in an end-to-end fashion. The network's performance is primarily evaluated on raw speech denoising, with additional assessments on tasks such as super-resolution and de-quantization. We benchmark aTENNuate on the VoiceBank + DEMAND and the Microsoft DNS1 synthetic test sets. The network outperforms previous real-time denoising models in terms of PESQ score, parameter count, MACs, and latency. Even as a raw waveform processing model, the model maintains high fidelity to the clean signal with minimal audible artifacts. In addition, the model remains performant even when the noisy input is compressed down to 4000Hz and 4 bits, suggesting general speech enhancement capabilities in low-resource environments.
Authors: Yongxin Deng (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, China), Xihe Qiu (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, China), Xiaoyu Tan (INF Technology), Chao Qu (INF Technology), Jing Pan (School of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia), Yuan Cheng (School of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia), Yinghui Xu (Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Incubation Institute, Fudan University, Shanghai, China), Wei Chu (INF Technology)
Abstract: Cognitive psychology investigates perception, attention, memory, language, problem-solving, decision-making, and reasoning. Kahneman's dual-system theory elucidates the human decision-making process, distinguishing between the rapid, intuitive System 1 and the deliberative, rational System 2. Recent advancements have positioned large language Models (LLMs) as formidable tools nearing human-level proficiency in various cognitive tasks. Nonetheless, the presence of a dual-system framework analogous to human cognition in LLMs remains unexplored. This study introduces the \textbf{CogniDual Framework for LLMs} (CFLLMs), designed to assess whether LLMs can, through self-training, evolve from deliberate deduction to intuitive responses, thereby emulating the human process of acquiring and mastering new information. Our findings reveal the cognitive mechanisms behind LLMs' response generation, enhancing our understanding of their capabilities in cognitive psychology. Practically, self-trained models can provide faster responses to certain queries, reducing computational demands during inference.
Authors: Nikoletta Koilia, Christoforos Kachris
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for natural language processing tasks, revolutionizing the field with their ability to understand and generate human-like text. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the several research efforts that have been presented for the acceleration of transformer networks for Large Language Models using hardware accelerators. The survey presents the frameworks that have been proposed and then performs a qualitative and quantitative comparison regarding the technology, the processing platform (FPGA, ASIC, In-Memory, GPU), the speedup, the energy efficiency, the performance (GOPs), and the energy efficiency (GOPs/W) of each framework. The main challenge in comparison is that every proposed scheme is implemented on a different process technology making hard a fair comparison. The main contribution of this paper is that we extrapolate the results of the performance and the energy efficiency on the same technology to make a fair comparison; one theoretical and one more practical. We implement part of the LLMs on several FPGA chips to extrapolate the results to the same process technology and then we make a fair comparison of the performance.
Authors: Aoxiang Ning, Minglong Xue, Jinhong He, Chengyun Song
Abstract: Existing low-light image enhancement methods are difficult to fit the complex nonlinear relationship between normal and low-light images due to uneven illumination and noise effects. The recently proposed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) feature spline-based convolutional layers and learnable activation functions, which can effectively capture nonlinear dependencies. In this paper, we design a KAN-Block based on KANs and innovatively apply it to low-light image enhancement. This method effectively alleviates the limitations of current methods constrained by linear network structures and lack of interpretability, further demonstrating the potential of KANs in low-level vision tasks. Given the poor perception of current low-light image enhancement methods and the stochastic nature of the inverse diffusion process, we further introduce frequency-domain perception for visually oriented enhancement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of our method on benchmark datasets. The code will be available at: https://github.com/AXNing/KSID}{https://github.com/AXNing/KSID.
URLs: https://github.com/AXNing/KSID, https://github.com/AXNing/KSID.
Authors: Sara Roos-Hoefgeest, Mario Roos-Hoefgeest, Ignacio Alvarez, Rafael C. Gonz\'alez
Abstract: High-precision surface defect detection in manufacturing is essential for ensuring quality control. Laser triangulation profilometric sensors are key to this process, providing detailed and accurate surface measurements over a line. To achieve a complete and precise surface scan, accurate relative motion between the sensor and the workpiece is required. It is crucial to control the sensor pose to maintain optimal distance and relative orientation to the surface. It is also important to ensure uniform profile distribution throughout the scanning process. This paper presents a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) based approach to optimize robot inspection trajectories for profilometric sensors. Building upon the Boustrophedon scanning method, our technique dynamically adjusts the sensor position and tilt to maintain optimal orientation and distance from the surface, while also ensuring a consistent profile distance for uniform and high-quality scanning. Utilizing a simulated environment based on the CAD model of the part, we replicate real-world scanning conditions, including sensor noise and surface irregularities. This simulation-based approach enables offline trajectory planning based on CAD models. Key contributions include the modeling of the state space, action space, and reward function, specifically designed for inspection applications using profilometric sensors. We use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm to efficiently train the RL agent, demonstrating its capability to optimize inspection trajectories with profilometric sensors. To validate our approach, we conducted several experiments where a model trained on a specific training piece was tested on various parts in simulation. Also, we conducted a real-world experiment by executing the optimized trajectory, generated offline from a CAD model, to inspect a part using a UR3e robotic arm model.
Authors: Wei Gao, Jingqiang Wang, Xinv Zhu, Jun Zhong, Yue Shen, Youshuang Ding
Abstract: We would like industrial robots to handle unstructured environments with cameras and perception pipelines. In contrast to traditional industrial robots that replay offline-crafted trajectories, online behavior planning is required for these perception-guided industrial applications. Aside from perception and planning algorithms, deploying perception-guided manipulators also requires substantial effort in integration. One approach is writing scripts in a traditional language (such as Python) to construct the planning problem and perform integration with other algorithmic modules & external devices. While scripting in Python is feasible for a handful of robots and applications, deploying perception-guided manipulation at scale (e.g., more than 10000 robot workstations in over 2000 customer sites) becomes intractable. To resolve this challenge, we propose a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for perception-guided manipulation applications. To scale up the deployment,our DSL provides: 1) an easily accessible interface to construct & solve a sub-class of Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) problems that are important in practical applications; and 2) a mechanism to implement flexible control flow to perform integration and address customized requirements of distinct industrial application. Combined with an intuitive graphical programming frontend, our DSL is mainly used by machine operators without coding experience in traditional programming languages. Within hours of training, operators are capable of orchestrating interesting sophisticated manipulation behaviors with our DSL. Extensive practical deployments demonstrate the efficacy of our method.
Authors: Wei Lu, Rachel K. Luu, Markus J. Buehler
Abstract: The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In this work, we explore the effects of Continued Pretraining (CPT), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and various preference-based optimization approaches, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO), on fine-tuned LLM performance. Our analysis shows how these strategies influence model outcomes and reveals that the merging of multiple fine-tuned models can lead to the emergence of capabilities that surpass the individual contributions of the parent models. We find that model merging leads to new functionalities that neither parent model could achieve alone, leading to improved performance in domain-specific assessments. Experiments with different model architectures are presented, including Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral 7B models, where similar behaviors are observed. Exploring whether the results hold also for much smaller models, we use a tiny LLM with 1.7 billion parameters and show that very small LLMs do not necessarily feature emergent capabilities under model merging, suggesting that model scaling may be a key component. In open-ended yet consistent chat conversations between a human and AI models, our assessment reveals detailed insights into how different model variants perform and show that the smallest model achieves a high intelligence score across key criteria including reasoning depth, creativity, clarity, and quantitative precision. Other experiments include the development of image generation prompts based on disparate biological material design concepts, to create new microstructures, architectural concepts, and urban design based on biological materials-inspired construction principles.
Authors: Inacio Vieira, Will Allred, Seamus Lankford, Sheila Castilho Monteiro De Sousa, Andy Way
Abstract: Decoder-only LLMs have shown impressive performance in MT due to their ability to learn from extensive datasets and generate high-quality translations. However, LLMs often struggle with the nuances and style required for organisation-specific translation. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Llama 3 8B Instruct, leveraging translation memories (TMs), as a valuable resource to enhance accuracy and efficiency. We investigate the impact of fine-tuning the Llama 3 model using TMs from a specific organisation in the software sector. Our experiments cover five translation directions across languages of varying resource levels (English to Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, German, Finnish, and Korean). We analyse diverse sizes of training datasets (1k to 207k segments) to evaluate their influence on translation quality. We fine-tune separate models for each training set and evaluate their performance based on automatic metrics, BLEU, chrF++, TER, and COMET. Our findings reveal improvement in translation performance with larger datasets across all metrics. On average, BLEU and COMET scores increase by 13 and 25 points, respectively, on the largest training set against the baseline model. Notably, there is a performance deterioration in comparison with the baseline model when fine-tuning on only 1k and 2k examples; however, we observe a substantial improvement as the training dataset size increases. The study highlights the potential of integrating TMs with LLMs to create bespoke translation models tailored to the specific needs of businesses, thus enhancing translation quality and reducing turn-around times. This approach offers a valuable insight for organisations seeking to leverage TMs and LLMs for optimal translation outcomes, especially in narrower domains.
Authors: Lorenzo Bini, Marco Sorbi, Stephane Marchand-Maillet
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly popular for effectively modeling data with graph structures. Recently, attention mechanisms have been integrated into GNNs to improve their ability to capture complex patterns. This paper presents the first comprehensive study revealing a critical, unexplored consequence of this integration: the emergence of Massive Activations (MAs) within attention layers. We introduce a novel method for detecting and analyzing MAs, focusing on edge features in different graph transformer architectures. Our study assesses various GNN models using benchmark datasets, including ZINC, TOX21, and PROTEINS. Key contributions include (1) establishing the direct link between attention mechanisms and MAs generation in GNNs, (2) developing a robust definition and detection method for MAs based on activation ratio distributions, (3) introducing the Explicit Bias Term (EBT) as a potential countermeasure and exploring it as an adversarial framework to assess models robustness based on the presence or absence of MAs. Our findings highlight the prevalence and impact of attention-induced MAs across different architectures, such as GraphTransformer, GraphiT, and SAN. The study reveals the complex interplay between attention mechanisms, model architecture, dataset characteristics, and MAs emergence, providing crucial insights for developing more robust and reliable graph models.
Authors: Prerak Mody, Nicolas F. Chaves-de-Plaza, Chinmay Rao, Eleftheria Astrenidou, Mischa de Ridder, Nienke Hoekstra, Klaus Hildebrandt, Marius Staring
Abstract: Increased usage of automated tools like deep learning in medical image segmentation has alleviated the bottleneck of manual contouring. This has shifted manual labour to quality assessment (QA) of automated contours which involves detecting errors and correcting them. A potential solution to semi-automated QA is to use deep Bayesian uncertainty to recommend potentially erroneous regions, thus reducing time spent on error detection. Previous work has investigated the correspondence between uncertainty and error, however, no work has been done on improving the "utility" of Bayesian uncertainty maps such that it is only present in inaccurate regions and not in the accurate ones. Our work trains the FlipOut model with the Accuracy-vs-Uncertainty (AvU) loss which promotes uncertainty to be present only in inaccurate regions. We apply this method on datasets of two radiotherapy body sites, c.f. head-and-neck CT and prostate MR scans. Uncertainty heatmaps (i.e. predictive entropy) are evaluated against voxel inaccuracies using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Precision-Recall (PR) curves. Numerical results show that when compared to the Bayesian baseline the proposed method successfully suppresses uncertainty for accurate voxels, with similar presence of uncertainty for inaccurate voxels. Code to reproduce experiments is available at https://github.com/prerakmody/bayesuncertainty-error-correspondence
URLs: https://github.com/prerakmody/bayesuncertainty-error-correspondence
Authors: Fabrizio Gilardi, Sabrina Di Lorenzo, Juri Ezzaini, Beryl Santa, Benjamin Streiff, Eric Zurfluh, Emma Hoes
Abstract: The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to its application in many areas, including journalism. One key issue is the public's perception of AI-generated content. This preregistered study investigates (i) the perceived quality of AI-assisted and AI-generated versus human-generated news articles, (ii) whether disclosure of AI's involvement in generating these news articles influences engagement with them, and (iii) whether such awareness affects the willingness to read AI-generated articles in the future. We employed a between-subjects survey experiment with 599 participants from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, who evaluated the credibility, readability, and expertise of news articles. These articles were either written by journalists (control group), rewritten by AI (AI-assisted group), or entirely generated by AI (AI-generated group). Our results indicate that all news articles, regardless of whether they were written by journalists or AI, were perceived to be of equal quality. When participants in the treatment groups were subsequently made aware of AI's involvement in generating the articles, they expressed a higher willingness to engage with (i.e., continue reading) the articles than participants in the control group. However, they were not more willing to read AI-generated news in the future. These results suggest that aversion to AI usage in news media is not primarily rooted in a perceived lack of quality, and that by disclosing using AI, journalists could attract more immediate engagement with their content, at least in the short term.
Authors: Jeongsoo Kim, Jongho Nang, Junsuk Choe
Abstract: Recent Vision Transformer (ViT)-based methods for Image Super-Resolution have demonstrated impressive performance. However, they suffer from significant complexity, resulting in high inference times and memory usage. Additionally, ViT models using Window Self-Attention (WSA) face challenges in processing regions outside their windows. To address these issues, we propose the Low-to-high Multi-Level Transformer (LMLT), which employs attention with varying feature sizes for each head. LMLT divides image features along the channel dimension, gradually reduces spatial size for lower heads, and applies self-attention to each head. This approach effectively captures both local and global information. By integrating the results from lower heads into higher heads, LMLT overcomes the window boundary issues in self-attention. Extensive experiments show that our model significantly reduces inference time and GPU memory usage while maintaining or even surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art ViT-based Image Super-Resolution methods. Our codes are availiable at https://github.com/jwgdmkj/LMLT.
Authors: Fabian Diet, Moussa Kassem Sbeyti, Michelle Karg
Abstract: Natural distribution shift causes a deterioration in the perception performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This comprehensive analysis for real-world traffic data addresses: 1) investigating the effect of natural distribution shift and weather augmentations on both detection quality and confidence estimation, 2) evaluating model performance for both classification and object localization, and 3) benchmarking two common uncertainty quantification methods - Ensembles and different variants of Monte-Carlo (MC) Dropout - under natural and close-to-natural distribution shift. For this purpose, a novel dataset has been curated from publicly available autonomous driving datasets. The in-distribution (ID) data is based on cutouts of a single object, for which both class and bounding box annotations are available. The six distribution-shift datasets cover adverse weather scenarios, simulated rain and fog, corner cases, and out-of-distribution data. A granular analysis of CNNs under distribution shift allows to quantize the impact of different types of shifts on both, task performance and confidence estimation: ConvNeXt-Tiny is more robust than EfficientNet-B0; heavy rain degrades classification stronger than localization, contrary to heavy fog; integrating MC-Dropout into selected layers only has the potential to enhance task performance and confidence estimation, whereby the identification of these layers depends on the type of distribution shift and the considered task.
Authors: Qianlong Xiang, Miao Zhang, Yuzhang Shang, Jianlong Wu, Yan Yan, Liqiang Nie
Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated exceptional generative capabilities across various areas, while they are hindered by slow inference speeds and high computational demands during deployment. The most common way to accelerate DMs involves reducing the number of denoising steps during generation, achieved through faster sampling solvers or knowledge distillation (KD). In contrast to prior approaches, we propose a novel method that transfers the capability of large pretrained DMs to faster architectures. Specifically, we employ KD in a distinct manner to compress DMs by distilling their generative ability into more rapid variants. Furthermore, considering that the source data is either unaccessible or too enormous to store for current generative models, we introduce a new paradigm for their distillation without source data, termed Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Diffusion Models (DKDM). Generally, our established DKDM framework comprises two main components: 1) a DKDM objective that uses synthetic denoising data produced by pretrained DMs to optimize faster DMs without source data, and 2) a dynamic iterative distillation method that flexibly organizes the synthesis of denoising data, preventing it from slowing down the optimization process as the generation is slow. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at using KD to distill DMs into any architecture in a data-free manner. Importantly, our DKDM is orthogonal to most existing acceleration methods, such as denoising step reduction, quantization and pruning. Experiments show that our DKDM is capable of deriving 2x faster DMs with performance remaining on par with the baseline. Notably, our DKDM enables pretrained DMs to function as "datasets" for training new DMs.
Authors: Lorenzo Pacchiardi, Lucy G. Cheke, Jos\'e Hern\'andez-Orallo
Abstract: Predicting the performance of LLMs on individual task instances is essential to ensure their reliability in high-stakes applications. To do so, a possibility is to evaluate the considered LLM on a set of task instances and train an assessor to predict its performance based on features of the instances. However, this approach requires evaluating each new LLM on a sufficiently large set of task instances to train an assessor specific to it. In this work, we leverage the evaluation results of previously tested LLMs to reduce the number of evaluations required to predict the performance of a new LLM. In practice, we propose to test the new LLM on a small set of reference instances and train a generic assessor which predicts the performance of the LLM on an instance based on the performance of the former on the reference set and features of the instance of interest. We conduct empirical studies on HELM-Lite and KindsOfReasoning, a collection of existing reasoning datasets that we introduce, where we evaluate all instruction-fine-tuned OpenAI models until the January 2024 version of GPT4. When predicting performance on instances with the same distribution as those used to train the generic assessor, we find this achieves performance comparable to the LLM-specific assessors trained on the full set of instances. Additionally, we find that randomly selecting the reference instances performs as well as some advanced selection methods we tested. For out of distribution, however, no clear winner emerges and the overall performance is worse, suggesting that the inherent predictability of LLMs is low.
Authors: Yucong Zhang, Xin Zou, Jinshan Yang, Wenjun Chen, Faya Liang, Ming Li
Abstract: This paper presents the Multimodal Analyzing System for Laryngoscope (MASL), a system that combines audio and video data to automatically extract key segments and metrics from laryngeal videostroboscopic videos for clinical assessment. MASL integrates glottis detection with keyword spotting to analyze patient vocalizations and refine video highlights for better inspection of vocal cord movements. The system includes a strobing video extraction module that identifies frames by analyzing hue, saturation, and value fluctuations. MASL also provides effective metrics for vocal cord paralysis detection, employing a two-stage glottis segmentation process using U-Net followed by diffusion-based refinement to reduce false positives. Instead of glottal area waveforms, MASL estimates anterior glottic angle waveforms (AGAW) from glottis masks, evaluating both left and right vocal cords to detect unilateral vocal cord paralysis (UVFP). By comparing AGAW variances, MASL distinguishes between left and right paralysis. Ablation studies and experiments on public and real-world datasets validate MASL's segmentation module and demonstrate its ability to provide reliable metrics for UVFP diagnosis.
Authors: Manshan Guo, Bhavin Choksi, Sari Sadiya, Alessandro T. Gifford, Martina G. Vilas, Radoslaw M. Cichy, Gemma Roig
Abstract: In contrast to human vision, artificial neural networks (ANNs) remain relatively susceptible to adversarial attacks. To address this vulnerability, efforts have been made to transfer inductive bias from human brains to ANNs, often by training the ANN representations to match their biological counterparts. Previous works relied on brain data acquired in rodents or primates using invasive techniques, from specific regions of the brain, under non-natural conditions (anesthetized animals), and with stimulus datasets lacking diversity and naturalness. In this work, we explored whether aligning model representations to human EEG responses to a rich set of real-world images increases robustness to ANNs. Specifically, we trained ResNet50-backbone models on a dual task of classification and EEG prediction; and evaluated their EEG prediction accuracy and robustness to adversarial attacks. We observed significant correlation between the networks' EEG prediction accuracy, often highest around 100 ms post stimulus onset, and their gains in adversarial robustness. Although effect size was limited, effects were consistent across different random initializations and robust for architectural variants. We further teased apart the data from individual EEG channels and observed strongest contribution from electrodes in the parieto-occipital regions. The demonstrated utility of human EEG for such tasks opens up avenues for future efforts that scale to larger datasets under diverse stimuli conditions with the promise of stronger effects.
Authors: Edgar Wolf, Tobias Windisch
Abstract: Process curves are multi-variate finite time series data coming from manufacturing processes. This paper studies machine learning methods for drifts of process curves. A theoretic framework to synthetically generate process curves in a controlled way is introduced in order to benchmark machine learning algorithms for process drift detection. A evaluation score, called the temporal area under the curve, is introduced, which allows to quantify how well machine learning models unveil curves belonging to drift segments. Finally, a benchmark study comparing popular machine learning approaches on synthetic data generated with the introduced framework shown.
Authors: Stephen Tian, Blake Wulfe, Kyle Sargent, Katherine Liu, Sergey Zakharov, Vitor Guizilini, Jiajun Wu
Abstract: Large-scale visuomotor policy learning is a promising approach toward developing generalizable manipulation systems. Yet, policies that can be deployed on diverse embodiments, environments, and observational modalities remain elusive. In this work, we investigate how knowledge from large-scale visual data of the world may be used to address one axis of variation for generalizable manipulation: observational viewpoint. Specifically, we study single-image novel view synthesis models, which learn 3D-aware scene-level priors by rendering images of the same scene from alternate camera viewpoints given a single input image. For practical application to diverse robotic data, these models must operate zero-shot, performing view synthesis on unseen tasks and environments. We empirically analyze view synthesis models within a simple data-augmentation scheme that we call View Synthesis Augmentation (VISTA) to understand their capabilities for learning viewpoint-invariant policies from single-viewpoint demonstration data. Upon evaluating the robustness of policies trained with our method to out-of-distribution camera viewpoints, we find that they outperform baselines in both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks. Videos and additional visualizations are available at https://s-tian.github.io/projects/vista.
Authors: Qingwen Fu
Abstract: The article introduces a method for extracting words of different degrees of importance based on the BERT pre-training model and proves the effectiveness of this method. The article also discusses the impact of maintaining the same perturbation results for words of different importance on the overall text utility. This method can be applied to long text protection.
Authors: Yanxu Chen, Linshu Huang, Tian Gou
Abstract: In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant progress in the field of music generation, driving innovation in music creation and applications. This paper provides a systematic review of the latest research advancements in AI music generation, covering key technologies, models, datasets, evaluation methods, and their practical applications across various fields. The main contributions of this review include: (1) presenting a comprehensive summary framework that systematically categorizes and compares different technological approaches, including symbolic generation, audio generation, and hybrid models, helping readers better understand the full spectrum of technologies in the field; (2) offering an extensive survey of current literature, covering emerging topics such as multimodal datasets and emotion expression evaluation, providing a broad reference for related research; (3) conducting a detailed analysis of the practical impact of AI music generation in various application domains, particularly in real-time interaction and interdisciplinary applications, offering new perspectives and insights; (4) summarizing the existing challenges and limitations of music quality evaluation methods and proposing potential future research directions, aiming to promote the standardization and broader adoption of evaluation techniques. Through these innovative summaries and analyses, this paper serves as a comprehensive reference tool for researchers and practitioners in AI music generation, while also outlining future directions for the field.
Authors: Justin Lovelace, Soham Ray, Kwangyoun Kim, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Felix Wu
Abstract: This work introduces Sample-Efficient Speech Diffusion (SESD), an algorithm for effective speech synthesis in modest data regimes through latent diffusion. It is based on a novel diffusion architecture, that we call U-Audio Transformer (U-AT), that efficiently scales to long sequences and operates in the latent space of a pre-trained audio autoencoder. Conditioned on character-aware language model representations, SESD achieves impressive results despite training on less than 1k hours of speech - far less than current state-of-the-art systems. In fact, it synthesizes more intelligible speech than the state-of-the-art auto-regressive model, VALL-E, while using less than 2% the training data.
Authors: Evan Wang, Federico Cassano, Catherine Wu, Yunfeng Bai, Will Song, Vaskar Nath, Ziwen Han, Sean Hendryx, Summer Yue, Hugh Zhang
Abstract: While scaling training compute has led to remarkable improvements in large language models (LLMs), scaling inference compute has not yet yielded analogous gains. We hypothesize that a core missing component is a lack of diverse LLM outputs, leading to inefficient search due to models repeatedly sampling highly similar, yet incorrect generations. We empirically demonstrate that this lack of diversity can be mitigated by searching over candidate plans for solving a problem in natural language. Based on this insight, we propose PLANSEARCH, a novel search algorithm which shows strong results across HumanEval+, MBPP+, and LiveCodeBench (a contamination-free benchmark for competitive coding). PLANSEARCH generates a diverse set of observations about the problem and then uses these observations to construct plans for solving the problem. By searching over plans in natural language rather than directly over code solutions, PLANSEARCH explores a significantly more diverse range of potential solutions compared to baseline search methods. Using PLANSEARCH on top of Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieves a state-of-the-art pass@200 of 77.0% on LiveCodeBench, outperforming both the best score achieved without search (pass@1 = 41.4%) and using standard repeated sampling (pass@200 = 60.6%). Finally, we show that, across all models, search algorithms, and benchmarks analyzed, we can accurately predict performance gains due to search as a direct function of the diversity over generated ideas.
Authors: Yan Shvartzshnaider, Vasisht Duddu, John Lacalamita
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), while memorizing parts of their training data scraped from the Internet, may also inadvertently encode societal preferences and norms. As these models are integrated into sociotechnical systems, it is crucial that the norms they encode align with societal expectations. These norms could vary across models, hyperparameters, optimization techniques, and datasets. This is especially challenging due to prompt sensitivity$-$small variations in prompts yield different responses, rendering existing assessment methodologies unreliable. There is a need for a comprehensive framework covering various models, optimization, and datasets, along with a reliable methodology to assess encoded norms. We present LLM-CI, the first open-sourced framework to assess privacy norms encoded in LLMs. LLM-CI uses a Contextual Integrity-based factorial vignette methodology to assess the encoded norms across different contexts and LLMs. We propose the multi-prompt assessment methodology to address prompt sensitivity by assessing the norms from only the prompts that yield consistent responses across multiple variants. Using LLM-CI and our proposed methodology, we comprehensively evaluate LLMs using IoT and COPPA vignettes datasets from prior work, examining the impact of model properties (e.g., hyperparameters, capacity) and optimization strategies (e.g., alignment, quantization).
Authors: Yuntian Deng, Wenting Zhao, Jack Hessel, Xiang Ren, Claire Cardie, Yejin Choi
Abstract: The increasing availability of real-world conversation data offers exciting opportunities for researchers to study user-chatbot interactions. However, the sheer volume of this data makes manually examining individual conversations impractical. To overcome this challenge, we introduce WildVis, an interactive tool that enables fast, versatile, and large-scale conversation analysis. WildVis provides search and visualization capabilities in the text and embedding spaces based on a list of criteria. To manage million-scale datasets, we implemented optimizations including search index construction, embedding precomputation and compression, and caching to ensure responsive user interactions within seconds. We demonstrate WildVis's utility through three case studies: facilitating chatbot misuse research, visualizing and comparing topic distributions across datasets, and characterizing user-specific conversation patterns. WildVis is open-source and designed to be extendable, supporting additional datasets and customized search and visualization functionalities.
Authors: Yunze Man, Shuhong Zheng, Zhipeng Bao, Martial Hebert, Liang-Yan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang
Abstract: Complex 3D scene understanding has gained increasing attention, with scene encoding strategies playing a crucial role in this success. However, the optimal scene encoding strategies for various scenarios remain unclear, particularly compared to their image-based counterparts. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive study that probes various visual encoding models for 3D scene understanding, identifying the strengths and limitations of each model across different scenarios. Our evaluation spans seven vision foundation encoders, including image-based, video-based, and 3D foundation models. We evaluate these models in four tasks: Vision-Language Scene Reasoning, Visual Grounding, Segmentation, and Registration, each focusing on different aspects of scene understanding. Our evaluations yield key findings: DINOv2 demonstrates superior performance, video models excel in object-level tasks, diffusion models benefit geometric tasks, and language-pretrained models show unexpected limitations in language-related tasks. These insights challenge some conventional understandings, provide novel perspectives on leveraging visual foundation models, and highlight the need for more flexible encoder selection in future vision-language and scene-understanding tasks.
Authors: Seyed Arash Sheikholeslam, Andre Ivanov
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce SynthAI, a new method for the automated creation of High-Level Synthesis (HLS) designs. SynthAI integrates ReAct agents, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, web search technologies, and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework within a structured decision graph. This innovative approach enables the systematic decomposition of complex hardware design tasks into multiple stages and smaller, manageable modules. As a result, SynthAI produces synthesizable designs that closely adhere to user-specified design objectives and functional requirements. We further validate the capabilities of SynthAI through several case studies, highlighting its proficiency in generating complex, multi-module logic designs from a single initial prompt. The SynthAI code is provided via the following repo: \url{https://github.com/sarashs/FPGA_AGI}
Authors: Qingbin Zeng, Qinglong Yang, Shunan Dong, Heming Du, Liang Zheng, Fengli Xu, Yong Li
Abstract: This paper considers a scenario in city navigation: an AI agent is provided with language descriptions of the goal location with respect to some well-known landmarks; By only observing the scene around, including recognizing landmarks and road network connections, the agent has to make decisions to navigate to the goal location without instructions. This problem is very challenging, because it requires agent to establish self-position and acquire spatial representation of complex urban environment, where landmarks are often invisible. In the absence of navigation instructions, such abilities are vital for the agent to make high-quality decisions in long-range city navigation. With the emergent reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), a tempting baseline is to prompt LLMs to "react" on each observation and make decisions accordingly. However, this baseline has very poor performance that the agent often repeatedly visits same locations and make short-sighted, inconsistent decisions. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel agentic workflow featured by its abilities to perceive, reflect and plan. Specifically, we find LLaVA-7B can be fine-tuned to perceive the direction and distance of landmarks with sufficient accuracy for city navigation. Moreover, reflection is achieved through a memory mechanism, where past experiences are stored and can be retrieved with current perception for effective decision argumentation. Planning uses reflection results to produce long-term plans, which can avoid short-sighted decisions in long-range navigation. We show the designed workflow significantly improves navigation ability of the LLM agent compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Jiayi Gui, Yiming Liu, Jiale Cheng, Xiaotao Gu, Xiao Liu, Hongning Wang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities across various tasks, showcasing complex problem-solving abilities. Understanding and executing complex rules, along with multi-step planning, are fundamental to logical reasoning and critical for practical LLM agents and decision-making systems. However, evaluating LLMs as effective rule-based executors and planners remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LogicGame, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the comprehensive rule understanding, execution, and planning capabilities of LLMs. Unlike traditional benchmarks, LogicGame provides diverse games that contain a series of rules with an initial state, requiring models to comprehend and apply predefined regulations to solve problems. We create simulated scenarios in which models execute or plan operations to achieve specific outcomes. These game scenarios are specifically designed to distinguish logical reasoning from mere knowledge by relying exclusively on predefined rules. This separation allows for a pure assessment of rule-based reasoning capabilities. The evaluation considers not only final outcomes but also intermediate steps, providing a comprehensive assessment of model performance. Moreover, these intermediate steps are deterministic and can be automatically verified. LogicGame defines game scenarios with varying difficulty levels, from simple rule applications to complex reasoning chains, in order to offer a precise evaluation of model performance on rule understanding and multi-step execution. Utilizing LogicGame, we test various LLMs and identify notable shortcomings in their rule-based logical reasoning abilities.
Authors: Haowen Xu, Jinghui Yuan, Anye Zhou, Guanhao Xu, Wan Li, Xuegang Ban, Xinyue Ye
Abstract: Leveraging recent advances in generative AI, multi-agent systems are increasingly being developed to enhance the functionality and efficiency of smart city applications. This paper explores the transformative potential of large language models (LLMs) and emerging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), paving the way for innovative solutions to address critical challenges in urban mobility. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in mobility data, ITS, and Connected Vehicles (CV) applications. Building on this review, we discuss the rationale behind RAG and examine the opportunities for integrating these Generative AI (GenAI) technologies into the smart mobility sector. We propose a conceptual framework aimed at developing multi-agent systems capable of intelligently and conversationally delivering smart mobility services to urban commuters, transportation operators, and decision-makers. Our approach seeks to foster an autonomous and intelligent approach that (a) promotes science-based advisory to reduce traffic congestion, accidents, and carbon emissions at multiple scales, (b) facilitates public education and engagement in participatory mobility management, and (c) automates specialized transportation management tasks and the development of critical ITS platforms, such as data analytics and interpretation, knowledge representation, and traffic simulations. By integrating LLM and RAG, our approach seeks to overcome the limitations of traditional rule-based multi-agent systems, which rely on fixed knowledge bases and limited reasoning capabilities. This integration paves the way for a more scalable, intuitive, and automated multi-agent paradigm, driving advancements in ITS and urban mobility.
Authors: Qian Niu, Junyu Liu, Ziqian Bi, Pohsun Feng, Benji Peng, Keyu Chen
Abstract: This comprehensive review explores the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs) and cognitive science, examining similarities and differences between LLMs and human cognitive processes. We analyze methods for evaluating LLMs cognitive abilities and discuss their potential as cognitive models. The review covers applications of LLMs in various cognitive fields, highlighting insights gained for cognitive science research. We assess cognitive biases and limitations of LLMs, along with proposed methods for improving their performance. The integration of LLMs with cognitive architectures is examined, revealing promising avenues for enhancing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Key challenges and future research directions are identified, emphasizing the need for continued refinement of LLMs to better align with human cognition. This review provides a balanced perspective on the current state and future potential of LLMs in advancing our understanding of both artificial and human intelligence.
Authors: Ayal Taitler
Abstract: Perimeter identification involves ascertaining the boundaries of a designated area or zone, requiring traffic flow monitoring, control, or optimization. Various methodologies and technologies exist for accurately defining these perimeters; however, they often necessitate specialized equipment, precise mapping, or comprehensive data for effective problem delineation. In this study, we propose a sequential decision-making framework for perimeter search, designed to operate efficiently in real-time and require only publicly accessible information. We conceptualize the perimeter search as a game between a playing agent and an artificial environment, where the agent's objective is to identify the optimal perimeter by sequentially improving the current perimeter. We detail the model for the game and discuss its adaptability in determining the definition of an optimal perimeter. Ultimately, we showcase the model's efficacy through a real-world scenario, highlighting the identification of corresponding optimal perimeters.
Authors: Aapo Hyv\"arinen
Abstract: This book uses the modern theory of artificial intelligence (AI) to understand human suffering or mental pain. Both humans and sophisticated AI agents process information about the world in order to achieve goals and obtain rewards, which is why AI can be used as a model of the human brain and mind. This book intends to make the theory accessible to a relatively general audience, requiring only some relevant scientific background. The book starts with the assumption that suffering is mainly caused by frustration. Frustration means the failure of an agent (whether AI or human) to achieve a goal or a reward it wanted or expected. Frustration is inevitable because of the overwhelming complexity of the world, limited computational resources, and scarcity of good data. In particular, such limitations imply that an agent acting in the real world must cope with uncontrollability, unpredictability, and uncertainty, which all lead to frustration. Fundamental in such modelling is the idea of learning, or adaptation to the environment. While AI uses machine learning, humans and animals adapt by a combination of evolutionary mechanisms and ordinary learning. Even frustration is fundamentally an error signal that the system uses for learning. This book explores various aspects and limitations of learning algorithms and their implications regarding suffering. At the end of the book, the computational theory is used to derive various interventions or training methods that will reduce suffering in humans. The amount of frustration is expressed by a simple equation which indicates how it can be reduced. The ensuing interventions are very similar to those proposed by Buddhist and Stoic philosophy, and include mindfulness meditation. Therefore, this book can be interpreted as an exposition of a computational theory justifying why such philosophies and meditation reduce human suffering.
Authors: Pengyu Zhang, Yingbo Zhou, Ming Hu, Xian Wei, Mingsong Chen
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has been proposed to enable distributed learning on Artificial Intelligence Internet of Things (AIoT) devices with guarantees of high-level data privacy. Since random initial models in FL can easily result in unregulated Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) processes, existing FL methods greatly suffer from both slow convergence and poor accuracy, especially in non-IID scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named CyclicFL, which can quickly derive effective initial models to guide the SGD processes, thus improving the overall FL training performance. We formally analyze the significance of data consistency between the pre-training and training stages of CyclicFL, showing the limited Lipschitzness of loss for the pre-trained models by CyclicFL. Moreover, we systematically prove that our method can achieve faster convergence speed under various convexity assumptions. Unlike traditional centralized pre-training methods that require public proxy data, CyclicFL pre-trains initial models on selected AIoT devices cyclically without exposing their local data. Therefore, they can be easily integrated into any security-critical FL methods. Comprehensive experimental results show that CyclicFL can not only improve the maximum classification accuracy by up to $14.11\%$ but also significantly accelerate the overall FL training process.
Authors: Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo
Abstract: Deriving robust control policies for realistic urban navigation scenarios is not a trivial task. In an end-to-end approach, these policies must map high-dimensional images from the vehicle's cameras to low-level actions such as steering and throttle. While pure Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are based exclusively on engineered rewards, Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) agents learn from expert demonstrations while interacting with the environment, which favors GAIL on tasks for which a reward signal is difficult to derive, such as autonomous driving. However, training deep networks directly from raw images on RL tasks is known to be unstable and troublesome. To deal with that, this work proposes a hierarchical GAIL-based architecture (hGAIL) which decouples representation learning from the driving task to solve the autonomous navigation of a vehicle. The proposed architecture consists of two modules: a GAN (Generative Adversarial Net) which generates an abstract mid-level input representation, which is the Bird's-Eye View (BEV) from the surroundings of the vehicle; and the GAIL which learns to control the vehicle based on the BEV predictions from the GAN as input. hGAIL is able to learn both the policy and the mid-level representation simultaneously as the agent interacts with the environment. Our experiments made in the CARLA simulation environment have shown that GAIL exclusively from cameras (without BEV) fails to even learn the task, while hGAIL, after training exclusively on one city, was able to autonomously navigate successfully in 98% of the intersections of a new city not used in training phase. Videos and code available at: https://sites.google.com/view/hgail
Authors: Mohammad Abdous, Poorya Piroozfar, Behrouz Minaei Bidgoli
Abstract: One of the components of natural language processing that has received a lot of investigation recently is semantic textual similarity. In computational linguistics and natural language processing, assessing the semantic similarity of words, phrases, paragraphs, and texts is crucial. Calculating the degree of semantic resemblance between two textual pieces, paragraphs, or phrases provided in both monolingual and cross-lingual versions is known as semantic similarity. Cross lingual semantic similarity requires corpora in which there are sentence pairs in both the source and target languages with a degree of semantic similarity between them. Many existing cross lingual semantic similarity models use a machine translation due to the unavailability of cross lingual semantic similarity dataset, which the propagation of the machine translation error reduces the accuracy of the model. On the other hand, when we want to use semantic similarity features for machine translation the same machine translations should not be used for semantic similarity. For Persian, which is one of the low resource languages, no effort has been made in this regard and the need for a model that can understand the context of two languages is felt more than ever. In this article, the corpus of semantic textual similarity between sentences in Persian and English languages has been produced for the first time by using linguistic experts. We named this dataset PESTS (Persian English Semantic Textual Similarity). This corpus contains 5375 sentence pairs. Also, different models based on transformers have been fine-tuned using this dataset. The results show that using the PESTS dataset, the Pearson correlation of the XLM ROBERTa model increases from 85.87% to 95.62%.
Authors: Navid Ansari, Alireza Javanmardi, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Hans-Peter Seidel, Vahid Babaei
Abstract: Bayesian optimization (BO) provides a powerful framework for optimizing black-box, expensive-to-evaluate functions. It is therefore an attractive tool for engineering design problems, typically involving multiple objectives. Thanks to the rapid advances in fabrication and measurement methods as well as parallel computing infrastructure, querying many design problems can be heavily parallelized. This class of problems challenges BO with an unprecedented setup where it has to deal with very large batches, shifting its focus from sample efficiency to iteration efficiency. We present a novel Bayesian optimization framework specifically tailored to address these limitations. Our key contribution is a highly scalable, sample-based acquisition function that performs a non-dominated sorting of not only the objectives but also their associated uncertainty. We show that our acquisition function in combination with different Bayesian neural network surrogates is effective in data-intensive environments with a minimal number of iterations. We demonstrate the superiority of our method by comparing it with state-of-the-art multi-objective optimizations. We perform our evaluation on two real-world problems -- airfoil design and 3D printing -- showcasing the applicability and efficiency of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/an-on-ym-ous/lbn_mobo
Authors: Yifan Zhou, Yan Shing Liang, Yew Kee Wong, Haichuan Qiu, Yu Xi Wu, Bin He
Abstract: The Research & Development (R&D) phase of drug development is a lengthy and costly process. To revolutionize this process, we introduce our new concept QMLS to shorten the whole R&D phase to three to six months and decrease the cost to merely fifty to eighty thousand USD. For Hit Generation, Machine Learning Molecule Generation (MLMG) generates possible hits according to the molecular structure of the target protein while the Quantum Simulation (QS) filters molecules from the primary essay based on the reaction and binding effectiveness with the target protein. Then, For Lead Optimization, the resultant molecules generated and filtered from MLMG and QS are compared, and molecules that appear as a result of both processes will be made into dozens of molecular variations through Machine Learning Molecule Variation (MLMV), while others will only be made into a few variations. Lastly, all optimized molecules would undergo multiple rounds of QS filtering with a high standard for reaction effectiveness and safety, creating a few dozen pre-clinical-trail-ready drugs. This paper is based on our first paper, where we pitched the concept of machine learning combined with quantum simulations. In this paper we will go over the detailed design and framework of QMLS, including MLMG, MLMV, and QS.
Authors: Ashesh Chattopadhyay, Michael Gray, Tianning Wu, Anna B. Lowe, Ruoying He
Abstract: While data-driven approaches demonstrate great potential in atmospheric modeling and weather forecasting, ocean modeling poses distinct challenges due to complex bathymetry, land, vertical structure, and flow non-linearity. This study introduces OceanNet, a principled neural operator-based digital twin for ocean circulation. OceanNet uses a Fourier neural operator and predictor-evaluate-corrector integration scheme to mitigate autoregressive error growth and enhance stability over extended time scales. A spectral regularizer counteracts spectral bias at smaller scales. OceanNet is applied to the northwest Atlantic Ocean western boundary current (the Gulf Stream), focusing on the task of seasonal prediction for Loop Current eddies and the Gulf Stream meander. Trained using historical sea surface height (SSH) data, OceanNet demonstrates competitive forecast skill by outperforming SSH predictions by an uncoupled, state-of-the-art dynamical ocean model forecast, reducing computation by 500,000 times. These accomplishments demonstrate the potential of physics-inspired deep neural operators as cost-effective alternatives to high-resolution numerical ocean models.
Authors: Banghao Chen, Zhaofeng Zhang, Nicolas Langren\'e, Shengxin Zhu
Abstract: This comprehensive review delves into the pivotal role of prompt engineering in unleashing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from its inception in the 1950s to the emergence of advanced neural networks and deep learning architectures, has made a breakthrough in LLMs, with models such as GPT-4o and Claude-3, and in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with models such as CLIP and ALIGN. Prompt engineering is the process of structuring inputs, which has emerged as a crucial technique to maximize the utility and accuracy of these models. This paper explores both foundational and advanced methodologies of prompt engineering, including techniques such as self-consistency, chain-of-thought, and generated knowledge, which significantly enhance model performance. Additionally, it examines the prompt method of VLMs through innovative approaches such as Context Optimization (CoOp), Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), and Multimodal Prompt Learning (MaPLe). Critical to this discussion is the aspect of AI security, particularly adversarial attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in prompt engineering. Strategies to mitigate these risks and enhance model robustness are thoroughly reviewed. The evaluation of prompt methods is also addressed, through both subjective and objective metrics, ensuring a robust analysis of their efficacy. This review also reflects the essential role of prompt engineering in advancing AI capabilities, providing a structured framework for future research and application.
Authors: Mohammed Latif Siddiq, Joanna C. S. Santos, Sajith Devareddy, Anna Muller
Abstract: With the growing popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineers' daily practices, it is important to ensure that the code generated by these tools is not only functionally correct but also free of vulnerabilities. Although LLMs can help developers to be more productive, prior empirical studies have shown that LLMs can generate insecure code. There are two contributing factors to the insecure code generation. First, existing datasets used to evaluate LLMs do not adequately represent genuine software engineering tasks sensitive to security. Instead, they are often based on competitive programming challenges or classroom-type coding tasks. In real-world applications, the code produced is integrated into larger codebases, introducing potential security risks. Second, existing evaluation metrics primarily focus on the functional correctness of the generated code while ignoring security considerations. Therefore, in this paper, we described SALLM, a framework to benchmark LLMs' abilities to generate secure code systematically. This framework has three major components: a novel dataset of security-centric Python prompts, configurable assessment techniques to evaluate the generated code, and novel metrics to evaluate the models' performance from the perspective of secure code generation.
Authors: Tianyu Zheng, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Jiawei Guo, Xinrun Du, Qi Jia, Chenghua Lin, Wenhao Huang, Jie Fu, Ge Zhang
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Kun, a novel approach for creating high-quality instruction-tuning datasets for large language models (LLMs) without relying on manual annotations. Adapting a self-training algorithm based on instruction back-translation and answer polishment, Kun leverages unlabelled data from diverse sources such as Wudao, Wanjuan, and SkyPile to generate a substantial dataset of over a million Chinese instructional data points. This approach significantly deviates from traditional methods by using a self-curation process to refine and select the most effective instruction-output pairs. Our experiments with the 6B-parameter Yi model across various benchmarks demonstrate Kun's robustness and scalability. Our method's core contributions lie in its algorithmic advancement, which enhances data retention and clarity, and its innovative data generation approach that substantially reduces the reliance on costly and time-consuming manual annotations. This methodology presents a scalable and efficient solution for improving the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs, with significant implications for their application across diverse fields. The code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/Zheng0428/COIG-Kun
Authors: Jessica Hullman, Alex Kale, Jason Hartline
Abstract: DeHow well people use information displays to make decisions is of primary interest in human-centered AI, model explainability, data visualization, and related areas. However, what constitutes a decision problem, and what is required for a study to establish that human decisions could be improved remain open to speculation. We propose a widely applicable definition of a decision problem synthesized from statistical decision theory and information economics as a standard for establishing when human decisions can be improved in HCI. We argue that to attribute loss in human performance to forms of bias, an experiment must provide participants with the information that a rational agent would need to identify the utility-maximizing decision. As a demonstration, we evaluate the extent to which recent evaluations of decision-making from the literature on AI-assisted decisions achieve these criteria. We find that only 10 (26\%) of 39 studies that claim to identify biased behavior present participants with sufficient information to characterize their behavior as deviating from good decision-making in at least one treatment condition. We motivate the value of studying well-defined decision problems by describing a characterization of performance losses they allow us to conceive. In contrast, the ambiguities of a poorly communicated decision problem preclude normative interpretation. We conclude with recommendations for practice.
Authors: Yuqiang Sun, Daoyuan Wu, Yue Xue, Han Liu, Wei Ma, Lyuye Zhang, Yang Liu, Yingjiu Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in various tasks, including vulnerability detection. However, current efforts in this area are preliminary, lacking clarity on whether LLMs' vulnerability reasoning capabilities stem from the models themselves or external aids such as knowledge retrieval and tooling support. This paper aims to isolate LLMs' vulnerability reasoning from other capabilities, such as vulnerability knowledge adoption, context information retrieval, and structured output generation. We introduce LLM4Vuln, a unified evaluation framework that separates and assesses LLMs' vulnerability reasoning capabilities and examines improvements when combined with other enhancements. We conducted controlled experiments with 97 ground-truth vulnerabilities and 97 non-vulnerable cases in Solidity and Java, testing them in a total of 9,312 scenarios across four LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Mixtral, and Llama 3). Our findings reveal the varying impacts of knowledge enhancement, context supplementation, prompt schemes, and models. Additionally, we identified 14 zero-day vulnerabilities in four pilot bug bounty programs, resulting in \$3,576 in bounties.
Authors: Alex Zhang, Khanh Nguyen, Jens Tuyls, Albert Lin, Karthik Narasimhan
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of Language-Guided World Models (LWMs) -- probabilistic models that can simulate environments by reading texts. Agents equipped with these models provide humans with more extensive and efficient control, allowing them to simultaneously alter agent behaviors in multiple tasks via natural verbal communication. In this work, we take initial steps in developing robust LWMs that can generalize to compositionally novel language descriptions. We design a challenging world modeling benchmark based on the game of MESSENGER (Hanjie et al., 2021), featuring evaluation settings that require varying degrees of compositional generalization. Our experiments reveal the lack of generalizability of the state-of-the-art Transformer model, as it offers marginal improvements in simulation quality over a no-text baseline. We devise a more robust model by fusing the Transformer with the EMMA attention mechanism (Hanjie et al., 2021). Our model substantially outperforms the Transformer and approaches the performance of a model with an oracle semantic parsing and grounding capability. To demonstrate the practicality of this model in improving AI safety and transparency, we simulate a scenario in which the model enables an agent to present plans to a human before execution, and to revise plans based on their language feedback.
Authors: Yuanyuan Liang, Keren Tan, Tingyu Xie, Wenbiao Tao, Siyuan Wang, Yunshi Lan, Weining Qian
Abstract: Graph Databases (Graph DB) find extensive application across diverse domains such as finance, social networks, and medicine. Yet, the translation of Natural Language (NL) into the Graph Query Language (GQL), referred to as NL2GQL, poses significant challenges owing to its intricate and specialized nature. Some approaches have sought to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) to address analogous tasks like text2SQL. Nonetheless, in the realm of NL2GQL tasks tailored to a particular domain, the absence of domain-specific NL-GQL data pairs adds complexity to aligning LLMs with the graph DB. To tackle this challenge, we present a well-defined pipeline. Initially, we utilize ChatGPT to generate NL-GQL data pairs, leveraging the provided graph DB with self-instruction. Subsequently, we employ the generated data to fine-tune LLMs, ensuring alignment between LLMs and the graph DB. Moreover, we find the importance of relevant schema in efficiently generating accurate GQLs. Thus, we introduce a method to extract relevant schema as the input context. We evaluate our method using two carefully constructed datasets derived from graph DBs in the finance and medicine domains, named FinGQL and MediGQL. Experimental results reveal that our approach significantly outperforms a set of baseline methods, with improvements of 5.90 and 6.36 absolute points on EM, and 6.00 and 7.09 absolute points on EX for FinGQL and MediGQL, respectively.
Authors: Ilias Tsingenopoulos, Jacopo Cortellazzi, Branislav Bo\v{s}ansk\'y, Simone Aonzo, Davy Preuveneers, Wouter Joosen, Fabio Pierazzi, Lorenzo Cavallaro
Abstract: ML-based malware detection on dynamic analysis reports is vulnerable to both evasion and spurious correlations. In this work, we investigate a specific ML architecture employed in the pipeline of a widely-known commercial antivirus company, with the goal to harden it against adversarial malware. Adversarial training, the sole defensive technique that can confer empirical robustness, is not applicable out of the box in this domain, for the principal reason that gradient-based perturbations rarely map back to feasible problem-space programs. We introduce a novel Reinforcement Learning approach for constructing adversarial examples, a constituent part of adversarially training a model against evasion. Our approach comes with multiple advantages. It performs modifications that are feasible in the problem-space, and only those; thus it circumvents the inverse mapping problem. It also makes possible to provide theoretical guarantees on the robustness of the model against a particular set of adversarial capabilities. Our empirical exploration validates our theoretical insights, where we can consistently reach 0% Attack Success Rate after a few adversarial retraining iterations.
Authors: Anita Rau, Josiah Aklilu, F. Christopher Holsinger, Serena Yeung-Levy
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are trained to minimize the rendering loss of predicted viewpoints. However, the photometric loss often does not provide enough information to disambiguate between different possible geometries yielding the same image. Previous work has thus incorporated depth supervision during NeRF training, leveraging dense predictions from pre-trained depth networks as pseudo-ground truth. While these depth priors are assumed to be perfect once filtered for noise, in practice, their accuracy is more challenging to capture. This work proposes a novel approach to uncertainty in depth priors for NeRF supervision. Instead of using custom-trained depth or uncertainty priors, we use off-the-shelf pretrained diffusion models to predict depth and capture uncertainty during the denoising process. Because we know that depth priors are prone to errors, we propose to supervise the ray termination distance distribution with Earth Mover's Distance instead of enforcing the rendered depth to replicate the depth prior exactly through L2-loss. Our depth-guided NeRF outperforms all baselines on standard depth metrics by a large margin while maintaining performance on photometric measures.
Authors: Yanglin Feng, Yang Qin, Dezhong Peng, Hongyuan Zhu, Xi Peng, Peng Hu
Abstract: In this paper, we present and study a new instance-level retrieval task: PointCloud-Text Matching~(PTM), which aims to find the exact cross-modal instance that matches a given point-cloud query or text query. PTM could be applied to various scenarios, such as indoor/urban-canyon localization and scene retrieval. However, there exists no suitable and targeted dataset for PTM in practice. Therefore, we construct three new PTM benchmark datasets, namely 3D2T-SR, 3D2T-NR, and 3D2T-QA. We observe that the data is challenging and with noisy correspondence due to the sparsity, noise, or disorder of point clouds and the ambiguity, vagueness, or incompleteness of texts, which make existing cross-modal matching methods ineffective for PTM. To tackle these challenges, we propose a PTM baseline, named Robust PointCloud-Text Matching method (RoMa). RoMa consists of two modules: a Dual Attention Perception module (DAP) and a Robust Negative Contrastive Learning module (RNCL). Specifically, DAP leverages token-level and feature-level attention to adaptively focus on useful local and global features, and aggregate them into common representations, thereby reducing the adverse impact of noise and ambiguity. To handle noisy correspondence, RNCL divides negative pairs, which are much less error-prone than positive pairs, into clean and noisy subsets, and assigns them forward and reverse optimization directions respectively, thus enhancing robustness against noisy correspondence. We conduct extensive experiments on our benchmarks and demonstrate the superiority of our RoMa.
Authors: Taku Okawara, Kenji Koide, Shuji Oishi, Masashi Yokozuka, Atsuhiko Banno, Kentaro Uno, Kazuya Yoshida
Abstract: Tunnels and long corridors are challenging environments for mobile robots because a LiDAR point cloud should degenerate in these environments. To tackle point cloud degeneration, this study presents a tightly-coupled LiDAR-IMU-wheel odometry algorithm with an online calibration for skid-steering robots. We propose a full linear wheel odometry factor, which not only serves as a motion constraint but also performs the online calibration of kinematic models for skid-steering robots. Despite the dynamically changing kinematic model (e.g., wheel radii changes caused by tire pressures) and terrain conditions, our method can address the model error via online calibration. Moreover, our method enables an accurate localization in cases of degenerated environments, such as long and straight corridors, by calibration while the LiDAR-IMU fusion sufficiently operates. Furthermore, we estimate the uncertainty (i.e., covariance matrix) of the wheel odometry online for creating a reasonable constraint. The proposed method is validated through three experiments. The first indoor experiment shows that the proposed method is robust in severe degeneracy cases (long corridors) and changes in the wheel radii. The second outdoor experiment demonstrates that our method accurately estimates the sensor trajectory despite being in rough outdoor terrain owing to online uncertainty estimation of wheel odometry. The third experiment shows the proposed online calibration enables robust odometry estimation in changing terrains.
Authors: Usevalad Milasheuski, Luca Barbieri, Bernardo Camajori Tedeschini, Monica Nicoli, Stefano Savazzi
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) allows multiple privacy-sensitive applications to leverage their dataset for a global model construction without any disclosure of the information. One of those domains is healthcare, where groups of silos collaborate in order to generate a global predictor with improved accuracy and generalization. However, the inherent challenge lies in the high heterogeneity of medical data, necessitating sophisticated techniques for assessment and compensation. This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of the mathematical formalization and taxonomy of heterogeneity within FL environments, focusing on the intricacies of medical data. In particular, we address the evaluation and comparison of the most popular FL algorithms with respect to their ability to cope with quantity-based, feature and label distribution-based heterogeneity. The goal is to provide a quantitative evaluation of the impact of data heterogeneity in FL systems for healthcare networks as well as a guideline on FL algorithm selection. Our research extends beyond existing studies by benchmarking seven of the most common FL algorithms against the unique challenges posed by medical data use cases. The paper targets the prediction of the risk of stroke recurrence through a set of tabular clinical reports collected by different federated hospital silos: data heterogeneity frequently encountered in this scenario and its impact on FL performance are discussed.
Authors: Saikat Chakraborty, Gabriel Ebner, Siddharth Bhat, Sarah Fakhoury, Sakina Fatima, Shuvendu Lahiri, Nikhil Swamy
Abstract: Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We also report on an extended version of our dataset containing a total of 940K lines of programs and proofs, with a total of 54k top-level F* definitions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.
Authors: Francisco de Arriba-P\'erez, Silvia Garc\'ia-M\'endez, F\'atima Leal, Benedita Malheiro, Juan Carlos Burguillo
Abstract: Social media platforms enable the rapid dissemination and consumption of information. However, users instantly consume such content regardless of the reliability of the shared data. Consequently, the latter crowdsourcing model is exposed to manipulation. This work contributes with an explainable and online classification method to recognize fake news in real-time. The proposed method combines both unsupervised and supervised Machine Learning approaches with online created lexica. The profiling is built using creator-, content- and context-based features using Natural Language Processing techniques. The explainable classification mechanism displays in a dashboard the features selected for classification and the prediction confidence. The performance of the proposed solution has been validated with real data sets from Twitter and the results attain 80 % accuracy and macro F-measure. This proposal is the first to jointly provide data stream processing, profiling, classification and explainability. Ultimately, the proposed early detection, isolation and explanation of fake news contribute to increase the quality and trustworthiness of social media contents.
Authors: Silvia Garc\'ia-M\'endez, Francisco de Arriba-P\'erez, Mar\'ia del Carmen Somoza-L\'opez
Abstract: Transformer architectures contribute to managing long-term dependencies for Natural Language Processing, representing one of the most recent changes in the field. These architectures are the basis of the innovative, cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) that have produced a huge buzz in several fields and industrial sectors, among the ones education stands out. Accordingly, these generative Artificial Intelligence-based solutions have directed the change in techniques and the evolution in educational methods and contents, along with network infrastructure, towards high-quality learning. Given the popularity of LLMs, this review seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of those solutions designed specifically to generate and evaluate educational materials and which involve students and teachers in their design or experimental plan. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review of educational applications (e.g., student assessment) of LLMs. As expected, the most common role of these systems is as virtual tutors for automatic question generation. Moreover, the most popular models are GTP-3 and BERT. However, due to the continuous launch of new generative models, new works are expected to be published shortly.
Authors: Keyu Chen, Yuheng Lei, Hao Cheng, Haoran Wu, Wenchao Sun, Sifa Zheng
Abstract: Generating safety-critical scenarios, which are essential yet difficult to collect at scale, offers an effective method to evaluate the robustness of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Existing methods focus on optimizing adversariality while preserving the naturalness of scenarios, aiming to achieve a balance through data-driven approaches. However, without an appropriate upper bound for adversariality, the scenarios might exhibit excessive adversariality, potentially leading to unavoidable collisions. In this paper, we introduce FREA, a novel safety-critical scenarios generation method that incorporates the Largest Feasible Region (LFR) of AV as guidance to ensure the reasonableness of the adversarial scenarios. Concretely, FREA initially pre-calculates the LFR of AV from offline datasets. Subsequently, it learns a reasonable adversarial policy that controls the scene's critical background vehicles (CBVs) to generate adversarial yet AV-feasible scenarios by maximizing a novel feasibility-dependent adversarial objective function. Extensive experiments illustrate that FREA can effectively generate safety-critical scenarios, yielding considerable near-miss events while ensuring AV's feasibility. Generalization analysis also confirms the robustness of FREA in AV testing across various surrogate AV methods and traffic environments.
Authors: Xunguang Wang, Daoyuan Wu, Zhenlan Ji, Zongjie Li, Pingchuan Ma, Shuai Wang, Yingjiu Li, Yang Liu, Ning Liu, Juergen Rahmel
Abstract: Jailbreaking is an emerging adversarial attack that bypasses the safety alignment deployed in off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) and has evolved into multiple categories: human-based, optimization-based, generation-based, and the recent indirect and multilingual jailbreaks. However, delivering a practical jailbreak defense is challenging because it needs to not only handle all the above jailbreak attacks but also incur negligible delays to user prompts, as well as be compatible with both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Inspired by how the traditional security concept of shadow stacks defends against memory overflow attacks, this paper introduces a generic LLM jailbreak defense framework called SelfDefend, which establishes a shadow LLM as a defense instance to concurrently protect the target LLM instance in the normal stack and collaborate with it for checkpoint-based access control. The effectiveness of SelfDefend builds upon our observation that existing LLMs (both target and defense LLMs) have the capability to identify harmful prompts or intentions in user queries, which we empirically validate using the commonly used GPT-3.5/4 models across all major jailbreak attacks. To further improve the defense's robustness and minimize costs, we employ a data distillation approach to tune dedicated open-source defense models. These models outperform six state-of-the-art defenses and match the performance of GPT-4-based SelfDefend, with significantly lower extra delays. We also empirically show that the tuned models are robust to adaptive jailbreaks and prompt injections.
Authors: Weiwei Duan, Luping Ji, Shengjia Chen, Sicheng Zhu, Mao Ye
Abstract: As a sub-field of object detection, moving infrared small target detection presents significant challenges due to tiny target sizes and low contrast against backgrounds. Currently-existing methods primarily rely on the features extracted only from spatio-temporal domain. Frequency domain has hardly been concerned yet, although it has been widely applied in image processing. To extend feature source domains and enhance feature representation, we propose a new Triple-domain Strategy (Tridos) with the frequency-aware memory enhancement on spatio-temporal domain for infrared small target detection. In this scheme, it effectively detaches and enhances frequency features by a local-global frequency-aware module with Fourier transform. Inspired by human visual system, our memory enhancement is designed to capture the spatial relations of infrared targets among video frames. Furthermore, it encodes temporal dynamics motion features via differential learning and residual enhancing. Additionally, we further design a residual compensation to reconcile possible cross-domain feature mismatches. To our best knowledge, proposed Tridos is the first work to explore infrared target feature learning comprehensively in spatio-temporal-frequency domains. The extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., DAUB, ITSDT-15K and IRDST) validate that our triple-domain infrared feature learning scheme could often be obviously superior to state-of-the-art ones. Source codes are available at https://github.com/UESTC-nnLab/Tridos.
Authors: Sahana Ramnath, Kartik Pandey, Elizabeth Boschee, Xiang Ren
Abstract: Authorship Verification (AV) (do two documents have the same author?) is essential in many sensitive real-life applications. AV is often used in proprietary domains that require a private, offline model, making SOTA online models like ChatGPT undesirable. Current offline models however have lower downstream utility due to low accuracy/scalability (eg: traditional stylometry AV systems) and lack of accessible post-hoc explanations. In this work, we take the first step to address the above challenges with our trained, offline Llama-3-8B model CAVE (Controllable Authorship Verification Explanations): CAVE generates free-text AV explanations that are controlled to be (1) structured (can be decomposed into sub-explanations in terms of relevant linguistic features), and (2) easily verified for explanation-label consistency (via intermediate labels in sub-explanations). We first engineer a prompt that can generate silver training data from a SOTA teacher model in the desired CAVE output format. We then filter and distill this data into a pretrained Llama-3-8B, our carefully selected student model. Results on three difficult AV datasets IMDb62, Blog-Auth, and Fanfiction show that CAVE generates high quality explanations (as measured by automatic and human evaluation) as well as competitive task accuracies.
Authors: Jiayi Liu, Qianyu Zhang, Xue Wan, Shengyang Zhang, Yaolin Tian, Haodong Han, Yutao Zhao, Baichuan Liu, Zeyuan Zhao, Xubo Luo
Abstract: With the complexity of lunar exploration missions, the moon needs to have a higher level of autonomy. Environmental perception and navigation algorithms are the foundation for lunar rovers to achieve autonomous exploration. The development and verification of algorithms require highly reliable data support. Most of the existing lunar datasets are targeted at a single task, lacking diverse scenes and high-precision ground truth labels. To address this issue, we propose a multi-task, multi-scene, and multi-label lunar benchmark dataset LuSNAR. This dataset can be used for comprehensive evaluation of autonomous perception and navigation systems, including high-resolution stereo image pairs, panoramic semantic labels, dense depth maps, LiDAR point clouds, and the position of rover. In order to provide richer scene data, we built 9 lunar simulation scenes based on Unreal Engine. Each scene is divided according to topographic relief and the density of objects. To verify the usability of the dataset, we evaluated and analyzed the algorithms of semantic segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and autonomous navigation. The experiment results prove that the dataset proposed in this paper can be used for ground verification of tasks such as autonomous environment perception and navigation, and provides a lunar benchmark dataset for testing the accessibility of algorithm metrics. We make LuSNAR publicly available at: https://github.com/autumn999999/LuSNAR-dataset.
Authors: Prithvi Poddar, Steve Paul, Souma Chowdhury
Abstract: The advent of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) presents the scope for a transformative shift in the domain of urban transportation. However, its widespread adoption and economic viability depends in part on the ability to optimally schedule the fleet of aircraft across vertiports in a UAM network, under uncertainties attributed to airspace congestion, changing weather conditions, and varying demands. This paper presents a comprehensive optimization formulation of the fleet scheduling problem, while also identifying the need for alternate solution approaches, since directly solving the resulting integer nonlinear programming problem is computationally prohibitive for daily fleet scheduling. Previous work has shown the effectiveness of using (graph) reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to train real-time executable policy models for fleet scheduling. However, such policies can often be brittle on out-of-distribution scenarios or edge cases. Moreover, training performance also deteriorates as the complexity (e.g., number of constraints) of the problem increases. To address these issues, this paper presents an imitation learning approach where the RL-based policy exploits expert demonstrations yielded by solving the exact optimization using a Genetic Algorithm. The policy model comprises Graph Neural Network (GNN) based encoders that embed the space of vertiports and aircraft, Transformer networks to encode demand, passenger fare, and transport cost profiles, and a Multi-head attention (MHA) based decoder. Expert demonstrations are used through the Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) algorithm. Interfaced with a UAM simulation environment involving 8 vertiports and 40 aircrafts, in terms of the daily profits earned reward, the new imitative approach achieves better mean performance and remarkable improvement in the case of unseen worst-case scenarios, compared to pure RL results.
Authors: Qiao Wu, Kun Sun, Pei An, Mathieu Salzmann, Yanning Zhang, Jiaqi Yang
Abstract: The high temporal variation of the point clouds is the key challenge of 3D single-object tracking (3D SOT). Existing approaches rely on the assumption that the shape variation of the point clouds and the motion of the objects across neighboring frames are smooth, failing to cope with high temporal variation data. In this paper, we present a novel framework for 3D SOT in point clouds with high temporal variation, called HVTrack. HVTrack proposes three novel components to tackle the challenges in the high temporal variation scenario: 1) A Relative-Pose-Aware Memory module to handle temporal point cloud shape variations; 2) a Base-Expansion Feature Cross-Attention module to deal with similar object distractions in expanded search areas; 3) a Contextual Point Guided Self-Attention module for suppressing heavy background noise. We construct a dataset with high temporal variation (KITTI-HV) by setting different frame intervals for sampling in the KITTI dataset. On the KITTI-HV with 5 frame intervals, our HVTrack surpasses the state-of-the-art tracker CXTracker by 11.3%/15.7% in Success/Precision.
Authors: Sangjoon Park, Chan Woo Wee, Seo Hee Choi, Kyung Hwan Kim, Jee Suk Chang, Hong In Yoon, Ik Jae Lee, Yong Bae Kim, Jaeho Cho, Ki Chang Keum, Chang Geol Lee, Hwa Kyung Byun, Woong Sub Koom
Abstract: Accurate patient selection is critical in radiotherapy (RT) to prevent ineffective treatments. Traditional survival prediction models, relying on structured data, often lack precision. This study explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) to structure unstructured electronic health record (EHR) data, thereby improving survival prediction accuracy through comprehensive clinical information integration. Data from 34,276 patients treated with RT at Yonsei Cancer Center between 2013 and 2023 were analyzed, encompassing both structured and unstructured data. An open-source LLM was used to structure the unstructured EHR data via single-shot learning, with its performance compared against a domain-specific medical LLM and a smaller variant. Survival prediction models were developed using statistical, machine learning, and deep learning approaches, incorporating both structured and LLM-structured data. Clinical experts evaluated the accuracy of the LLM-structured data. The open-source LLM achieved 87.5% accuracy in structuring unstructured EHR data without additional training, significantly outperforming the domain-specific medical LLM, which reached only 35.8% accuracy. Larger LLMs were more effective, particularly in extracting clinically relevant features like general condition and disease extent, which closely correlated with patient survival. Incorporating LLM-structured clinical features into survival prediction models significantly improved accuracy, with the C-index of deep learning models increasing from 0.737 to 0.820. These models also became more interpretable by emphasizing clinically significant factors. This study shows that general-domain LLMs, even without specific medical training, can effectively structure large-scale unstructured EHR data, substantially enhancing the accuracy and interpretability of clinical predictive models.
Authors: Enneng Yang, Li Shen, Guibing Guo, Xingwei Wang, Xiaochun Cao, Jie Zhang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Model merging is an efficient empowerment technique in the machine learning community that does not require the collection of raw training data and does not require expensive computation. As model merging becomes increasingly prevalent across various fields, it is crucial to understand the available model merging techniques comprehensively. However, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding a systematic and thorough review of these techniques. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of model merging methods and theories, their applications in various domains and settings, and future research directions. Specifically, we first propose a new taxonomic approach that exhaustively discusses existing model merging methods. Secondly, we discuss the application of model merging techniques in large language models, multimodal large language models, and 10+ machine learning subfields, including continual learning, multi-task learning, few-shot learning, etc. Finally, we highlight the remaining challenges of model merging and discuss future research directions. A comprehensive list of papers about model merging is available at \url{https://github.com/EnnengYang/Awesome-Model-Merging-Methods-Theories-Applications}.
URLs: https://github.com/EnnengYang/Awesome-Model-Merging-Methods-Theories-Applications
Authors: \'Aron Samuel Kov\'acs, Pedro Hermosilla, Renata G. Raidou
Abstract: We introduce G-Style, a novel algorithm designed to transfer the style of an image onto a 3D scene represented using Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting is a powerful 3D representation for novel view synthesis, as -- compared to other approaches based on Neural Radiance Fields -- it provides fast scene renderings and user control over the scene. Recent pre-prints have demonstrated that the style of Gaussian Splatting scenes can be modified using an image exemplar. However, since the scene geometry remains fixed during the stylization process, current solutions fall short of producing satisfactory results. Our algorithm aims to address these limitations by following a three-step process: In a pre-processing step, we remove undesirable Gaussians with large projection areas or highly elongated shapes. Subsequently, we combine several losses carefully designed to preserve different scales of the style in the image, while maintaining as much as possible the integrity of the original scene content. During the stylization process and following the original design of Gaussian Splatting, we split Gaussians where additional detail is necessary within our scene by tracking the gradient of the stylized color. Our experiments demonstrate that G-Style generates high-quality stylizations within just a few minutes, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Authors: Yuan Tang, Xu Han, Xianzhi Li, Qiao Yu, Jinfeng Xu, Yixue Hao, Long Hu, Min Chen
Abstract: Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the 3D physical world remains a significant challenge. Due to the lack of large-scale 3D-text pair datasets, the success of LLMs has yet to be replicated in 3D understanding. In this paper, we rethink this issue and propose a new task: 3D Data-Efficient Point-Language Understanding. The goal is to enable LLMs to achieve robust 3D object understanding with minimal 3D point cloud and text data pairs. To address this task, we introduce GreenPLM, which leverages more text data to compensate for the lack of 3D data. First, inspired by using CLIP to align images and text, we utilize a pre-trained point cloud-text encoder to map the 3D point cloud space to the text space. This mapping leaves us to seamlessly connect the text space with LLMs. Once the point-text-LLM connection is established, we further enhance text-LLM alignment by expanding the intermediate text space, thereby reducing the reliance on 3D point cloud data. Specifically, we generate 6M free-text descriptions of 3D objects, and design a three-stage training strategy to help LLMs better explore the intrinsic connections between different modalities. To achieve efficient modality alignment, we design a zero-parameter cross-attention module for token pooling. Extensive experimental results show that GreenPLM requires only 12% of the 3D training data used by existing state-of-the-art models to achieve superior 3D understanding. Remarkably, GreenPLM also achieves competitive performance using text-only data. The code and weights are available at: https://github.com/TangYuan96/GreenPLM.
Authors: Lorenzo Guerra, Linhan Xu, Paolo Bellavista, Thomas Chapuis, Guillaume Duc, Pavlo Mozharovskyi, Van-Tam Nguyen
Abstract: The integration of digital devices in modern vehicles has revolutionized automotive technology, enhancing safety and the overall driving experience. The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is a central system for managing in-vehicle communication between the electronic control units (ECUs). However, the CAN protocol poses security challenges due to inherent vulnerabilities, lacking encryption and authentication, which, combined with an expanding attack surface, necessitates robust security measures. In response to this challenge, numerous Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have been developed and deployed. Nonetheless, an open, comprehensive, and realistic dataset to test the effectiveness of such IDSs remains absent in the existing literature. This paper addresses this gap by considering the latest ROAD dataset, containing stealthy and sophisticated injections. The methodology involves dataset labelling and the implementation of both state-of-the-art deep learning models and traditional machine learning models to show the discrepancy in performance between the datasets most commonly used in the literature and the ROAD dataset, a more realistic alternative.
Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Juluan Shi, Chaozheng Wang, Cheryl Lee, Youliang Yuan, Jen-tse Huang, Michael R. Lyu
Abstract: Equipped with the capability to call functions, modern large language models (LLMs) can leverage external tools for addressing a range of tasks unattainable through language skills alone. However, the effective execution of these tools relies heavily not just on the advanced capabilities of LLMs but also on precise user instructions, which often cannot be ensured in the real world. To evaluate the performance of LLMs tool-use under imperfect instructions, we meticulously examine the real-world instructions queried from users, analyze the error patterns, and build a challenging tool-use benchmark called Noisy ToolBench (NoisyToolBench). We find that due to the next-token prediction training objective, LLMs tend to arbitrarily generate the missed argument, which may lead to hallucinations and risks. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Ask-when-Needed (AwN), which prompts LLMs to ask questions to users whenever they encounter obstacles due to unclear instructions. Moreover, to reduce the manual labor involved in user-LLM interaction and assess LLMs performance in tool utilization from both accuracy and efficiency perspectives, we design an automated evaluation tool named ToolEvaluator. Our experiments demonstrate that the AwN significantly outperforms existing frameworks for tool learning in the NoisyToolBench. We will release all related code and datasets to support future research.
Authors: Hao Shi, Yuan Gao, Zhaoheng Ni, Tatsuya Kawahara
Abstract: Serialized output training (SOT) attracts increasing attention due to its convenience and flexibility for multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, it is not easy to train with attention loss only. In this paper, we propose the overlapped encoding separation (EncSep) to fully utilize the benefits of the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention hybrid loss. This additional separator is inserted after the encoder to extract the multi-speaker information with CTC losses. Furthermore, we propose the serialized speech information guidance SOT (GEncSep) to further utilize the separated encodings. The separated streams are concatenated to provide single-speaker information to guide attention during decoding. The experimental results on LibriMix show that the single-speaker encoding can be separated from the overlapped encoding. The CTC loss helps to improve the encoder representation under complex scenarios. GEncSep further improved performance.
Authors: Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Sikai Chen
Abstract: In the field of autonomous driving, developing safe and trustworthy autonomous driving policies remains a significant challenge. Recently, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has attracted substantial attention due to its potential to enhance training safety and sampling efficiency. Nevertheless, existing RLHF-enabled methods often falter when faced with imperfect human demonstrations, potentially leading to training oscillations or even worse performance than rule-based approaches. Inspired by the human learning process, we propose Physics-enhanced Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (PE-RLHF). This novel framework synergistically integrates human feedback (e.g., human intervention and demonstration) and physics knowledge (e.g., traffic flow model) into the training loop of reinforcement learning. The key advantage of PE-RLHF is its guarantee that the learned policy will perform at least as well as the given physics-based policy, even when human feedback quality deteriorates, thus ensuring trustworthy safety improvements. PE-RLHF introduces a Physics-enhanced Human-AI (PE-HAI) collaborative paradigm for dynamic action selection between human and physics-based actions, employs a reward-free approach with a proxy value function to capture human preferences, and incorporates a minimal intervention mechanism to reduce the cognitive load on human mentors. Extensive experiments across diverse driving scenarios demonstrate that PE-RLHF significantly outperforms traditional methods, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in safety, efficiency, and generalizability, even with varying quality of human feedback. The philosophy behind PE-RLHF not only advances autonomous driving technology but can also offer valuable insights for other safety-critical domains. Demo video and code are available at: \https://zilin-huang.github.io/PE-RLHF-website/
Authors: Shahbaz Rezaei, Xin Liu
Abstract: Human understandable explanation of deep learning models is necessary for many critical and sensitive applications. Unlike image or tabular data where the importance of each input feature (for the classifier's decision) can be directly projected into the input, time series distinguishable features (e.g. dominant frequency) are often hard to manifest in time domain for a user to easily understand. Moreover, most explanation methods require a baseline value as an indication of the absence of any feature. However, the notion of lack of feature, which is often defined as black pixels for vision tasks or zero/mean values for tabular data, is not well-defined in time series. Despite the adoption of explainable AI methods (XAI) from tabular and vision domain into time series domain, these differences limit the application of these XAI methods in practice. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method that allows a model originally trained on time domain to be interpreted in other explanation spaces using existing methods. We suggest four explanation spaces that each can potentially alleviate these issues in certain types of time series. Our method can be readily adopted in existing platforms without any change to trained models or XAI methods. The code is available at https://github.com/shrezaei/TS-X-spaces.
Authors: Tiansheng Huang, Sihao Hu, Fatih Ilhan, Selim Furkan Tekin, Ling Liu
Abstract: Harmful fine-tuning issue \citep{qi2023fine} poses serious safety concerns for Large language models' fine-tuning-as-a-service. While existing defenses \citep{huang2024vaccine,rosati2024representation} have been proposed to mitigate the issue, their performances are still far away from satisfactory, and the root cause of the problem has not been fully recovered. For the first time in the literature, we in this paper show that \textit{harmful perturbation} over the model weights should be the root cause of alignment-broken of harmful fine-tuning. In order to attenuate the negative impact of harmful perturbation, we propose an alignment-stage solution, dubbed Booster. Technically, along with the original alignment loss, we append a loss regularizer in the alignment stage's optimization. The regularizer ensures that the model's harmful loss reduction before/after simulated harmful perturbation is attenuated, thereby mitigating the subsequent fine-tuning risk. Empirical results show that Booster can effectively reduce the harmful score of the fine-tuned models while maintaining the performance of downstream tasks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/git-disl/Booster}.
Authors: Hyungkeun Park, Jong-Seok Lee
Abstract: Logit-based knowledge distillation (KD) for classification is cost-efficient compared to feature-based KD but often subject to inferior performance. Recently, it was shown that the performance of logit-based KD can be improved by effectively delivering the probability distribution for the non-target classes from the teacher model, which is known as `implicit (dark) knowledge', to the student model. Through gradient analysis, we first show that this actually has an effect of adaptively controlling the learning of implicit knowledge. Then, we propose a new loss that enables the student to learn explicit knowledge (i.e., the teacher's confidence about the target class) along with implicit knowledge in an adaptive manner. Furthermore, we propose to separate the classification and distillation tasks for effective distillation and inter-class relationship modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, called adaptive explicit knowledge transfer (AEKT) method, achieves improved performance compared to the state-of-the-art KD methods on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets.
Authors: Gaojie Lin, Jianwen Jiang, Chao Liang, Tianyun Zhong, Jiaqi Yang, Yanbo Zheng
Abstract: Diffusion-based video generation technology has advanced significantly, catalyzing a proliferation of research in human animation. However, the majority of these studies are confined to same-modality driving settings, with cross-modality human body animation remaining relatively underexplored. In this paper, we introduce, an end-to-end audio-driven human animation framework that ensures hand integrity, identity consistency, and natural motion. The key design of CyberHost is the Region Codebook Attention mechanism, which improves the generation quality of facial and hand animations by integrating fine-grained local features with learned motion pattern priors. Furthermore, we have developed a suite of human-prior-guided training strategies, including body movement map, hand clarity score, pose-aligned reference feature, and local enhancement supervision, to improve synthesis results. To our knowledge, CyberHost is the first end-to-end audio-driven human diffusion model capable of facilitating zero-shot video generation within the scope of human body. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CyberHost surpasses previous works in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.
Authors: Yuanqing Wang, Kenichiro Takaba, Michael S. Chen, Marcus Wieder, Yuzhi Xu, Tong Zhu, John Z. H. Zhang, Arnav Nagle, Kuang Yu, Xinyan Wang, Daniel J. Cole, Joshua A. Rackers, Kyunghyun Cho, Joe G. Greener, Peter Eastman, Stefano Martiniani, Mark E. Tuckerman
Abstract: A force field as accurate as quantum mechanics (QM) and as fast as molecular mechanics (MM), with which one can simulate a biomolecular system efficiently enough and meaningfully enough to get quantitative insights, is among the most ardent dreams of biophysicists -- a dream, nevertheless, not to be fulfilled any time soon. Machine learning force fields (MLFFs) represent a meaningful endeavor towards this direction, where differentiable neural functions are parametrized to fit ab initio energies, and furthermore forces through automatic differentiation. We argue that, as of now, the utility of the MLFF models is no longer bottlenecked by accuracy but primarily by their speed (as well as stability and generalizability), as many recent variants, on limited chemical spaces, have long surpassed the chemical accuracy of $1$ kcal/mol -- the empirical threshold beyond which realistic chemical predictions are possible -- though still magnitudes slower than MM. Hoping to kindle explorations and designs of faster, albeit perhaps slightly less accurate MLFFs, in this review, we focus our attention on the design space (the speed-accuracy tradeoff) between MM and ML force fields. After a brief review of the building blocks of force fields of either kind, we discuss the desired properties and challenges now faced by the force field development community, survey the efforts to make MM force fields more accurate and ML force fields faster, envision what the next generation of MLFF might look like.
Authors: Tianxu Liu, Yanbin Wang, Jianguo Sun, Ye Tian, Yanyu Huang, Tao Xue, Peiyue Li, Yiwei Liu
Abstract: As blockchain technology rapidly evolves, the demand for enhanced efficiency, security, and scalability grows.Transformer models, as powerful deep learning architectures,have shown unprecedented potential in addressing various blockchain challenges. However, a systematic review of Transformer applications in blockchain is lacking. This paper aims to fill this research gap by surveying over 200 relevant papers, comprehensively reviewing practical cases and research progress of Transformers in blockchain applications. Our survey covers key areas including anomaly detection, smart contract security analysis, cryptocurrency prediction and trend analysis, and code summary generation. To clearly articulate the advancements of Transformers across various blockchain domains, we adopt a domain-oriented classification system, organizing and introducing representative methods based on major challenges in current blockchain research. For each research domain,we first introduce its background and objectives, then review previous representative methods and analyze their limitations,and finally introduce the advancements brought by Transformer models. Furthermore, we explore the challenges of utilizing Transformer, such as data privacy, model complexity, and real-time processing requirements. Finally, this article proposes future research directions, emphasizing the importance of exploring the Transformer architecture in depth to adapt it to specific blockchain applications, and discusses its potential role in promoting the development of blockchain technology. This review aims to provide new perspectives and a research foundation for the integrated development of blockchain technology and machine learning, supporting further innovation and application expansion of blockchain technology.
Authors: Xugang Lu, Peng Shen, Yu Tsao, Hisashi Kawai
Abstract: Transferring linguistic knowledge from a pretrained language model (PLM) to an acoustic model has been shown to greatly improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, due to the heterogeneous feature distributions in cross-modalities, designing an effective model for feature alignment and knowledge transfer between linguistic and acoustic sequences remains a challenging task. Optimal transport (OT), which efficiently measures probability distribution discrepancies, holds great potential for aligning and transferring knowledge between acoustic and linguistic modalities. Nonetheless, the original OT treats acoustic and linguistic feature sequences as two unordered sets in alignment and neglects temporal order information during OT coupling estimation. Consequently, a time-consuming pretraining stage is required to learn a good alignment between the acoustic and linguistic representations. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Order Preserved OT (TOT)-based Cross-modal Alignment and Knowledge Transfer (CAKT) (TOT-CAKT) for ASR. In the TOT-CAKT, local neighboring frames of acoustic sequences are smoothly mapped to neighboring regions of linguistic sequences, preserving their temporal order relationship in feature alignment and matching. With the TOT-CAKT model framework, we conduct Mandarin ASR experiments with a pretrained Chinese PLM for linguistic knowledge transfer. Our results demonstrate that the proposed TOT-CAKT significantly improves ASR performance compared to several state-of-the-art models employing linguistic knowledge transfer, and addresses the weaknesses of the original OT-based method in sequential feature alignment for ASR.
Authors: W{\l}odzimierz Lewoniewski, Piotr Stolarski, Milena Str\'o\.zyna, Elzbieta Lewa\'nska, Aleksandra Wojewoda, Ewelina Ksi\k{e}\.zniak, Marcin Sawi\'nski
Abstract: This paper presents the experiments and results for the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2024 Task 6: Robustness of Credibility Assessment with Adversarial Examples (InCrediblAE). The primary objective of this task was to generate adversarial examples in five problem domains in order to evaluate the robustness of widely used text classification methods (fine-tuned BERT, BiLSTM, and RoBERTa) when applied to credibility assessment issues. This study explores the application of ensemble learning to enhance adversarial attacks on natural language processing (NLP) models. We systematically tested and refined several adversarial attack methods, including BERT-Attack, Genetic algorithms, TextFooler, and CLARE, on five datasets across various misinformation tasks. By developing modified versions of BERT-Attack and hybrid methods, we achieved significant improvements in attack effectiveness. Our results demonstrate the potential of modification and combining multiple methods to create more sophisticated and effective adversarial attack strategies, contributing to the development of more robust and secure systems.