Authors: Lin Li, Guikun Chen, Hanrong Shi, Jun Xiao, Long Chen
Abstract: The rapid evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has brought substantial advancements in artificial intelligence, significantly enhancing the capability to understand and generate multimodal content. While prior studies have largely concentrated on model architectures and training methodologies, a thorough analysis of the benchmarks used for evaluating these models remains underexplored. This survey addresses this gap by systematically reviewing 211 benchmarks that assess MLLMs across four core domains: understanding, reasoning, generation, and application. We provide a detailed analysis of task designs, evaluation metrics, and dataset constructions, across diverse modalities. We hope that this survey will contribute to the ongoing advancement of MLLM research by offering a comprehensive overview of benchmarking practices and identifying promising directions for future work. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers is available.
Authors: David Wood, Boris Lublinsky, Alexy Roytman, Shivdeep Singh, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Revital Eres, Mohammad Nassar, Hima Patel, Yousaf Shah, Constantin Adam, Petros Zerfos, Nirmit Desai, Daiki Tsuzuku, Takuya Goto, Michele Dolfi, Saptha Surendran, Paramesvaran Selvam, Sungeun An, Yuan Chi Chang, Dhiraj Joshi, Hajar Emami-Gohari, Xuan-Hong Dang, Yan Koyfman, Shahrokh Daijavad
Abstract: Data preparation is the first and a very important step towards any Large Language Model (LLM) development. This paper introduces an easy-to-use, extensible, and scale-flexible open-source data preparation toolkit called Data Prep Kit (DPK). DPK is architected and designed to enable users to scale their data preparation to their needs. With DPK they can prepare data on a local machine or effortlessly scale to run on a cluster with thousands of CPU Cores. DPK comes with a highly scalable, yet extensible set of modules that transform natural language and code data. If the user needs additional transforms, they can be easily developed using extensive DPK support for transform creation. These modules can be used independently or pipelined to perform a series of operations. In this paper, we describe DPK architecture and show its performance from a small scale to a very large number of CPUs. The modules from DPK have been used for the preparation of Granite Models [1] [2]. We believe DPK is a valuable contribution to the AI community to easily prepare data to enhance the performance of their LLM models or to fine-tune models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Authors: Myles Foley, Chris Hicks, Kate Highnam, Vasilios Mavroudis
Abstract: In the network security arms race, the defender is significantly disadvantaged as they need to successfully detect and counter every malicious attack. In contrast, the attacker needs to succeed only once. To level the playing field, we investigate the effectiveness of autonomous agents in a realistic network defence scenario. We first outline the problem, provide the background on reinforcement learning and detail our proposed agent design. Using a network environment simulation, with 13 hosts spanning 3 subnets, we train a novel reinforcement learning agent and show that it can reliably defend continual attacks by two advanced persistent threat (APT) red agents: one with complete knowledge of the network layout and another which must discover resources through exploration but is more general.
Authors: Elliot L. Epstein, Kaisheng Yao, Jing Li, Xinyi Bai, Hamid Palangi
Abstract: Evaluating instruction following capabilities for multimodal, multi-turn dialogue is challenging. With potentially multiple instructions in the input model context, the task is time-consuming for human raters and we show LLM based judges are biased towards answers from the same model. We propose MMMT-IF, an image based multi-turn Q$\&$A evaluation set with added global instructions between questions, constraining the answer format. This challenges models to retrieve instructions dispersed across long dialogues and reason under instruction constraints. All instructions are objectively verifiable through code execution. We introduce the Programmatic Instruction Following ($\operatorname{PIF}$) metric to measure the fraction of the instructions that are correctly followed while performing a reasoning task. The $\operatorname{PIF-N-K}$ set of metrics further evaluates robustness by measuring the fraction of samples in a corpus where, for each sample, at least K out of N generated model responses achieve a $\operatorname{PIF}$ score of one. The $\operatorname{PIF}$ metric aligns with human instruction following ratings, showing 60 percent correlation. Experiments show Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, have a $\operatorname{PIF}$ metric that drops from 0.81 on average at turn 1 across the models, to 0.64 at turn 20. Across all turns, when each response is repeated 4 times ($\operatorname{PIF-4-4}$), GPT-4o and Gemini successfully follow all instructions only $11\%$ of the time. When all the instructions are also appended to the end of the model input context, the $\operatorname{PIF}$ metric improves by 22.3 points on average, showing that the challenge with the task lies not only in following the instructions, but also in retrieving the instructions spread out in the model context. We plan to open source the MMMT-IF dataset and metric computation code.
Authors: Georgios Feretzakis, Vassilios S. Verykios
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing (NLP) by enabling robust text generation and understanding. However, their deployment in sensitive domains like healthcare, finance, and legal services raises critical concerns about privacy and data security. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for embedding trust mechanisms into LLMs to dynamically control the disclosure of sensitive information. The framework integrates three core components: User Trust Profiling, Information Sensitivity Detection, and Adaptive Output Control. By leveraging techniques such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), Named Entity Recognition (NER), contextual analysis, and privacy-preserving methods like differential privacy, the system ensures that sensitive information is disclosed appropriately based on the user's trust level. By focusing on balancing data utility and privacy, the proposed solution offers a novel approach to securely deploying LLMs in high-risk environments. Future work will focus on testing this framework across various domains to evaluate its effectiveness in managing sensitive data while maintaining system efficiency.
Authors: Yuexing Hao, Jason M. Holmes, Jared Hobson, Alexandra Bennett, Daniel K. Ebner, David M. Routman, Satomi Shiraishi, Samir H. Patel, Nathan Y. Yu, Chris L. Hallemeier, Brooke E. Ball, Mark R. Waddle, Wei Liu
Abstract: In-basket message interactions play a crucial role in physician-patient communication, occurring during all phases (pre-, during, and post) of a patient's care journey. However, responding to these patients' inquiries has become a significant burden on healthcare workflows, consuming considerable time for clinical care teams. To address this, we introduce RadOnc-GPT, a specialized Large Language Model (LLM) powered by GPT-4 that has been designed with a focus on radiotherapeutic treatment of prostate cancer with advanced prompt engineering, and specifically designed to assist in generating responses. We integrated RadOnc-GPT with patient electronic health records (EHR) from both the hospital-wide EHR database and an internal, radiation-oncology-specific database. RadOnc-GPT was evaluated on 158 previously recorded in-basket message interactions. Quantitative natural language processing (NLP) analysis and two grading studies with clinicians and nurses were used to assess RadOnc-GPT's responses. Our findings indicate that RadOnc-GPT slightly outperformed the clinical care team in "Clarity" and "Empathy," while achieving comparable scores in "Completeness" and "Correctness." RadOnc-GPT is estimated to save 5.2 minutes per message for nurses and 2.4 minutes for clinicians, from reading the inquiry to sending the response. Employing RadOnc-GPT for in-basket message draft generation has the potential to alleviate the workload of clinical care teams and reduce healthcare costs by producing high-quality, timely responses.
Authors: Chuang Niu, Parisa Kaviani, Qing Lyu, Mannudeep K. Kalra, Christopher T. Whitlow, Ge Wang
Abstract: Structured radiology reporting is advantageous for optimizing clinical workflows and patient outcomes. Current LLMs in creating structured reports face the challenges of formatting errors, content hallucinations, and privacy leakage concerns when uploaded to external servers. We aim to develop an enhanced open-source LLM for creating structured and standardized LCS reports from free-text descriptions. After institutional IRB approvals, 5,442 de-identified LCS reports from two institutions were retrospectively analyzed. 500 reports were randomly selected from the two institutions evenly and then manually labeled for evaluation. Two radiologists from the two institutions developed a standardized template including 29 features for lung nodule reporting. We proposed template-constrained decoding to enhance state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, including LLAMA, Qwen, and Mistral. The LLM performance was extensively evaluated in terms of F1 score, confidence interval, McNemar test, and z-test. Based on the structured reports created from the large-scale dataset, a nodule-level retrieval system was prototyped and an automatic statistical analysis was performed. Our software, vLLM-structure, is publicly available for local deployment with enhanced LLMs. Our template-constrained decoding approach consistently enhanced the LLM performance on multi-institutional datasets, with neither formatting errors nor content hallucinations. Our method improved the best open-source LLAMA-3.1 405B by up to 10.42%, and outperformed GPT-4o by 17.19%. A novel nodule retrieval system was successfully prototyped and demonstrated on a large-scale multimodal database using our enhanced LLM technologies. The automatically derived statistical distributions were closely consistent with the prior findings in terms of nodule type, location, size, status, and Lung-RADS.
Authors: Theo Gregersen, Pratyush Patel, Esha Choukse
Abstract: GPUs are known to be power-hungry, and due to the boom in artificial intelligence, they are currently the major contributors to the high power demands of upcoming datacenters. Most GPU usage in these popular workloads consist of large general matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMMs), which have therefore been optimized to achieve high utilization of hardware resources. In this work, we show that modifying the input data to GEMMs, while maintaining the matrix shapes and sizes can notably change the power consumption of these kernels. We experiment with four kinds of input variations: value distribution, bit similarity, placement, and sparsity, across different data types. Our findings indicate that these variations can change the GPU power usage during GEMM by almost 40%. We hypothesize that input-dependent power usage variations occur due to changes in the number of bit flips in the GPUs. We propose leveraging this property through compiler and scheduler optimizations to manage power and reduce energy consumption.
Authors: Ryan Shea, Zhou Yu
Abstract: Despite recent advancements in AI and NLP, negotiation remains a difficult domain for AI agents. Traditional game theoretic approaches that have worked well for two-player zero-sum games struggle in the context of negotiation due to their inability to learn human-compatible strategies. On the other hand, approaches that only use human data tend to be domain-specific and lack the theoretical guarantees provided by strategies grounded in game theory. Motivated by the notion of fairness as a criterion for optimality in general sum games, we propose a negotiation framework called FDHC which incorporates fairness into both the reward design and search to learn human-compatible negotiation strategies. Our method includes a novel, RL+search technique called LGM-Zero which leverages a pre-trained language model to retrieve human-compatible offers from large action spaces. Our results show that our method is able to achieve more egalitarian negotiation outcomes and improve negotiation quality.
Authors: Zhenghao Peng, Wenjie Luo, Yiren Lu, Tianyi Shen, Cole Gulino, Ari Seff, Justin Fu
Abstract: A major challenge in autonomous vehicle research is modeling agent behaviors, which has critical applications including constructing realistic and reliable simulations for off-board evaluation and forecasting traffic agents motion for onboard planning. While supervised learning has shown success in modeling agents across various domains, these models can suffer from distribution shift when deployed at test-time. In this work, we improve the reliability of agent behaviors by closed-loop fine-tuning of behavior models with reinforcement learning. Our method demonstrates improved overall performance, as well as improved targeted metrics such as collision rate, on the Waymo Open Sim Agents challenge. Additionally, we present a novel policy evaluation benchmark to directly assess the ability of simulated agents to measure the quality of autonomous vehicle planners and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on this new benchmark.
Authors: Lei Li, Zhifa Chen, Jian Wang, Bin Zhou, Guizhen Yu, Xiaoxuan Chen
Abstract: Recently, the application of autonomous driving in open-pit mining has garnered increasing attention for achieving safe and efficient mineral transportation. Compared to urban structured roads, unstructured roads in mining sites have uneven boundaries and lack clearly defined lane markings. This leads to a lack of sufficient constraint information for predicting the trajectories of other human-driven vehicles, resulting in higher uncertainty in trajectory prediction problems. A method is proposed to predict multiple possible trajectories and their probabilities of the target vehicle. The surrounding environment and historical trajectories of the target vehicle are encoded as a rasterized image, which is used as input to our deep convolutional network to predict the target vehicle's multiple possible trajectories. The method underwent offline testing on a dataset specifically designed for autonomous driving scenarios in open-pit mining and was compared and evaluated against physics-based method. The open-source code and data are available at https://github.com/LLsxyc/mine_motion_prediction.git
Authors: Chinthaka Ranasingha, Harshala Gammulle, Tharindu Fernando, Sridha Sridharan, Clinton Fookes
Abstract: Early diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an effective and favorable step towards enhancing the health and well-being of children with ASD. Manual ASD diagnosis testing is labor-intensive, complex, and prone to human error due to several factors contaminating the results. This paper proposes a novel framework that exploits the laws of physics for ASD severity recognition. The proposed physics-informed neural network architecture encodes the behaviour of the subject extracted by observing a part of the skeleton-based motion trajectory in a higher dimensional latent space. Two decoders, namely physics-based and non-physics-based decoder, use this latent embedding and predict the future motion patterns. The physics branch leverages the laws of physics that apply to a skeleton sequence in the prediction process while the non-physics-based branch is optimised to minimise the difference between the predicted and actual motion of the subject. A classifier also leverages the same latent space embeddings to recognise the ASD severity. This dual generative objective explicitly forces the network to compare the actual behaviour of the subject with the general normal behaviour of children that are governed by the laws of physics, aiding the ASD recognition task. The proposed method attains state-of-the-art performance on multiple ASD diagnosis benchmarks. To illustrate the utility of the proposed framework beyond the task ASD diagnosis, we conduct a third experiment using a publicly available benchmark for the task of fall prediction and demonstrate the superiority of our model.
Authors: Ya Shen, Gang Chen, Hui Ma, Mengjie Zhang
Abstract: The Cost-aware Dynamic Multi-Workflow Scheduling (CDMWS) in the cloud is a kind of cloud workflow management problem, which aims to assign virtual machine (VM) instances to execute tasks in workflows so as to minimize the total costs, including both the penalties for violating Service Level Agreement (SLA) and the VM rental fees. Powered by deep neural networks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods can construct effective scheduling policies for solving CDMWS problems. Traditional policy networks in RL often use basic feedforward architectures to separately determine the suitability of assigning any VM instances, without considering all VMs simultaneously to learn their global information. This paper proposes a novel self-attention policy network for cloud workflow scheduling (SPN-CWS) that captures global information from all VMs. We also develop an Evolution Strategy-based RL (ERL) system to train SPN-CWS reliably and effectively. The trained SPN-CWS can effectively process all candidate VM instances simultaneously to identify the most suitable VM instance to execute every workflow task. Comprehensive experiments show that our method can noticeably outperform several state-of-the-art algorithms on multiple benchmark CDMWS problems.
Authors: Jeevana Priya Inala, Chenglong Wang, Steven Drucker, Gonzalo Ramos, Victor Dibia, Nathalie Riche, Dave Brown, Dan Marshall, Jianfeng Gao
Abstract: This paper explores the potential of AI-powered tools to reshape data analysis, focusing on design considerations and challenges. We explore how the emergence of large language and multimodal models offers new opportunities to enhance various stages of data analysis workflow by translating high-level user intentions into executable code, charts, and insights. We then examine human-centered design principles that facilitate intuitive interactions, build user trust, and streamline the AI-assisted analysis workflow across multiple apps. Finally, we discuss the research challenges that impede the development of these AI-based systems such as enhancing model capabilities, evaluating and benchmarking, and understanding end-user needs.
Authors: Hongzhe Huang, Zhewen Yu, Jiang Liu, Li Cai, Dian Jiao, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang, Juncheng Li, Hao Jiang, Haoyuan Li, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently introduce significant variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel instruction curation algorithm, derived from two unique perspectives, human and LLM preference alignment, to compress this vast corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions to a compact and high-quality form: (i) For human preference alignment, we have collected a machine-generated multimodal instruction dataset and established a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria to guide the data quality assessment critically from human experts. By doing so, a reward model was trained on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of instruction alignment. (ii) For LLM preference alignment, given the instruction selected by the reward model, we propose leveraging the inner LLM used in MLLM to align the writing style of visual instructions with that of the inner LLM itself, resulting in LLM-aligned instruction improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can maintain or even improve model performance by compressing synthetic multimodal instructions by up to 90%. Impressively, by aggressively reducing the total training sample size from 158k to 14k (9$\times$ smaller), our model consistently outperforms its full-size dataset counterpart across various MLLM benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/Align2LLaVA.
Authors: Nurul Ain Nabilah Mohd Isa, Siti Nuraishah Agos Jawaddi, Azlan Ismail
Abstract: Integrating machine learning (ML) into customer service chatbots enhances their ability to understand and respond to user queries, ultimately improving service performance. However, they may appear artificial to some users and affecting customer experience. Hence, meticulous evaluation of ML models for each pipeline component is crucial for optimizing performance, though differences in functionalities can lead to unfair comparisons. In this paper, we present a tailored experimental evaluation approach for goal-oriented customer service chatbots with pipeline architecture, focusing on three key components: Natural Language Understanding (NLU), dialogue management (DM), and Natural Language Generation (NLG). Our methodology emphasizes individual assessment to determine optimal ML models. Specifically, we focus on optimizing hyperparameters and evaluating candidate models for NLU (utilizing BERT and LSTM), DM (employing DQN and DDQN), and NLG (leveraging GPT-2 and DialoGPT). The results show that for the NLU component, BERT excelled in intent detection whereas LSTM was superior for slot filling. For the DM component, the DDQN model outperformed DQN by achieving fewer turns, higher rewards, as well as greater success rates. For NLG, the large language model GPT-2 surpassed DialoGPT in BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE metrics. These findings aim to provide a benchmark for future research in developing and optimizing customer service chatbots, offering valuable insights into model performance and optimal hyperparameters.
Authors: Ricardo Knauer, Mario Koddenbrock, Raphael Wallsberger, Nicholas M. Brisson, Georg N. Duda, Deborah Falla, David W. Evans, Erik Rodner
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) provide powerful means to leverage prior knowledge for predictive modeling when data is limited. In this work, we demonstrate how LLMs can use their compressed world knowledge to generate intrinsically interpretable machine learning models, i.e., decision trees, without any training data. We find that these zero-shot decision trees can surpass data-driven trees on some small-sized tabular datasets and that embeddings derived from these trees perform on par with data-driven tree-based embeddings on average. Our knowledge-driven decision tree induction and embedding approaches therefore serve as strong new baselines for data-driven machine learning methods in the low-data regime.
Authors: G\'er\^ome Meyer, Philip Breuer, Jonathan F\"urst
Abstract: Open-ended questions test a more thorough understanding than closed-ended questions and are often a preferred assessment method. However, open-ended questions are tedious to grade and subject to personal bias. Therefore, there have been efforts to speed up the grading process through automation. Short Answer Grading (SAG) systems aim to automatically score students' answers. Despite growth in SAG methods and capabilities, there exists no comprehensive short-answer grading benchmark across different subjects, grading scales, and distributions. Thus, it is hard to assess the capabilities of current automated grading methods in terms of their generalizability. In this preliminary work, we introduce the combined ASAG2024 benchmark to facilitate the comparison of automated grading systems. Combining seven commonly used short-answer grading datasets in a common structure and grading scale. For our benchmark, we evaluate a set of recent SAG methods, revealing that while LLM-based approaches reach new high scores, they still are far from reaching human performance. This opens up avenues for future research on human-machine SAG systems.
Authors: Alfredo Ibias, Hector Antona, Guillem Ramirez-Miranda, Enric Guinovart, Eduard Alarcon
Abstract: Unsupervised learning methods have a soft inspiration in cognition models. To this day, the most successful unsupervised learning methods revolve around clustering samples in a mathematical space. In this paper we propose a state-of-the-art primitive-based unsupervised learning approach for decision-making inspired by novel cognition models. This representation-centric approach models the input space constructively as a distributed hierarchical structure in an input-agnostic way. We compared our approach with current state-of-the-art in unsupervised learning classification, and with current state-of-the-art in cancer type classification. We show how our proposal outperforms previous state-of-the-art. We also evaluate some cognition-like properties of our proposal where it not only outperforms the compared algorithms (even supervised learning ones), but it also shows a different, more cognition-like, behaviour.
Authors: Milo Roucairol, Tristan Cazenave
Abstract: We are interested in the automatic refutation of spectral graph theory conjectures. Most existing works address this problem either with the exhaustive generation of graphs with a limited size or with deep reinforcement learning. Exhaustive generation is limited by the size of the generated graphs and deep reinforcement learning takes hours or days to refute a conjecture. We propose to use search algorithms to address these shortcomings to find potentially large counter-examples to spectral graph theory conjectures in seconds. We apply a wide range of search algorithms to a selection of conjectures from Graffiti. Out of 13 already refuted conjectures from Graffiti, our algorithms are able to refute 12 in seconds. We also refute conjecture 197 from Graffiti which was open until now.
Authors: Alfredo Ibias, Hector Antona, Guillem Ramirez-Miranda, Enric Guinovart, Eduard Alarcon
Abstract: The Artificial Intelligence field seldom address the development of a fundamental building piece: a framework, methodology or algorithm to automatically build hierarchies of abstractions. This is a key requirement in order to build intelligent behaviour, as recent neuroscience studies clearly expose. In this paper we present a primitive-based framework to automatically generate hierarchies of constructive archetypes, as a theory of how to generate hierarchies of abstractions. We assume the existence of a primitive with very specific characteristics, and we develop our framework over it. We prove the effectiveness of our framework through mathematical definitions and proofs. Finally, we give a few insights about potential uses of our framework and the expected results.
Authors: Eddie Antonio Santos, Brett A. Becker
Abstract: The sudden emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has had a disruptive impact throughout the computing education community. LLMs have been shown to excel at producing correct code to CS1 and CS2 problems, and can even act as friendly assistants to students learning how to code. Recent work shows that LLMs demonstrate unequivocally superior results in being able to explain and resolve compiler error messages -- for decades, one of the most frustrating parts of learning how to code. However, LLM-generated error message explanations have only been assessed by expert programmers in artificial conditions. This work sought to understand how novice programmers resolve programming error messages (PEMs) in a more realistic scenario. We ran a within-subjects study with $n$ = 106 participants in which students were tasked to fix six buggy C programs. For each program, participants were randomly assigned to fix the problem using either a stock compiler error message, an expert-handwritten error message, or an error message explanation generated by GPT-4. Despite promising evidence on synthetic benchmarks, we found that GPT-4 generated error messages outperformed conventional compiler error messages in only 1 of the 6 tasks, measured by students' time-to-fix each problem. Handwritten explanations still outperform LLM and conventional error messages, both on objective and subjective measures.
Authors: Lancelot Da Costa
Abstract: We introduce a generic, compositional and interpretable class of generative world models that supports open-ended learning agents. This is a sparse class of Bayesian networks capable of approximating a broad range of stochastic processes, which provide agents with the ability to learn world models in a manner that may be both interpretable and computationally scalable. This approach integrating Bayesian structure learning and intrinsically motivated (model-based) planning enables agents to actively develop and refine their world models, which may lead to open-ended learning and more robust, adaptive behavior.
Authors: Weichen Dai, Yezeng Chen, Zijie Dai, Zhijie Huang, Yubo Liu, Yixuan Pan, Baiyang Song, Chengli Zhong, Xinhe Li, Zeyu Wang, Zhuoying Feng, Yi Zhou
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is gradually demonstrating its immense potential, and increasing attention is being given to how AI can be harnessed to advance scientific research. In this vision paper, we present our perspectives on how AI can better assist scientific inquiry and explore corresponding technical approach. We have proposed and open-sourced a large model of our KALE-LM model series, Llama3-KALE-LM-Chem-8B, which has achieved outstanding performance in tasks related to the field of chemistry. We hope that our work serves as a strong starting point, helping to realize more intelligent AI and promoting the advancement of human science and technology, as well as societal development.
Authors: Haotai Liang, Mengran Shi, Chen Dong, Xiaodong Xu, Long Liu, Hao Chen
Abstract: The key feature of model-driven semantic communication is the propagation of the model. The semantic model component (SMC) is designed to drive the intelligent model to transmit in the physical channel, allowing the intelligence to flow through the networks. According to the characteristics of neural networks with common and individual model parameters, this paper designs the cross-source-domain and cross-task semantic component model. Considering that the basic model is deployed on the edge node, the large server node updates the edge node by transmitting only the semantic component model to the edge node so that the edge node can handle different sources and different tasks. In addition, this paper also discusses how channel noise affects the performance of the model and proposes methods of injection noise and regularization to improve the noise resistance of the model. Experiments show that SMCs use smaller model parameters to achieve cross-source, cross-task functionality while maintaining performance and improving the model's tolerance to noise. Finally, a component transfer-based unmanned vehicle tracking prototype was implemented to verify the feasibility of model components in practical applications.
Authors: David Winkel, Niklas Strau{\ss}, Maximilian Bernhard, Zongyue Li, Thomas Seidl, Matthias Schubert
Abstract: Allocation tasks represent a class of problems where a limited amount of resources must be allocated to a set of entities at each time step. Prominent examples of this task include portfolio optimization or distributing computational workloads across servers. Allocation tasks are typically bound by linear constraints describing practical requirements that have to be strictly fulfilled at all times. In portfolio optimization, for example, investors may be obligated to allocate less than 30\% of the funds into a certain industrial sector in any investment period. Such constraints restrict the action space of allowed allocations in intricate ways, which makes learning a policy that avoids constraint violations difficult. In this paper, we propose a new method for constrained allocation tasks based on an autoregressive process to sequentially sample allocations for each entity. In addition, we introduce a novel de-biasing mechanism to counter the initial bias caused by sequential sampling. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to a variety of Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) methods on three distinct constrained allocation tasks: portfolio optimization, computational workload distribution, and a synthetic allocation benchmark. Our code is available at: https://github.com/niklasdbs/paspo
Authors: Peter David Fagan, Subramanian Ramamoorthy
Abstract: Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a useful paradigm for training policies that solve tasks involving complex motions. In practice, the successful application of LfD requires overcoming error accumulation during policy execution, i.e. the problem of drift due to errors compounding over time and the consequent out-of-distribution behaviours. Existing works seek to address this problem through scaling data collection, correcting policy errors with a human-in-the-loop, temporally ensembling policy predictions or through learning the parameters of a dynamical system model. In this work, we propose and validate an alternative approach to overcoming this issue. Inspired by reservoir computing, we develop a novel neural network layer that includes a fixed nonlinear dynamical system with tunable dynamical properties. We validate the efficacy of our neural network layer on the task of reproducing human handwriting motions using the LASA Human Handwriting Dataset. Through empirical experiments we demonstrate that incorporating our layer into existing neural network architectures addresses the issue of compounding errors in LfD. Furthermore, we perform a comparative evaluation against existing approaches including a temporal ensemble of policy predictions and an Echo State Networks (ESNs) implementation. We find that our approach yields greater policy precision and robustness on the handwriting task while also generalising to multiple dynamics regimes and maintaining competitive latency scores.
Authors: Zhuocheng Shen
Abstract: The integration of tools in augmenting large language models presents a novel approach toward enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of these models in handling specific, complex tasks. This paper delves into the methodology,challenges, and developments in the realm of teaching LLMs to use external tools, thereby pushing the boundaries of their capabilities beyond pre-existing knowledge bases. We introduce a standardized paradigm for tool integration guided by a series of functions that map user instructions to actionable plans and their execution, emphasizing the significance of understanding user intent, tool selection, and dynamic plan adjustment. Our exploration reveals the various challenges encountered, such as tool invocation timing, selection accuracy, and the need for robust reasoning processes. In addressing these challenges, we investigate techniques within the context of fine-tuning and incontext learning paradigms, highlighting innovative approaches to ensure diversity, augment datasets, and improve generalization.Furthermore, we investigate a perspective on enabling LLMs to not only utilize but also autonomously create tools, which may redefine their role from mere tool users to tool creators. Finally,we reproduced Chameleon's results on ScienceQA and analyzed the code structure.
Authors: Hyeong Kyu Choi, Weijie Xu, Chi Xue, Stephanie Eckman, Chandan K. Reddy
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often show unwarranted preference for certain choice options when responding to multiple-choice questions, posing significant reliability concerns in LLM-automated systems. To mitigate this selection bias problem, previous solutions utilized debiasing methods to adjust the model's input and/or output. Our work, in contrast, investigates the model's internal representation of the selection bias. Specifically, we introduce a novel debiasing approach, Bias Node Pruning (BNP), which eliminates the linear layer parameters that contribute to the bias. Furthermore, we present Auxiliary Option Injection (AOI), a simple yet effective input modification technique for debiasing, which is compatible even with black-box LLMs. To provide a more systematic evaluation of selection bias, we review existing metrics and introduce Choice Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CKLD), which addresses the insensitivity of the commonly used metrics to label imbalance. Experiments show that our methods are robust and adaptable across various datasets when applied to three LLMs.
Authors: Chuang Chen, Xiao Sun, Zhi Liu
Abstract: Visual emotion analysis holds significant research value in both computer vision and psychology. However, existing methods for visual emotion analysis suffer from limited generalizability due to the ambiguity of emotion perception and the diversity of data scenarios. To tackle this issue, we introduce UniEmoX, a cross-modal semantic-guided large-scale pretraining framework. Inspired by psychological research emphasizing the inseparability of the emotional exploration process from the interaction between individuals and their environment, UniEmoX integrates scene-centric and person-centric low-level image spatial structural information, aiming to derive more nuanced and discriminative emotional representations. By exploiting the similarity between paired and unpaired image-text samples, UniEmoX distills rich semantic knowledge from the CLIP model to enhance emotional embedding representations more effectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale pretraining framework that integrates psychological theories with contemporary contrastive learning and masked image modeling techniques for emotion analysis across diverse scenarios. Additionally, we develop a visual emotional dataset titled Emo8. Emo8 samples cover a range of domains, including cartoon, natural, realistic, science fiction and advertising cover styles, covering nearly all common emotional scenes. Comprehensive experiments conducted on six benchmark datasets across two downstream tasks validate the effectiveness of UniEmoX. The source code is available at https://github.com/chincharles/u-emo.
Authors: Seungcheol Shin, Myungjoo Kang
Abstract: In this paper, we define the sum of RKBSs using the characterization theorem of RKBSs and show that the sum of RKBSs is compatible with the direct sum of feature spaces. Moreover, we decompose the integral RKBS into the sum of $p$-norm RKBSs. Finally, we provide applications for the structural understanding of the integral RKBS class.
Authors: Biplov Paneru, Bishwash Paneru
Abstract: The combination of large language models (LLMs), augmented reality (AR), and user interface/user experience (UI/UX) design in therapies for children, especially with disorders like autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is examined in this review study. 150 publications were found by a thorough literature search throughout PubMed, ACM, IEEE Xplore, Elsevier, and Google Scholar; 42 of them were chosen for in-depth study due to their methodological rigor and relevance. Three primary areas are covered in this review: how AR can improve social and learning results; how LLMs can help with communication; and how UI/UX design affects how effective these technologies are. Results reveal that while LLMs can provide individualized learning and communication support, AR has demonstrated promise in enhancing social skills, motivation, and attention. For children with ASD, accessible and interesting interventions depend heavily on effective UI/UX design. To optimize the benefits of these technologies in ASD therapies, the study emphasizes the need for additional research to address difficulties related to customization, accessibility, and integration.
Authors: Wenzhu Shao
Abstract: The automation of feature extraction of machine learning has been successfully realized by the explosive development of deep learning. However, the structures and hyperparameters of deep neural network architectures also make huge difference on the performance in different tasks. The process of exploring optimal structures and hyperparameters often involves a lot of tedious human intervene. As a result, a legitimate question is to ask for the automation of searching for optimal network structures and hyperparameters. The work of automation of exploring optimal hyperparameters is done by Hyperparameter Optimization. Neural Architecture Search is aimed to automatically find the best network structure given specific tasks. In this paper, we firstly introduced the overall development of Neural Architecture Search and then focus mainly on providing an overall and understandable survey about Neural Architecture Search works that are relevant with reinforcement learning, including improvements and variants based on the hope of satisfying more complex structures and resource-insufficient environment.
Authors: Tiansheng Huang, Sihao Hu, Fatih Ilhan, Selim Furkan Tekin, Ling Liu
Abstract: Recent research demonstrates that the nascent fine-tuning-as-a-service business model exposes serious safety concerns -- fine-tuning over a few harmful data uploaded by the users can compromise the safety alignment of the model. The attack, known as harmful fine-tuning, has raised a broad research interest among the community. However, as the attack is still new, \textbf{we observe from our miserable submission experience that there are general misunderstandings within the research community.} We in this paper aim to clear some common concerns for the attack setting, and formally establish the research problem. Specifically, we first present the threat model of the problem, and introduce the harmful fine-tuning attack and its variants. Then we systematically survey the existing literature on attacks/defenses/mechanical analysis of the problem. Finally, we outline future research directions that might contribute to the development of the field. Additionally, we present a list of questions of interest, which might be useful to refer to when reviewers in the peer review process question the realism of the experiment/attack/defense setting. A curated list of relevant papers is maintained and made accessible at: \url{https://github.com/git-disl/awesome_LLM-harmful-fine-tuning-papers.}
URLs: https://github.com/git-disl/awesome_LLM-harmful-fine-tuning-papers.
Authors: Emma Croxford, Yanjun Gao, Nicholas Pellegrino, Karen K. Wong, Graham Wills, Elliot First, Frank J. Liao, Cherodeep Goswami, Brian Patterson, Majid Afshar
Abstract: Large Language Models have advanced clinical Natural Language Generation, creating opportunities to manage the volume of medical text. However, the high-stakes nature of medicine requires reliable evaluation, which remains a challenge. In this narrative review, we assess the current evaluation state for clinical summarization tasks and propose future directions to address the resource constraints of expert human evaluation.
Authors: Michelle S. Lam, Fred Hohman, Dominik Moritz, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Kenneth Holstein, Mary Beth Kery
Abstract: Whether a large language model policy is an explicit constitution or an implicit reward model, it is challenging to assess coverage over the unbounded set of real-world situations that a policy must contend with. We introduce an AI policy design process inspired by mapmaking, which has developed tactics for visualizing and iterating on maps even when full coverage is not possible. With Policy Projector, policy designers can survey the landscape of model input-output pairs, define custom regions (e.g., "violence"), and navigate these regions with rules that can be applied to LLM outputs (e.g., if output contains "violence" and "graphic details," then rewrite without "graphic details"). Policy Projector supports interactive policy authoring using LLM classification and steering and a map visualization reflecting the policy designer's work. In an evaluation with 12 AI safety experts, our system helps policy designers to address problematic model behaviors extending beyond an existing, comprehensive harm taxonomy.
Authors: Jongseo Lee, Geo Ahn, Jinwoo Choi, Seongtae Kim
Abstract: For automatic human figure drawing (HFD) assessment tasks, such as diagnosing autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using HFD images, the clarity and explainability of a model decision are crucial. Existing pixel-level attribution-based explainable AI (XAI) approaches demand considerable effort from users to interpret the semantic information of a region in an image, which can be often time-consuming and impractical. To overcome this challenge, we propose a part contribution evaluation based model explanation (PCEvE) framework. On top of the part detection, we measure the Shapley Value of each individual part to evaluate the contribution to a model decision. Unlike existing attribution-based XAI approaches, the PCEvE provides a straightforward explanation of a model decision, i.e., a part contribution histogram. Furthermore, the PCEvE expands the scope of explanations beyond the conventional sample-level to include class-level and task-level insights, offering a richer, more comprehensive understanding of model behavior. We rigorously validate the PCEvE via extensive experiments on multiple HFD assessment datasets. Also, we sanity-check the proposed method with a set of controlled experiments. Additionally, we demonstrate the versatility and applicability of our method to other domains by applying it to a photo-realistic dataset, the Stanford Cars.
Authors: Mengchen Zhang, Tong Wu, Tai Wang, Tengfei Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin
Abstract: 6D object pose estimation aims at determining an object's translation, rotation, and scale, typically from a single RGBD image. Recent advancements have expanded this estimation from instance-level to category-level, allowing models to generalize across unseen instances within the same category. However, this generalization is limited by the narrow range of categories covered by existing datasets, such as NOCS, which also tend to overlook common real-world challenges like occlusion. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Omni6D, a comprehensive RGBD dataset featuring a wide range of categories and varied backgrounds, elevating the task to a more realistic context. 1) The dataset comprises an extensive spectrum of 166 categories, 4688 instances adjusted to the canonical pose, and over 0.8 million captures, significantly broadening the scope for evaluation. 2) We introduce a symmetry-aware metric and conduct systematic benchmarks of existing algorithms on Omni6D, offering a thorough exploration of new challenges and insights. 3) Additionally, we propose an effective fine-tuning approach that adapts models from previous datasets to our extensive vocabulary setting. We believe this initiative will pave the way for new insights and substantial progress in both the industrial and academic fields, pushing forward the boundaries of general 6D pose estimation.
Authors: Huthaifa I. Ashqar, Ahmed Jaber, Taqwa I. Alhadidi, Mohammed Elhenawy
Abstract: This study aims to comprehensively review and empirically evaluate the application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and Large Vision Models (VLMs) in object detection for transportation systems. In the first fold, we provide a background about the potential benefits of MLLMs in transportation applications and conduct a comprehensive review of current MLLM technologies in previous studies. We highlight their effectiveness and limitations in object detection within various transportation scenarios. The second fold involves providing an overview of the taxonomy of end-to-end object detection in transportation applications and future directions. Building on this, we proposed empirical analysis for testing MLLMs on three real-world transportation problems that include object detection tasks namely, road safety attributes extraction, safety-critical event detection, and visual reasoning of thermal images. Our findings provide a detailed assessment of MLLM performance, uncovering both strengths and areas for improvement. Finally, we discuss practical limitations and challenges of MLLMs in enhancing object detection in transportation, thereby offering a roadmap for future research and development in this critical area.
Authors: Alexander Grushin, Walt Woods, Alvaro Velasquez, Simon Khan
Abstract: State of the art reinforcement learning methods sometimes encounter unsafe situations. Identifying when these situations occur is of interest both for post-hoc analysis and during deployment, where it might be advantageous to call out to a human overseer for help. Efforts to gauge the criticality of different points in time have been developed, but their accuracy is not well established due to a lack of ground truth, and they are not designed to be easily interpretable by end users. Therefore, we seek to define a criticality framework with both a quantifiable ground truth and a clear significance to users. We introduce true criticality as the expected drop in reward when an agent deviates from its policy for n consecutive random actions. We also introduce the concept of proxy criticality, a low-overhead metric that has a statistically monotonic relationship to true criticality. Safety margins make these interpretable, when defined as the number of random actions for which performance loss will not exceed some tolerance with high confidence. We demonstrate this approach in several environment-agent combinations; for an A3C agent in an Atari Beamrider environment, the lowest 5% of safety margins contain 47% of agent losses; i.e., supervising only 5% of decisions could potentially prevent roughly half of an agent's errors. This criticality framework measures the potential impacts of bad decisions, even before those decisions are made, allowing for more effective debugging and oversight of autonomous agents.
Authors: Youyuan Liu, Wenqi Jia, Taolue Yang, Miao Yin, Sian Jin
Abstract: Lossy compression is one of the most effective methods for reducing the size of scientific data containing multiple data fields. It reduces information density through prediction or transformation techniques to compress the data. Previous approaches use local information from a single target field when predicting target data points, limiting their potential to achieve higher compression ratios. In this paper, we identified significant cross-field correlations within scientific datasets. We propose a novel hybrid prediction model that utilizes CNN to extract cross-field information and combine it with existing local field information. Our solution enhances the prediction accuracy of lossy compressors, leading to improved compression ratios without compromising data quality. We evaluate our solution on three scientific datasets, demonstrating its ability to improve compression ratios by up to 25% under specific error bounds. Additionally, our solution preserves more data details and reduces artifacts compared to baseline approaches.
Authors: Lipeng Zhuang, Shiyu Fan, Yingdong Ru, Florent Audonnet, Paul Henderson, Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa
Abstract: We present Flat'n'Fold, a novel large-scale dataset for garment manipulation that addresses critical gaps in existing datasets. Comprising 1,212 human and 887 robot demonstrations of flattening and folding 44 unique garments across 8 categories, Flat'n'Fold surpasses prior datasets in size, scope, and diversity. Our dataset uniquely captures the entire manipulation process from crumpled to folded states, providing synchronized multi-view RGB-D images, point clouds, and action data, including hand or gripper positions and rotations. We quantify the dataset's diversity and complexity compared to existing benchmarks and show that our dataset features natural and diverse manipulations of real-world demonstrations of human and robot demonstrations in terms of visual and action information. To showcase Flat'n'Fold's utility, we establish new benchmarks for grasping point prediction and subtask decomposition. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models on these tasks reveals significant room for improvement. This underscores Flat'n'Fold's potential to drive advances in robotic perception and manipulation of deformable objects. Our dataset can be downloaded at https://cvas-ug.github.io/flat-n-fold
Authors: Ruiqi Xian, Xiyang Wu, Tianrui Guan, Xijun Wang, Boqing Gong, Dinesh Manocha
Abstract: We introduce SOAR, a novel Self-supervised pretraining algorithm for aerial footage captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). We incorporate human object knowledge throughout the pretraining process to enhance UAV video pretraining efficiency and downstream action recognition performance. This is in contrast to prior works that primarily incorporate object information during the fine-tuning stage. Specifically, we first propose a novel object-aware masking strategy designed to retain the visibility of certain patches related to objects throughout the pretraining phase. Second, we introduce an object-aware loss function that utilizes object information to adjust the reconstruction loss, preventing bias towards less informative background patches. In practice, SOAR with a vanilla ViT backbone, outperforms best UAV action recognition models, recording a 9.7% and 21.4% boost in top-1 accuracy on the NEC-Drone and UAV-Human datasets, while delivering an inference speed of 18.7ms per video, making it 2x to 5x faster. Additionally, SOAR obtains comparable accuracy to prior self-supervised learning (SSL) methods while requiring 87.5% less pretraining time and 25% less memory usage
Authors: Lalith Bharadwaj Baru, Shilhora Akshay Patel, Rohit Boddeda
Abstract: The evolution of digital image manipulation, particularly with the advancement of deep generative models, significantly challenges existing deepfake detection methods, especially when the origin of the deepfake is obscure. To tackle the increasing complexity of these forgeries, we propose \textbf{Wavelet-CLIP}, a deepfake detection framework that integrates wavelet transforms with features derived from the ViT-L/14 architecture, pre-trained in the CLIP fashion. Wavelet-CLIP utilizes Wavelet Transforms to deeply analyze both spatial and frequency features from images, thus enhancing the model's capability to detect sophisticated deepfakes. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive evaluations against existing state-of-the-art methods for cross-dataset generalization and detection of unseen images generated by standard diffusion models. Our method showcases outstanding performance, achieving an average AUC of 0.749 for cross-data generalization and 0.893 for robustness against unseen deepfakes, outperforming all compared methods. The code can be reproduced from the repo: \url{https://github.com/lalithbharadwajbaru/Wavelet-CLIP}
Authors: Quanting Xie, So Yeon Min, Tianyi Zhang, Aarav Bajaj, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Yonatan Bisk
Abstract: There is no limit to how much a robot might explore and learn, but all of that knowledge needs to be searchable and actionable. Within language research, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has become the workhouse of large-scale non-parametric knowledge, however existing techniques do not directly transfer to the embodied domain, which is multimodal, data is highly correlated, and perception requires abstraction. To address these challenges, we introduce Embodied-RAG, a framework that enhances the foundational model of an embodied agent with a non-parametric memory system capable of autonomously constructing hierarchical knowledge for both navigation and language generation. Embodied-RAG handles a full range of spatial and semantic resolutions across diverse environments and query types, whether for a specific object or a holistic description of ambiance. At its core, Embodied-RAG's memory is structured as a semantic forest, storing language descriptions at varying levels of detail. This hierarchical organization allows the system to efficiently generate context-sensitive outputs across different robotic platforms. We demonstrate that Embodied-RAG effectively bridges RAG to the robotics domain, successfully handling over 200 explanation and navigation queries across 19 environments, highlighting its promise for general-purpose non-parametric system for embodied agents.
Authors: Xin Hong, Yuan Gong, Vidhyasaharan Sethu, Ting Dang
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great success in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In addition to their cognitive intelligence, exploring their capabilities in emotional intelligence is also crucial, as it enables more natural and empathetic conversational AI. Recent studies have shown LLMs' capability in recognizing emotions, but they often focus on single emotion labels and overlook the complex and ambiguous nature of human emotions. This study is the first to address this gap by exploring the potential of LLMs in recognizing ambiguous emotions, leveraging their strong generalization capabilities and in-context learning. We design zero-shot and few-shot prompting and incorporate past dialogue as context information for ambiguous emotion recognition. Experiments conducted using three datasets indicate significant potential for LLMs in recognizing ambiguous emotions, and highlight the substantial benefits of including context information. Furthermore, our findings indicate that LLMs demonstrate a high degree of effectiveness in recognizing less ambiguous emotions and exhibit potential for identifying more ambiguous emotions, paralleling human perceptual capabilities.
Authors: Hui Lin, Florian Schiffers, Santiago L\'opez-Tapia, Neda Tavakoli, Daniel Kim, Aggelos K. Katsaggelos
Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is essential for medical image segmentation, especially in cross-modality data scenarios. UDA aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, thereby reducing the dependency on extensive manual annotations. This paper presents DRL-STNet, a novel framework for cross-modality medical image segmentation that leverages generative adversarial networks (GANs), disentangled representation learning (DRL), and self-training (ST). Our method leverages DRL within a GAN to translate images from the source to the target modality. Then, the segmentation model is initially trained with these translated images and corresponding source labels and then fine-tuned iteratively using a combination of synthetic and real images with pseudo-labels and real labels. The proposed framework exhibits superior performance in abdominal organ segmentation on the FLARE challenge dataset, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by 11.4% in the Dice similarity coefficient and by 13.1% in the Normalized Surface Dice metric, achieving scores of 74.21% and 80.69%, respectively. The average running time is 41 seconds, and the area under the GPU memory-time curve is 11,292 MB. These results indicate the potential of DRL-STNet for enhancing cross-modality medical image segmentation tasks.
Authors: Ghang Lee, Suhyung Jang, Seokho Hyun
Abstract: Performing building information modeling (BIM) tasks is a complex process that imposes a steep learning curve and a heavy cognitive load due to the necessity of remembering sequences of numerous commands. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), it is foreseeable that BIM tasks, including querying and managing BIM data, 4D and 5D BIM, design compliance checking, or authoring a design, using written or spoken natural language (i.e., text-to-BIM or speech-to-BIM), will soon supplant traditional graphical user interfaces. This paper proposes a generalized LLM-augmented BIM framework to expedite the development of LLM-enhanced BIM applications by providing a step-by-step development process. The proposed framework consists of six steps: interpret-fill-match-structure-execute-check. The paper demonstrates the applicability of the proposed framework through implementing a speech-to-BIM application, NADIA-S (Natural-language-based Architectural Detailing through Interaction with Artificial Intelligence via Speech), using exterior wall detailing as an example.
Authors: Phong Minh Vu, Tung Thanh Nguyen
Abstract: Software security incidents occur everyday and thousands of software security reports are announced each month. Thus, it is difficult for software security researchers, engineers, and other stakeholders to follow software security topics of their interests in real-time. In this paper, we propose, SOSK, a novel tool for this problem. SOSK allows a user to import a collection of software security reports. It pre-processes and extracts the most important keywords from the textual description of the reports. Based on the similarity of embedding vectors of keywords, SOSK can expand and/or refine a keyword set from a much smaller set of user-provided keywords. Thus, SOSK allows users to define any topic of their interests and retrieve security reports relevant to that topic effectively. Our preliminary evaluation shows that SOSK can expand keywords and retrieve reports relevant to user requests.
Authors: Donghwan Kim, Tae-Kyun Kim
Abstract: 3D human shape reconstruction under severe occlusion due to human-object or human-human interaction is a challenging problem. Parametric models i.e., SMPL(-X), which are based on the statistics across human shapes, can represent whole human body shapes but are limited to minimally-clothed human shapes. Implicit-function-based methods extract features from the parametric models to employ prior knowledge of human bodies and can capture geometric details such as clothing and hair. However, they often struggle to handle misaligned parametric models and inpaint occluded regions given a single RGB image. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline, MHCDIFF, Multi-hypotheses Conditioned Point Cloud Diffusion, composed of point cloud diffusion conditioned on probabilistic distributions for pixel-aligned detailed 3D human reconstruction under occlusion. Compared to previous implicit-function-based methods, the point cloud diffusion model can capture the global consistent features to generate the occluded regions, and the denoising process corrects the misaligned SMPL meshes. The core of MHCDIFF is extracting local features from multiple hypothesized SMPL(-X) meshes and aggregating the set of features to condition the diffusion model. In the experiments on CAPE and MultiHuman datasets, the proposed method outperforms various SOTA methods based on SMPL, implicit functions, point cloud diffusion, and their combined, under synthetic and real occlusions.
Authors: Yixuan Qiu, Qingyi Gao, Xiao Wang
Abstract: Generative models based on latent variables, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational auto-encoders (VAEs), have gained lots of interests due to their impressive performance in many fields. However, many data such as natural images usually do not populate the ambient Euclidean space but instead reside in a lower-dimensional manifold. Thus an inappropriate choice of the latent dimension fails to uncover the structure of the data, possibly resulting in mismatch of latent representations and poor generative qualities. Towards addressing these problems, we propose a novel framework called the latent Wasserstein GAN (LWGAN) that fuses the Wasserstein auto-encoder and the Wasserstein GAN so that the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold can be adaptively learned by a modified informative latent distribution. We prove that there exist an encoder network and a generator network in such a way that the intrinsic dimension of the learned encoding distribution is equal to the dimension of the data manifold. We theoretically establish that our estimated intrinsic dimension is a consistent estimate of the true dimension of the data manifold. Meanwhile, we provide an upper bound on the generalization error of LWGAN, implying that we force the synthetic data distribution to be similar to the real data distribution from a population perspective. Comprehensive empirical experiments verify our framework and show that LWGAN is able to identify the correct intrinsic dimension under several scenarios, and simultaneously generate high-quality synthetic data by sampling from the learned latent distribution.
Authors: Rafael Hidalgo, Jesse Parron, Aparna S. Varde, Weitian Wang
Abstract: This paper presents a system called Robo-CSK-Organizer that infuses commonsense knowledge from a classical knowledge based to enhance the context recognition capabilities of robots so as to facilitate the organization of detected objects by classifying them in a task-relevant manner. It is particularly useful in multipurpose robotics. Unlike systems relying solely on deep learning tools such as ChatGPT, the Robo-CSK-Organizer system stands out in multiple avenues as follows. It resolves ambiguities well, and maintains consistency in object placement. Moreover, it adapts to diverse task-based classifications. Furthermore, it contributes to explainable AI, hence helping to improve trust and human-robot collaboration. Controlled experiments performed in our work, simulating domestic robotics settings, make Robo-CSK-Organizer demonstrate superior performance while placing objects in contextually relevant locations. This work highlights the capacity of an AI-based system to conduct commonsense-guided decision-making in robotics closer to the thresholds of human cognition. Hence, Robo-CSK-Organizer makes positive impacts on AI and robotics.
Authors: Alexander Htet Kyaw, Se Hwan Jeon, Miana Smith, Neil Gershenfeld
Abstract: We present a system that transforms speech into physical objects by combining 3D generative Artificial Intelligence with robotic assembly. The system leverages natural language input to make design and manufacturing more accessible, enabling individuals without expertise in 3D modeling or robotic programming to create physical objects. We propose utilizing discrete robotic assembly of lattice-based voxel components to address the challenges of using generative AI outputs in physical production, such as design variability, fabrication speed, structural integrity, and material waste. The system interprets speech to generate 3D objects, discretizes them into voxel components, computes an optimized assembly sequence, and generates a robotic toolpath. The results are demonstrated through the assembly of various objects, ranging from chairs to shelves, which are prompted via speech and realized within 5 minutes using a 6-axis robotic arm.
Authors: Arshiya Khan, Guannan Liu, Xing Gao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant challenges in detecting and repairing vulnerable code, particularly when dealing with vulnerabilities involving multiple aspects, such as variables, code flows, and code structures. In this study, we utilize GitHub Copilot as the LLM and focus on buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Our experiments reveal a notable gap in Copilot's abilities when dealing with buffer overflow vulnerabilities, with a 76% vulnerability detection rate but only a 15% vulnerability repair rate. To address this issue, we propose context-aware prompt tuning techniques designed to enhance LLM performance in repairing buffer overflow. By injecting a sequence of domain knowledge about the vulnerability, including various security and code contexts, we demonstrate that Copilot's successful repair rate increases to 63%, representing more than four times the improvement compared to repairs without domain knowledge.
Authors: Jiawei Lu, Yingpeng Zhang, Zengjun Zhao, He Wang, Kun Zhou, Tianjia Shao
Abstract: Large-scale text-guided image diffusion models have shown astonishing results in text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, applying these models to synthesize textures for 3D geometries remains challenging due to the domain gap between 2D images and textures on a 3D surface. Early works that used a projecting-and-inpainting approach managed to preserve generation diversity but often resulted in noticeable artifacts and style inconsistencies. While recent methods have attempted to address these inconsistencies, they often introduce other issues, such as blurring, over-saturation, or over-smoothing. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel text-to-texture synthesis framework that leverages pretrained diffusion models. We first introduce a local attention reweighing mechanism in the self-attention layers to guide the model in concentrating on spatial-correlated patches across different views, thereby enhancing local details while preserving cross-view consistency. Additionally, we propose a novel latent space merge pipeline, which further ensures consistency across different viewpoints without sacrificing too much diversity. Our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques regarding texture consistency and visual quality, while delivering results much faster than distillation-based methods. Importantly, our framework does not require additional training or fine-tuning, making it highly adaptable to a wide range of models available on public platforms.
Authors: Xuanjin Jin, Chendong Zeng, Shengfa Zhu, Chunxiao Liu, Panpan Cai
Abstract: Uncertainties in dynamic road environments pose significant challenges for behavior and trajectory planning in autonomous driving. This paper introduces BoT-Drive, a planning algorithm that addresses uncertainties at both behavior and trajectory levels within a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework. BoT-Drive employs driver models to characterize unknown behavioral intentions and utilizes their model parameters to infer hidden driving styles. By also treating driver models as decision-making actions for the autonomous vehicle, BoT-Drive effectively tackles the exponential complexity inherent in POMDPs. To enhance safety and robustness, the planner further applies importance sampling to refine the driving trajectory conditioned on the planned high-level behavior. Evaluation on real-world data shows that BoT-Drive consistently outperforms both existing planning methods and learning-based methods in regular and complex urban driving scenes, demonstrating significant improvements in driving safety and reliability.
Authors: Liangtai Sun, Danyu Luo, Da Ma, Zihan Zhao, Baocai Chen, Zhennan Shen, Su Zhu, Lu Chen, Xin Chen, Kai Yu
Abstract: Recently, there has been a significant upsurge of interest in leveraging large language models (LLMs) to assist scientific discovery. However, most LLMs only focus on general science, while they lack domain-specific knowledge, such as chemical molecules and amino acid sequences. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SciDFM, a mixture-of-experts LLM, which is trained from scratch and is able to conduct college-level scientific reasoning and understand molecules and amino acid sequences. We collect a large-scale training corpus containing numerous scientific papers and books from different disciplines as well as data from domain-specific databases. We further fine-tune the pre-trained model on lots of instruction data to improve performances on downstream benchmarks. From experiment results, we show that SciDFM achieves strong performance on general scientific benchmarks such as SciEval and SciQ, and it reaches a SOTA performance on domain-specific benchmarks among models of similar size. We further analyze the expert layers and show that the results of expert selection vary with data from different disciplines. To benefit the broader research community, we open-source SciDFM at https://huggingface.co/OpenDFM/SciDFM-MoE-A5.6B-v1.0.
Authors: Guoxi Zhang, Jiuding Duan
Abstract: This paper addresses the cost-efficiency aspect of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). RLHF leverages datasets of human preferences over outputs of large language models (LLM) to instill human expectations into LLMs. While preference annotation comes with a monetized cost, the economic utility of a preference dataset has not been considered by far. What exacerbates this situation is that given complex intransitive or cyclic relationships in preference datasets, existing algorithms for fine-tuning LLMs are still far from capturing comprehensive preferences. This raises severe cost-efficiency concerns in production environments, where preference data accumulate over time. In this paper, we see the fine-tuning of LLMs as a monetized economy and introduce an auction mechanism to improve the efficiency of the preference data collection in dollar terms. We show that introducing an auction mechanism can play an essential role in enhancing the cost-efficiency of RLHF while maintaining satisfactory model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed auction-based protocol is cost-efficient for fine-tuning LLMs by concentrating on high-quality feedback.
Authors: Chrisantus Eze, Christopher Crick
Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Recent works have focused on source-free UDA, where only target data is available. This is challenging as models rely on noisy pseudo-labels and struggle with distribution shifts. We propose Active Adversarial Alignment (A3), a novel framework combining self-supervised learning, adversarial training, and active learning for robust source-free UDA. A3 actively samples informative and diverse data using an acquisition function for training. It adapts models via adversarial losses and consistency regularization, aligning distributions without source data access. A3 advances source-free UDA through its synergistic integration of active and adversarial learning for effective domain alignment and noise reduction.
Authors: Mucong Ding, Chenghao Deng, Jocelyn Choo, Zichu Wu, Aakriti Agrawal, Avi Schwarzschild, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, John Langford, Anima Anandkumar, Furong Huang
Abstract: While generalization over tasks from easy to hard is crucial to profile language models (LLMs), the datasets with fine-grained difficulty annotations for each problem across a broad range of complexity are still blank. Aiming to address this limitation, we present Easy2Hard-Bench, a consistently formatted collection of 6 benchmark datasets spanning various domains, such as mathematics and programming problems, chess puzzles, and reasoning questions. Each problem within these datasets is annotated with numerical difficulty scores. To systematically estimate problem difficulties, we collect abundant performance data on attempts to each problem by humans in the real world or LLMs on the prominent leaderboard. Leveraging the rich performance data, we apply well-established difficulty ranking systems, such as Item Response Theory (IRT) and Glicko-2 models, to uniformly assign numerical difficulty scores to problems. Moreover, datasets in Easy2Hard-Bench distinguish themselves from previous collections by a higher proportion of challenging problems. Through extensive experiments with six state-of-the-art LLMs, we provide a comprehensive analysis of their performance and generalization capabilities across varying levels of difficulty, with the aim of inspiring future research in LLM generalization. The datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/furonghuang-lab/Easy2Hard-Bench.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/furonghuang-lab/Easy2Hard-Bench.
Authors: Xian Yeow Lee, Haiyan Wang, Daisuke Katsumata, Takaharu Matsui, Chetan Gupta
Abstract: This paper proposes a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to learn dynamic dispatching strategies, which is crucial for optimizing throughput in material handling systems across diverse industries. To benchmark our method, we developed a material handling environment that reflects the complexities of an actual system, such as various activities at different locations, physical constraints, and inherent uncertainties. To enhance exploration during learning, we propose a method to integrate domain knowledge in the form of existing dynamic dispatching heuristics. Our experimental results show that our method can outperform heuristics by up to 7.4 percent in terms of median throughput. Additionally, we analyze the effect of different architectures on MARL performance when training multiple agents with different functions. We also demonstrate that the MARL agents performance can be further improved by using the first iteration of MARL agents as heuristics to train a second iteration of MARL agents. This work demonstrates the potential of applying MARL to learn effective dynamic dispatching strategies that may be deployed in real-world systems to improve business outcomes.
Authors: Mingyu Chen, Aldo Pacchiano, Xuezhou Zhang
Abstract: In this work, we study the \textit{state-free RL} problem, where the algorithm does not have the states information before interacting with the environment. Specifically, denote the reachable state set by ${S}^\Pi := \{ s|\max_{\pi\in \Pi}q^{P, \pi}(s)>0 \}$, we design an algorithm which requires no information on the state space $S$ while having a regret that is completely independent of ${S}$ and only depend on ${S}^\Pi$. We view this as a concrete first step towards \textit{parameter-free RL}, with the goal of designing RL algorithms that require no hyper-parameter tuning.
Authors: Aditi Godbole, Jabin Geevarghese George, Smita Shandilya
Abstract: The rapid increase in unstructured data across various fields has made multi-document comprehension and summarization a critical task. Traditional approaches often fail to capture relevant context, maintain logical consistency, and extract essential information from lengthy documents. This paper explores the use of Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-document summarization, demonstrating their exceptional capacity to grasp extensive connections, provide cohesive summaries, and adapt to various industry domains and integration with enterprise applications/systems. The paper discusses the workflow of multi-document summarization for effectively deploying long-context LLMs, supported by case studies in legal applications, enterprise functions such as HR, finance, and sourcing, as well as in the medical and news domains. These case studies show notable enhancements in both efficiency and accuracy. Technical obstacles, such as dataset diversity, model scalability, and ethical considerations like bias mitigation and factual accuracy, are carefully analyzed. Prospective research avenues are suggested to augment the functionalities and applications of long-context LLMs, establishing them as pivotal tools for transforming information processing across diverse sectors and enterprise applications.
Authors: Zara Lisbon
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital assets, the imperative for robust data privacy and compliance with regulatory frameworks has intensified. This paper investigates the critical role of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the management of digital assets and introduces innovative unlearning techniques specifically tailored to GNN architectures. We categorize unlearning strategies into two primary classes: data-driven approximation, which manipulates the graph structure to isolate and remove the influence of specific nodes, and model-driven approximation, which modifies the internal parameters and architecture of the GNN itself. By examining recent advancements in these unlearning methodologies, we highlight their applicability in various use cases, including fraud detection, risk assessment, token relationship prediction, and decentralized governance. We discuss the challenges inherent in balancing model performance with the requirements for data unlearning, particularly in the context of real-time financial applications. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both unlearning strategies to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of GNNs in digital asset ecosystems. Ultimately, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding and implementing GNN unlearning techniques, paving the way for secure and compliant deployment of machine learning in the digital asset domain.
Authors: Mahdi Morafah, Vyacheslav Kungurtsev, Hojin Chang, Chen Chen, Bill Lin
Abstract: Federated Learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative machine learning, while preserving user data privacy. Despite its potential, standard FL lacks support for diverse heterogeneous device prototypes, which vary significantly in model and dataset sizes -- from small IoT devices to large workstations. This limitation is only partially addressed by existing knowledge distillation techniques, which often fail to transfer knowledge effectively across a broad spectrum of device prototypes with varied capabilities. This failure primarily stems from two issues: the dilution of informative logits from more capable devices by those from less capable ones, and the use of a single integrated logits as the distillation target across all devices, which neglects their individual learning capacities and and the unique contributions of each. To address these challenges, we introduce TAKFL, a novel KD-based framework that treats the knowledge transfer from each device prototype's ensemble as a separate task, independently distilling each to preserve its unique contributions and avoid dilution. TAKFL also incorporates a KD-based self-regularization technique to mitigate the issues related to the noisy and unsupervised ensemble distillation process. To integrate the separately distilled knowledge, we introduce an adaptive task arithmetic knowledge integration process, allowing each student model to customize the knowledge integration for optimal performance. Additionally, we present theoretical results demonstrating the effectiveness of task arithmetic in transferring knowledge across heterogeneous devices with varying capacities. Comprehensive evaluations of our method across both CV and NLP tasks demonstrate that TAKFL achieves SOTA results in a variety of datasets and settings, significantly outperforming existing KD-based methods. Code is released at https://github.com/MMorafah/TAKFL
Authors: Qingquan Zhang, Jialin Liu, Xin Yao
Abstract: Multiobjective evolutionary learning (MOEL) has demonstrated its advantages of training fairer machine learning models considering a predefined set of conflicting objectives, including accuracy and different fairness measures. Recent works propose to construct a representative subset of fairness measures as optimisation objectives of MOEL throughout model training. However, the determination of a representative measure set relies on dataset, prior knowledge and requires substantial computational costs. What's more, those representative measures may differ across different model training processes. Instead of using a static predefined set determined before model training, this paper proposes to dynamically and adaptively determine a representative measure set online during model training. The dynamically determined representative set is then used as optimising objectives of the MOEL framework and can vary with time. Extensive experimental results on 12 well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves outstanding performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches for mitigating unfairness in terms of accuracy as well as 25 fairness measures although only a few of them were dynamically selected and used as optimisation objectives. The results indicate the importance of setting optimisation objectives dynamically during training.
Authors: Haoyu Wang, Chunyu Qiang, Tianrui Wang, Cheng Gong, Qiuyu Liu, Yu Jiang, Xiaobao Wang, Chenyang Wang, Chen Zhang
Abstract: Recent advancements in speech synthesis models, trained on extensive datasets, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities. These models can control content, timbre, and emotion in generated speech based on prompt inputs. Despite these advancements, the choice of prompts significantly impacts the output quality, yet most existing selection schemes do not adequately address the control of emotional intensity. To address this question, this paper proposes a two-stage prompt selection strategy EmoPro, which is specifically designed for emotionally controllable speech synthesis. This strategy focuses on selecting highly expressive and high-quality prompts by evaluating them from four perspectives: emotional expression strength, speech quality, text-emotion consistency, and model generation performance. Experimental results show that prompts selected using the proposed method result in more emotionally expressive and engaging synthesized speech compared to those obtained through baseline. Audio samples and codes will be available at https://whyrrrrun.github.io/EmoPro/.
Authors: Harsh Purohit, Tomoya Nishida, Kota Dohi, Takashi Endo, Yohei Kawaguchi
Abstract: Insufficient recordings and the scarcity of anomalies present significant challenges in developing and validating robust anomaly detection systems for machine sounds. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach for generating diverse anomalies in machine sound using a latent diffusion-based model that integrates an encoder-decoder framework. Our method utilizes the Flan-T5 model to encode captions derived from audio file metadata, enabling conditional generation through a carefully designed U-Net architecture. This approach aids our model in generating audio signals within the EnCodec latent space, ensuring high contextual relevance and quality. We objectively evaluated the quality of our generated sounds using the Fr\'echet Audio Distance (FAD) score and other metrics, demonstrating that our approach surpasses existing models in generating reliable machine audio that closely resembles actual abnormal conditions. The evaluation of the anomaly detection system using our generated data revealed a strong correlation, with the area under the curve (AUC) score differing by 4.8\% from the original, validating the effectiveness of our generated data. These results demonstrate the potential of our approach to enhance the evaluation and robustness of anomaly detection systems across varied and previously unseen conditions. Audio samples can be found at \url{https://hpworkhub.github.io/MIMII-Gen.github.io/}.
Authors: Shashank Shekhar, Anthony Favier, Rachid Alami
Abstract: We present a substantial extension of our Human-Aware Task Planning framework, tailored for scenarios with intermittent shared execution experiences and significant belief divergence between humans and robots, particularly due to the uncontrollable nature of humans. Our objective is to build a robot policy that accounts for uncontrollable human behaviors, thus enabling the anticipation of possible advancements achieved by the robot when the execution is not shared, e.g. when humans are briefly absent from the shared environment to complete a subtask. But, this anticipation is considered from the perspective of humans who have access to an estimated model for the robot. To this end, we propose a novel planning framework and build a solver based on AND-OR search, which integrates knowledge reasoning, including situation assessment by perspective taking. Our approach dynamically models and manages the expansion and contraction of potential advances while precisely keeping track of when (and when not) agents share the task execution experience. The planner systematically assesses the situation and ignores worlds that it has reason to think are impossible for humans. Overall, our new solver can estimate the distinct beliefs of the human and the robot along potential courses of action, enabling the synthesis of plans where the robot selects the right moment for communication, i.e. informing, or replying to an inquiry, or defers ontic actions until the execution experiences can be shared. Preliminary experiments in two domains, one novel and one adapted, demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.
Authors: Yi Ren, Tianyi Zhang, Weibin Li, DuoMu Zhou, Chenhao Qin, FangCheng Dong
Abstract: In recent years, with the rapid development of large language models, serval models such as GPT-4o have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, surpassing human performance in various language tasks. As a result, many researchers have begun exploring their potential applications in the field of public opinion analysis. This study proposes a novel large-language-models-based method for public opinion event heat level prediction. First, we preprocessed and classified 62,836 Chinese hot event data collected between July 2022 and December 2023. Then, based on each event's online dissemination heat index, we used the MiniBatchKMeans algorithm to automatically cluster the events and categorize them into four heat levels (ranging from low heat to very high heat). Next, we randomly selected 250 events from each heat level, totalling 1,000 events, to build the evaluation dataset. During the evaluation process, we employed various large language models to assess their accuracy in predicting event heat levels in two scenarios: without reference cases and with similar case references. The results showed that GPT-4o and DeepseekV2 performed the best in the latter case, achieving prediction accuracies of 41.4% and 41.5%, respectively. Although the overall prediction accuracy remains relatively low, it is worth noting that for low-heat (Level 1) events, the prediction accuracies of these two models reached 73.6% and 70.4%, respectively. Additionally, the prediction accuracy showed a downward trend from Level 1 to Level 4, which correlates with the uneven distribution of data across the heat levels in the actual dataset. This suggests that with the more robust dataset, public opinion event heat level prediction based on large language models will have significant research potential for the future.
Authors: Seyedarmin Azizi, Mohammad Erfan Sadeghi, Mehdi Kamal, Massoud Pedram
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a framework to enhance the robustness of the neural models by mitigating the effects of process-induced and aging-related variations of analog computing components on the accuracy of the analog neural networks. We model these variations as the noise affecting the precision of the activations and introduce a denoising block inserted between selected layers of a pre-trained model. We demonstrate that training the denoising block significantly increases the model's robustness against various noise levels. To minimize the overhead associated with adding these blocks, we present an exploration algorithm to identify optimal insertion points for the denoising blocks. Additionally, we propose a specialized architecture to efficiently execute the denoising blocks, which can be integrated into mixed-signal accelerators. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach using Deep Neural Network (DNN) models trained on the ImageNet and CIFAR-10 datasets. The results show that on average, by accepting 2.03% parameter count overhead, the accuracy drop due to the variations reduces from 31.7% to 1.15%.
Authors: Liang Kuang, Kuangpu Guo, Jian Liang, Jianguo Zhang
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) allows collaborative machine learning training without sharing private data. Numerous studies have shown that one significant factor affecting the performance of federated learning models is the heterogeneity of data across different clients, especially when the data is sampled from various domains. A recent paper introduces variance-aware dual-level prototype clustering and uses a novel $\alpha$-sparsity prototype loss, which increases intra-class similarity and reduces inter-class similarity. To ensure that the features converge within specific clusters, we introduce an improved algorithm, Federated Prototype Learning with Convergent Clusters, abbreviated as FedPLCC. To increase inter-class distances, we weight each prototype with the size of the cluster it represents. To reduce intra-class distances, considering that prototypes with larger distances might come from different domains, we select only a certain proportion of prototypes for the loss function calculation. Evaluations on the Digit-5, Office-10, and DomainNet datasets show that our method performs better than existing approaches.
Authors: Chinnawut Nantabut
Abstract: Understanding and modeling complex dynamic systems is crucial for enhancing vehicle performance and safety, especially in the context of autonomous driving. Recently, popular methods such as Koopman operators and their approximators, known as Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD), have emerged for their effectiveness in transforming strongly nonlinear system behavior into linear representations. This allows them to be integrated with conventional linear controllers. To achieve this, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), specifically truncated SVD, is employed to approximate Koopman operators from extensive datasets efficiently. This study evaluates different basis functions used in EDMD and ranks for truncated SVD for representing lane change behavior models, aiming to balance computational efficiency with information loss. The findings, however, suggest that the technique of truncated SVD does not necessarily achieve substantial reductions in computational training time and results in significant information loss.
Authors: Xuechen Mu, Zhenyu Huang, Kewei Li, Haotian Zhang, Xiuli Wang, Yusi Fan, Kai Zhang, Fengfeng Zhou
Abstract: Recent advancements in feature representation and dimension reduction have highlighted their crucial role in enhancing the efficacy of predictive modeling. This work introduces TemporalPaD, a novel end-to-end deep learning framework designed for temporal pattern datasets. TemporalPaD integrates reinforcement learning (RL) with neural networks to achieve concurrent feature representation and feature reduction. The framework consists of three cooperative modules: a Policy Module, a Representation Module, and a Classification Module, structured based on the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. The Policy Module, responsible for dimensionality reduction through RL, functions as the actor, while the Representation Module for feature extraction and the Classification Module collectively serve as the critic. We comprehensively evaluate TemporalPaD using 29 UCI datasets, a well-known benchmark for validating feature reduction algorithms, through 10 independent tests and 10-fold cross-validation. Additionally, given that TemporalPaD is specifically designed for time series data, we apply it to a real-world DNA classification problem involving enhancer category and enhancer strength. The results demonstrate that TemporalPaD is an efficient and effective framework for achieving feature reduction, applicable to both structured data and sequence datasets. The source code of the proposed TemporalPaD is freely available as supplementary material to this article and at http://www.healthinformaticslab.org/supp/.
Authors: Jaepill Choi, Kyubyung Chae, Jiwoo Song, Yohan Jo, Taesup Kim
Abstract: In abstractive summarization, the challenge of producing concise and accurate summaries arises from the vast amount of information contained in the source document. Consequently, although Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, they often introduce inaccuracies by hallucinating content not found in the original source. While supervised fine-tuning methods that maximize likelihood contribute to this issue, they do not consistently enhance the faithfulness of the summaries. Preference-based optimization methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), can further refine the model to align with human preferences. However, these methods still heavily depend on costly human feedback. In this work, we introduce a novel and straightforward approach called Model-based Preference Optimization (MPO) to fine-tune LLMs for improved summarization abilities without any human feedback. By leveraging the model's inherent summarization capabilities, we create a preference dataset that is fully generated by the model using different decoding strategies. Our experiments on standard summarization datasets and various metrics demonstrate that our proposed MPO significantly enhances the quality of generated summaries without relying on human feedback.
Authors: Marvin Tom Teichmann, Manasi Datar, Lisa Kratzke, Fernando Vega, Florin C. Ghesu
Abstract: The precision of contouring target structures and organs-at-risk (OAR) in radiotherapy planning is crucial for ensuring treatment efficacy and patient safety. Recent advancements in deep learning (DL) have significantly improved OAR contouring performance, yet the reliability of these models, especially in the presence of out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, remains a concern in clinical settings. This application study explores the integration of epistemic uncertainty estimation within the OAR contouring workflow to enable OOD detection in clinically relevant scenarios, using specifically compiled data. Furthermore, we introduce an advanced statistical method for OOD detection to enhance the methodological framework of uncertainty estimation. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that epistemic uncertainty estimation is effective in identifying instances where model predictions are unreliable and may require an expert review. Notably, our approach achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.95 for OOD detection, with a specificity of 0.95 and a sensitivity of 0.92 for implant cases, underscoring its efficacy. This study addresses significant gaps in the current research landscape, such as the lack of ground truth for uncertainty estimation and limited empirical evaluations. Additionally, it provides a clinically relevant application of epistemic uncertainty estimation in an FDA-approved and widely used clinical solution for OAR segmentation from Varian, a Siemens Healthineers company, highlighting its practical benefits.
Authors: Akshay Balsubramani
Abstract: Artificial intelligence models trained through loss minimization have demonstrated significant success, grounded in principles from fields like information theory and statistical physics. This work explores these established connections through the lens of statistical mechanics, starting from first-principles sample concentration behaviors that underpin AI and machine learning. Our development of statistical mechanics for modeling highlights the key role of exponential families, and quantities of statistics, physics, and information theory.
Authors: Ethan Davies, Pranav Kalidindi
Abstract: Mission planning often involves optimising the use of ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) assets in order to achieve a set of mission objectives within allowed parameters subject to constraints. The missions of interest here, involve routing multiple UAVs visiting multiple targets, utilising sensors to capture data relating to each target. Finding such solutions is often an NP-Hard problem and cannot be solved efficiently on classical computers. Furthermore, during the mission new constraints and objectives may arise, requiring a new solution to be computed within a short time period. To achieve this we investigate near term quantum algorithms that have the potential to offer speed-ups against current classical methods. We demonstrate how a large family of these problems can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and then converted to a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation (QUBO). The formulation provided is versatile and can be adapted for many different constraints with clear qubit scaling provided. We discuss the results of solving the QUBO formulation using commercial quantum annealers and compare the solutions to current edge classical solvers. We also analyse the results from solving the QUBO using Quantum Approximate Optimisation Algorithms (QAOA) and discuss their results. Finally, we also provide efficient methods to encode to the problem into the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) formalism, where we have tailored the ansatz to the problem making efficient use of the qubits available.
Authors: Ayush Kumar Sharma, Sourav Patel, Supriya Bharat Wakchaure, Abirami S
Abstract: Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are essential for protecting computer networks from malicious activities, including Denial of Service (DoS), Probing, User-to-Root (U2R), and Remote-to-Local (R2L) attacks. Without effective NIDS, networks are vulnerable to significant security breaches and data loss. Machine learning techniques provide a promising approach to enhance NIDS by automating threat detection and improving accuracy. In this research, we propose an Enhanced Convolutional Neural Network (EnCNN) for NIDS and evaluate its performance using the KDDCUP'99 dataset. Our methodology includes comprehensive data preprocessing, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and feature engineering. We compare EnCNN with various machine learning algorithms, including Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and ensemble methods like Random Forest, AdaBoost, and Voting Ensemble. The results show that EnCNN significantly improves detection accuracy, with a notable 10% increase over state-of-art approaches. This demonstrates the effectiveness of EnCNN in real-time network intrusion detection, offering a robust solution for identifying and mitigating security threats, and enhancing overall network resilience.
Authors: Yuli Zhou, Guolei Sun, Yawei Li, Luca Benini, Ender Konukoglu
Abstract: This study investigates the application and performance of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) in the challenging task of video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS). VCOS involves detecting objects that blend seamlessly in the surroundings for videos, due to similar colors and textures, poor light conditions, etc. Compared to the objects in normal scenes, camouflaged objects are much more difficult to detect. SAM2, a video foundation model, has shown potential in various tasks. But its effectiveness in dynamic camouflaged scenarios remains under-explored. This study presents a comprehensive study on SAM2's ability in VCOS. First, we assess SAM2's performance on camouflaged video datasets using different models and prompts (click, box, and mask). Second, we explore the integration of SAM2 with existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and VCOS methods. Third, we specifically adapt SAM2 by fine-tuning it on the video camouflaged dataset. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SAM2 has excellent zero-shot ability of detecting camouflaged objects in videos. We also show that this ability could be further improved by specifically adjusting SAM2's parameters for VCOS. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhoustan/SAM2-VCOS
Authors: Christoph Riedl, Eric Bogert
Abstract: Can human decision-makers learn from AI feedback? Using data on 52,000 decision-makers from a large online chess platform, we investigate how their AI use affects three interrelated long-term outcomes: Learning, skill gap, and diversity of decision strategies. First, we show that individuals are far more likely to seek AI feedback in situations in which they experienced success rather than failure. This AI feedback seeking strategy turns out to be detrimental to learning: Feedback on successes decreases future performance, while feedback on failures increases it. Second, higher-skilled decision-makers seek AI feedback more often and are far more likely to seek AI feedback after a failure, and benefit more from AI feedback than lower-skilled individuals. As a result, access to AI feedback increases, rather than decreases, the skill gap between high- and low-skilled individuals. Finally, we leverage 42 major platform updates as natural experiments to show that access to AI feedback causes a decrease in intellectual diversity of the population as individuals tend to specialize in the same areas. Together, those results indicate that learning from AI feedback is not automatic and using AI correctly seems to be a skill itself. Furthermore, despite its individual-level benefits, access to AI feedback can have significant population-level downsides including loss of intellectual diversity and an increasing skill gap.
Authors: Yipeng Lu, Yifan Zhao, Haiping Wang, Zhiwei Ruan, Yuan Liu, Zhen Dong, Bisheng Yang
Abstract: Dashboard cameras (dashcams) record millions of driving videos daily, offering a valuable potential data source for various applications, including driving map production and updates. A necessary step for utilizing these dashcam data involves the estimation of camera poses. However, the low-quality images captured by dashcams, characterized by motion blurs and dynamic objects, pose challenges for existing image-matching methods in accurately estimating camera poses. In this study, we propose a precise pose estimation method for dashcam images, leveraging the inherent camera motion prior. Typically, image sequences captured by dash cameras exhibit pronounced motion prior, such as forward movement or lateral turns, which serve as essential cues for correspondence estimation. Building upon this observation, we devise a pose regression module aimed at learning camera motion prior, subsequently integrating these prior into both correspondences and pose estimation processes. The experiment shows that, in real dashcams dataset, our method is 22% better than the baseline for pose estimation in AUC5\textdegree, and it can estimate poses for 19% more images with less reprojection error in Structure from Motion (SfM).
Authors: Yiming Chen, Xianghu Yue, Xiaoxue Gao, Chen Zhang, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Robby T. Tan, Haizhou Li
Abstract: Various audio-LLMs (ALLMs) have been explored recently for tackling different audio tasks simultaneously using a single, unified model. While existing evaluations of ALLMs primarily focus on single-audio tasks, real-world applications often involve processing multiple audio streams simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose the first multi-audio evaluation (MAE) benchmark that consists of 20 datasets from 11 multi-audio tasks encompassing both speech and sound scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on MAE demonstrate that the existing ALLMs, while being powerful in comprehending primary audio elements in individual audio inputs, struggling to handle multi-audio scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel multi-audio-LLM (MALLM) to capture audio context among multiple similar audios using discriminative learning on our proposed synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the proposed MALLM outperforms all baselines and achieves high data efficiency using synthetic data without requiring human annotations. The proposed MALLM opens the door for ALLMs towards multi-audio processing era and brings us closer to replicating human auditory capabilities in machines.
Authors: Yang Qian, Xinbiao Wang, Yuxuan Du, Yong Luo, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and its variants exhibit immense potential in tackling combinatorial optimization challenges. However, their practical realization confronts a dilemma: the requisite circuit depth for satisfactory performance is problem-specific and often exceeds the maximum capability of current quantum devices. To address this dilemma, here we first analyze the convergence behavior of QAOA, uncovering the origins of this dilemma and elucidating the intricate relationship between the employed mixer Hamiltonian, the specific problem at hand, and the permissible maximum circuit depth. Harnessing this understanding, we introduce the Mixer Generator Network (MG-Net), a unified deep learning framework adept at dynamically formulating optimal mixer Hamiltonians tailored to distinct tasks and circuit depths. Systematic simulations, encompassing Ising models and weighted Max-Cut instances with up to 64 qubits, substantiate our theoretical findings, highlighting MG-Net's superior performance in terms of both approximation ratio and efficiency.
Authors: Zhiqiang Chen, Guofan Fan, Jinying Gao, Lei Ma, Bo Lei, Tiejun Huang, Shan Yu
Abstract: The human brain exhibits a strong ability to spontaneously associate different visual attributes of the same or similar visual scene, such as associating sketches and graffiti with real-world visual objects, usually without supervising information. In contrast, in the field of artificial intelligence, controllable generation methods like ControlNet heavily rely on annotated training datasets such as depth maps, semantic segmentation maps, and poses, which limits the method's scalability. Inspired by the neural mechanisms that may contribute to the brain's associative power, specifically the cortical modularization and hippocampal pattern completion, here we propose a self-supervised controllable generation (SCG) framework. Firstly, we introduce an equivariant constraint to promote inter-module independence and intra-module correlation in a modular autoencoder network, thereby achieving functional specialization. Subsequently, based on these specialized modules, we employ a self-supervised pattern completion approach for controllable generation training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed modular autoencoder effectively achieves functional specialization, including the modular processing of color, brightness, and edge detection, and exhibits brain-like features including orientation selectivity, color antagonism, and center-surround receptive fields. Through self-supervised training, associative generation capabilities spontaneously emerge in SCG, demonstrating excellent generalization ability to various tasks such as associative generation on painting, sketches, and ancient graffiti. Compared to the previous representative method ControlNet, our proposed approach not only demonstrates superior robustness in more challenging high-noise scenarios but also possesses more promising scalability potential due to its self-supervised manner.
Authors: Hanbin Bae, Pavel Andreev, Azat Saginbaev, Nicholas Babaev, Won-Jun Lee, Hosang Sung, Hoon-Young Cho
Abstract: This paper introduces a speech enhancement solution tailored for true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds on-device usage. The solution was specifically designed to support conversations in noisy environments, with active noise cancellation (ANC) activated. The primary challenges for speech enhancement models in this context arise from computational complexity that limits on-device usage and latency that must be less than 3 ms to preserve a live conversation. To address these issues, we evaluated several crucial design elements, including the network architecture and domain, design of loss functions, pruning method, and hardware-specific optimization. Consequently, we demonstrated substantial improvements in speech enhancement quality compared with that in baseline models, while simultaneously reducing the computational complexity and algorithmic latency.
Authors: Sergey Berezin, Reza Farahbakhsh, Noel Crespi
Abstract: We introduce a novel family of adversarial attacks that exploit the inability of language models to interpret ASCII art. To evaluate these attacks, we propose the ToxASCII benchmark and develop two custom ASCII art fonts: one leveraging special tokens and another using text-filled letter shapes. Our attacks achieve a perfect 1.0 Attack Success Rate across ten models, including OpenAI's o1-preview and LLaMA 3.1. Warning: this paper contains examples of toxic language used for research purposes.
Authors: Salma Hassan, Hamad Al Hammadi, Ibrahim Mohammed, Muhammad Haris Khan
Abstract: The early detection and nuanced subtype classification of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a predominant cause of cancer mortality worldwide, is a critical and complex issue. In this paper, we introduce an innovative integration of multi-modal data, synthesizing fused medical imaging (CT and PET scans) with clinical health records and genomic data. This unique fusion methodology leverages advanced machine learning models, notably MedClip and BEiT, for sophisticated image feature extraction, setting a new standard in computational oncology. Our research surpasses existing approaches, as evidenced by a substantial enhancement in NSCLC detection and classification precision. The results showcase notable improvements across key performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Specifically, our leading multi-modal classifier model records an impressive accuracy of 94.04%. We believe that our approach has the potential to transform NSCLC diagnostics, facilitating earlier detection and more effective treatment planning and, ultimately, leading to superior patient outcomes in lung cancer care.
Authors: Jingyu Song, Xudong Chen, Liupei Lu, Jie Li, Katherine A. Skinner
Abstract: High-definition (HD) maps provide environmental information for autonomous driving systems and are essential for safe planning. While existing methods with single-frame input achieve impressive performance for online vectorized HD map construction, they still struggle with complex scenarios and occlusions. We propose MemFusionMap, a novel temporal fusion model with enhanced temporal reasoning capabilities for online HD map construction. Specifically, we contribute a working memory fusion module that improves the model's memory capacity to reason across history frames. We also design a novel temporal overlap heatmap to explicitly inform the model about the temporal overlap information and vehicle trajectory in the Bird's Eye View space. By integrating these two designs, MemFusionMap significantly outperforms existing methods while also maintaining a versatile design for scalability. We conduct extensive evaluation on open-source benchmarks and demonstrate a maximum improvement of 5.4% in mAP over state-of-the-art methods. The code for MemFusionMap will be made open-source upon publication of this paper.
Authors: Yujie Tang, Meiling Wang, Yinan Deng, Zibo Zheng, Jiagui Zhong, Yufeng Yue
Abstract: In everyday life, frequently used objects like cups often have unfixed positions and multiple instances within the same category, and their carriers frequently change as well. As a result, it becomes challenging for a robot to efficiently navigate to a specific instance. To tackle this challenge, the robot must capture and update scene changes and plans continuously. However, current object navigation approaches primarily focus on semantic-level and lack the ability to dynamically update scene representation. This paper captures the relationships between frequently used objects and their static carriers. It constructs an open-vocabulary Carrier-Relationship Scene Graph (CRSG) and updates the carrying status during robot navigation to reflect the dynamic changes of the scene. Based on the CRSG, we further propose an instance navigation strategy that models the navigation process as a Markov Decision Process. At each step, decisions are informed by Large Language Model's commonsense knowledge and visual-language feature similarity. We designed a series of long-sequence navigation tasks for frequently used everyday items in the Habitat simulator. The results demonstrate that by updating the CRSG, the robot can efficiently navigate to moved targets. Additionally, we deployed our algorithm on a real robot and validated its practical effectiveness.
Authors: George R. Nahass, Ghasem Yazdanpanah, Madison Cheung, Alex Palacios, Jeffery Peterson, Kevin Heinze, Sasha Hubschman, Chad A. Purnell, Pete Setabutr, Ann Q. Tran, Darvin Yi
Abstract: Periorbital distances and features around the eyes and lids hold valuable information for disease quantification and monitoring of surgical and medical intervention. These distances are commonly measured manually, a process that is both subjective and highly time-consuming. Here, we set out to developed three deep-learning methods for segmentation and periorbital distance prediction, and also evaluate the utility of periorbital distances for disease classification. The MAE of our deep learning predicted distances was less than or very close to the error observed between trained human annotators. We compared our models to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method for periorbital distance prediction and found that our methods outperformed SOTA on all of our datasets on all but one periorbital measurement. We also show that robust segmentation can be achieved on diseased eyes using models trained on open-source, healthy eyes, and that periorbital distances have can be used as high-quality features in downstream classification models. Leveraging segmentation networks as intermediary steps in classification has broad implications for increasing the generalizability of classification models in ophthalmic plastic and craniofacial surgery by avoiding the out-of-distribution problem observed in traditional convolutional neural networks.
Authors: Joseph Cotnareanu, Zhanguang Zhang, Hui-Ling Zhen, Yingxue Zhang, Mark Coates
Abstract: Efficiently determining the satisfiability of a boolean equation -- known as the SAT problem for brevity -- is crucial in various industrial problems. Recently, the advent of deep learning methods has introduced significant potential for enhancing SAT solving. However, a major barrier to the advancement of this field has been the scarcity of large, realistic datasets. The majority of current public datasets are either randomly generated or extremely limited, containing only a few examples from unrelated problem families. These datasets are inadequate for meaningful training of deep learning methods. In light of this, researchers have started exploring generative techniques to create data that more accurately reflect SAT problems encountered in practical situations. These methods have so far suffered from either the inability to produce challenging SAT problems or time-scalability obstacles. In this paper we address both by identifying and manipulating the key contributors to a problem's ``hardness'', known as cores. Although some previous work has addressed cores, the time costs are unacceptably high due to the expense of traditional heuristic core detection techniques. We introduce a fast core detection procedure that uses a graph neural network. Our empirical results demonstrate that we can efficiently generate problems that remain hard to solve and retain key attributes of the original example problems. We show via experiment that the generated synthetic SAT problems can be used in a data augmentation setting to provide improved prediction of solver runtimes.
Authors: Siheng Li, Cheng Yang, Taiqiang Wu, Chufan Shi, Yuji Zhang, Xinyu Zhu, Zesen Cheng, Deng Cai, Mo Yu, Lemao Liu, Jie Zhou, Yujiu Yang, Ngai Wong, Xixin Wu, Wai Lam
Abstract: Honesty is a fundamental principle for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring these models to recognize what they know and don't know and be able to faithfully express their knowledge. Despite promising, current LLMs still exhibit significant dishonest behaviors, such as confidently presenting wrong answers or failing to express what they know. In addition, research on the honesty of LLMs also faces challenges, including varying definitions of honesty, difficulties in distinguishing between known and unknown knowledge, and a lack of comprehensive understanding of related research. To address these issues, we provide a survey on the honesty of LLMs, covering its clarification, evaluation approaches, and strategies for improvement. Moreover, we offer insights for future research, aiming to inspire further exploration in this important area.
Authors: Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi, Nicola Bastianello, Karl H. Johansson, Viktoria Fodor
Abstract: In this paper, we depart from the widely-used gradient descent-based hierarchical federated learning (FL) algorithms to develop a novel hierarchical FL framework based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Within this framework, we propose two novel FL algorithms, which both use ADMM in the top layer: one that employs ADMM in the lower layer and another that uses the conventional gradient descent-based approach. The proposed framework enhances privacy, and experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithms compared to the conventional algorithms in terms of learning convergence and accuracy. Additionally, gradient descent on the lower layer performs well even if the number of local steps is very limited, while ADMM on both layers lead to better performance otherwise.
Authors: Minghao Wang, Pinxue Lin
Abstract: This paper proposes a method for improving the accuracy of mastitis risk assessment in cows using neural networks and video analysis. Mastitis, an infection of the udder tissue, is a critical health problem for cows and can be detected by examining the cow's teat. Traditionally, veterinarians assess the health of a cow's teat during the milking process, but this process is limited in time and can weaken the accuracy of the assessment. In commercial farms, cows are recorded by cameras when they are milked in the milking parlor. This paper uses a neural network to identify key frames in the recorded video where the cow's udder appears intact. These key frames allow veterinarians to have more flexible time to perform health assessments on the teat, increasing their efficiency and accuracy. However, there are challenges in using cow teat video for mastitis risk assessment, such as complex environments, changing cow positions and postures, and difficulty in identifying the udder from the video. To address these challenges, a fusion distance and an ensemble model are proposed to improve the performance (F-score) of identifying key frames from cow teat videos. The results show that these two approaches improve performance compared to using a single distance measure or model.
Authors: Tyreal Yizhou Qian, Bo Yu, Weizhe Li, Chenglong Xu
Abstract: This study examined the public opinions of esports at the 2023 Asian Games and value co-creation during the event using an LLM-enhanced BERTopic modeling analysis. We identified five major themes representing public perceptions, as well as how major stakeholders co-created value within and beyond the esports ecosystem. Key findings highlighted the strategic use of social media marketing to influence public opinion and promote esports events and brands, emphasizing the importance of event logistics and infrastructure. Additionally, the study revealed the co-creation value contributed by stakeholders outside the traditional esports ecosystem, particularly in promoting national representation and performance. Our findings supported the ongoing efforts to legitimize esports as a sport, noting that mainstream recognition remains a challenge. The inclusion of esports as a medal event showcased broader acceptance and helped mitigate negative public perceptions. Moreover, contributions from non-traditional stakeholders underscored the value of cross-subcultural collaborations in esports.
Authors: Hamed Babaei Giglou, Jennifer D'Souza, S\"oren Auer
Abstract: In response to the growing complexity and volume of scientific literature, this paper introduces the LLMs4Synthesis framework, designed to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating high-quality scientific syntheses. This framework addresses the need for rapid, coherent, and contextually rich integration of scientific insights, leveraging both open-source and proprietary LLMs. It also examines the effectiveness of LLMs in evaluating the integrity and reliability of these syntheses, alleviating inadequacies in current quantitative metrics. Our study contributes to this field by developing a novel methodology for processing scientific papers, defining new synthesis types, and establishing nine detailed quality criteria for evaluating syntheses. The integration of LLMs with reinforcement learning and AI feedback is proposed to optimize synthesis quality, ensuring alignment with established criteria. The LLMs4Synthesis framework and its components are made available, promising to enhance both the generation and evaluation processes in scientific research synthesis.
Authors: Sajjad Aghasi Javid, Mahmood Mohassel Feghhi
Abstract: It is acknowledged that the most common cause of dementia worldwide is Alzheimer's disease (AD). This condition progresses in severity from mild to severe and interferes with people's everyday routines. Early diagnosis plays a critical role in patient care and clinical trials. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are used to create a framework for identifying specific disease features from MRI scans Classification of dementia involves approaches such as medical history review, neuropsychological tests, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, the image dataset obtained from Kaggle faces a significant issue of class imbalance, which requires equal distribution of samples from each class to address. In this article, to address this imbalance, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is utilized. Furthermore, a pre-trained convolutional neural network has been applied to the DEMNET dementia network to extract key features from AD images. The proposed model achieved an impressive accuracy of 98.67%.
Authors: Kuo-Hsuan Hung, Kuan-Chen Wang, Kai-Chun Liu, Wei-Lun Chen, Xugang Lu, Yu Tsao, Chii-Wann Lin
Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an important non-invasive method for diagnosing cardiovascular disease. However, ECG signals are susceptible to noise contamination, such as electrical interference or signal wandering, which reduces diagnostic accuracy. Various ECG denoising methods have been proposed, but most existing methods yield suboptimal performance under very noisy conditions or require several steps during inference, leading to latency during online processing. In this paper, we propose a novel ECG denoising model, namely Mamba-based ECG Enhancer (MECG-E), which leverages the Mamba architecture known for its fast inference and outstanding nonlinear mapping capabilities. Experimental results indicate that MECG-E surpasses several well-known existing models across multiple metrics under different noise conditions. Additionally, MECG-E requires less inference time than state-of-the-art diffusion-based ECG denoisers, demonstrating the model's functionality and efficiency.
Authors: William E. R. de Amorim, Scott A. Sisson, T. Rodrigues, David J. Nott, Guilherme S. Rodrigues
Abstract: Positional Encoder Graph Neural Networks (PE-GNNs) are a leading approach for modeling continuous spatial data. However, they often fail to produce calibrated predictive distributions, limiting their effectiveness for uncertainty quantification. We introduce the Positional Encoder Graph Quantile Neural Network (PE-GQNN), a novel method that integrates PE-GNNs, Quantile Neural Networks, and recalibration techniques in a fully nonparametric framework, requiring minimal assumptions about the predictive distributions. We propose a new network architecture that, when combined with a quantile-based loss function, yields accurate and reliable probabilistic models without increasing computational complexity. Our approach provides a flexible, robust framework for conditional density estimation, applicable beyond spatial data contexts. We further introduce a structured method for incorporating a KNN predictor into the model while avoiding data leakage through the GNN layer operation. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PE-GQNN significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both predictive accuracy and uncertainty quantification.
Authors: Alexey Tikhonov, Lisa Bylinina, Ivan P. Yamshchikov
Abstract: We show differences between a language-and-vision model CLIP and two text-only models - FastText and SBERT - when it comes to the encoding of individuation information. We study latent representations that CLIP provides for substrates, granular aggregates, and various numbers of objects. We demonstrate that CLIP embeddings capture quantitative differences in individuation better than models trained on text-only data. Moreover, the individuation hierarchy we deduce from the CLIP embeddings agrees with the hierarchies proposed in linguistics and cognitive science.
Authors: Josef Koumar, Karel Hynek, Tom\'a\v{s} \v{C}ejka, Pavel \v{S}i\v{s}ka
Abstract: Anomaly detection in network traffic is crucial for maintaining the security of computer networks and identifying malicious activities. One of the primary approaches to anomaly detection are methods based on forecasting. Nevertheless, extensive real-world network datasets for forecasting and anomaly detection techniques are missing, potentially causing performance overestimation of anomaly detection algorithms. This manuscript addresses this gap by introducing a dataset comprising time series data of network entities' behavior, collected from the CESNET3 network. The dataset was created from 40 weeks of network traffic of 275 thousand active IP addresses. The ISP origin of the presented data ensures a high level of variability among network entities, which forms a unique and authentic challenge for forecasting and anomaly detection models. It provides valuable insights into the practical deployment of forecast-based anomaly detection approaches.
Authors: Zehan Li, Yan Hu, Scott Lane, Salih Selek, Lokesh Shahani, Rodrigo Machado-Vieira, Jair Soares, Hua Xu, Hongfang Liu, Ming Huang
Abstract: Accurate identification and categorization of suicidal events can yield better suicide precautions, reducing operational burden, and improving care quality in high-acuity psychiatric settings. Pre-trained language models offer promise for identifying suicidality from unstructured clinical narratives. We evaluated the performance of four BERT-based models using two fine-tuning strategies (multiple single-label and single multi-label) for detecting coexisting suicidal events from 500 annotated psychiatric evaluation notes. The notes were labeled for suicidal ideation (SI), suicide attempts (SA), exposure to suicide (ES), and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). RoBERTa outperformed other models using binary relevance (acc=0.86, F1=0.78). MentalBERT (F1=0.74) also exceeded BioClinicalBERT (F1=0.72). RoBERTa fine-tuned with a single multi-label classifier further improved performance (acc=0.88, F1=0.81), highlighting that models pre-trained on domain-relevant data and the single multi-label classification strategy enhance efficiency and performance. Keywords: EHR-based Phynotyping; Natural Language Processing; Secondary Use of EHR Data; Suicide Classification; BERT-based Model; Psychiatry; Mental Health
Authors: Saeed Mohammadi Dashtaki, Mehdi Hosseini Chagahi, Behzad Moshiri, Md. Jalil Piran
Abstract: One of the most important challenges in the financial and cryptocurrency field is accurately predicting cryptocurrency price trends. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) is beneficial in addressing this challenge. Cryptocurrency markets, marked by substantial growth and volatility, attract investors and scholars keen on deciphering and forecasting cryptocurrency price movements. The vast and diverse array of data available for such predictions increases the complexity of the task. In our study, we introduce a novel approach termed hard and soft information fusion (HSIF) to enhance the accuracy of cryptocurrency price movement forecasts. The hard information component of our approach encompasses historical price records alongside technical indicators. Complementing this, the soft data component extracts from X (formerly Twitter), encompassing news headlines and tweets about the cryptocurrency. To use this data, we use the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based sentiment analysis method, financial BERT (FinBERT), which performs best. Finally, our model feeds on the information set including processed hard and soft data. We employ the bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model because processing information in both forward and backward directions can capture long-term dependencies in sequential information. Our empirical findings emphasize the superiority of the HSIF approach over models dependent on single-source data by testing on Bitcoin-related data. By fusing hard and soft information on Bitcoin dataset, our model has about 96.8\% accuracy in predicting price movement. Incorporating information enables our model to grasp the influence of social sentiment on price fluctuations, thereby supplementing the technical analysis-based predictions derived from hard information.
Authors: Shih-Fang Chen, Jun-Cheng Chen, I-Hong Jhuo, Yen-Yu Lin
Abstract: Learning a discriminative model to distinguish a target from its surrounding distractors is essential to generic visual object tracking. Dynamic target representation adaptation against distractors is challenging due to the limited discriminative capabilities of prevailing trackers. We present a new visual Prompting mechanism for generic Visual Object Tracking (PiVOT) to address this issue. PiVOT proposes a prompt generation network with the pre-trained foundation model CLIP to automatically generate and refine visual prompts, enabling the transfer of foundation model knowledge for tracking. While CLIP offers broad category-level knowledge, the tracker, trained on instance-specific data, excels at recognizing unique object instances. Thus, PiVOT first compiles a visual prompt highlighting potential target locations. To transfer the knowledge of CLIP to the tracker, PiVOT leverages CLIP to refine the visual prompt based on the similarities between candidate objects and the reference templates across potential targets. Once the visual prompt is refined, it can better highlight potential target locations, thereby reducing irrelevant prompt information. With the proposed prompting mechanism, the tracker can generate improved instance-aware feature maps through the guidance of the visual prompt, thus effectively reducing distractors. The proposed method does not involve CLIP during training, thereby keeping the same training complexity and preserving the generalization capability of the pretrained foundation model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks indicate that PiVOT, using the proposed prompting method can suppress distracting objects and enhance the tracker.
Authors: Maryam Berijanian, Spencer Dork, Kuldeep Singh, Michael Riley Millikan, Ashlin Riggs, Aadarsh Swaminathan, Sarah L. Gibbs, Scott E. Friedman, Nathan Brugnone
Abstract: Understanding and modeling collective intelligence is essential for addressing complex social systems. Directed graphs called fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) offer a powerful tool for encoding causal mental models, but extracting high-integrity FCMs from text is challenging. This study presents an approach using large language models (LLMs) to automate FCM extraction. We introduce novel graph-based similarity measures and evaluate them by correlating their outputs with human judgments through the Elo rating system. Results show positive correlations with human evaluations, but even the best-performing measure exhibits limitations in capturing FCM nuances. Fine-tuning LLMs improves performance, but existing measures still fall short. This study highlights the need for soft similarity measures tailored to FCM extraction, advancing collective intelligence modeling with NLP.
Authors: Huizi Yu, Jiayan Zhou, Lingyao Li, Shan Chen, Jack Gallifant, Anye Shi, Xiang Li, Wenyue Hua, Mingyu Jin, Guang Chen, Yang Zhou, Zhao Li, Trisha Gupte, Ming-Li Chen, Zahra Azizi, Yongfeng Zhang, Themistocles L. Assimes, Xin Ma, Danielle S. Bitterman, Lin Lu, Lizhou Fan
Abstract: Simulated patient systems play a crucial role in modern medical education and research, providing safe, integrative learning environments and enabling clinical decision-making simulations. Large Language Models (LLM) could advance simulated patient systems by replicating medical conditions and patient-doctor interactions with high fidelity and low cost. However, ensuring the effectiveness and trustworthiness of these systems remains a challenge, as they require a large, diverse, and precise patient knowledgebase, along with a robust and stable knowledge diffusion to users. Here, we developed AIPatient, an advanced simulated patient system with AIPatient Knowledge Graph (AIPatient KG) as the input and the Reasoning Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Reasoning RAG) agentic workflow as the generation backbone. AIPatient KG samples data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)-III database, producing a clinically diverse and relevant cohort of 1,495 patients with high knowledgebase validity (F1 0.89). Reasoning RAG leverages six LLM powered agents spanning tasks including retrieval, KG query generation, abstraction, checker, rewrite, and summarization. This agentic framework reaches an overall accuracy of 94.15% in EHR-based medical Question Answering (QA), outperforming benchmarks that use either no agent or only partial agent integration. Our system also presents high readability (median Flesch Reading Ease 77.23; median Flesch Kincaid Grade 5.6), robustness (ANOVA F-value 0.6126, p<0.1), and stability (ANOVA F-value 0.782, p<0.1). The promising performance of the AIPatient system highlights its potential to support a wide range of applications, including medical education, model evaluation, and system integration.
Authors: Heqing Zou (Xiao Jie), Tianze Luo (Xiao Jie), Guiyang Xie (Xiao Jie), Victor (Xiao Jie), Zhang, Fengmao Lv, Guangcong Wang, Juanyang Chen, Zhuochen Wang, Hansheng Zhang, Huaijian Zhang
Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual encoders has recently shown promising performance in visual understanding tasks, leveraging their inherent capability to comprehend and generate human-like text for visual reasoning. Given the diverse nature of visual data, MultiModal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) exhibit variations in model designing and training for understanding images, short videos, and long videos. Our paper focuses on the substantial differences and unique challenges posed by long video understanding compared to static image and short video understanding. Unlike static images, short videos encompass sequential frames with both spatial and within-event temporal information, while long videos consist of multiple events with between-event and long-term temporal information. In this survey, we aim to trace and summarize the advancements of MM-LLMs from image understanding to long video understanding. We review the differences among various visual understanding tasks and highlight the challenges in long video understanding, including more fine-grained spatiotemporal details, dynamic events, and long-term dependencies. We then provide a detailed summary of the advancements in MM-LLMs in terms of model design and training methodologies for understanding long videos. Finally, we compare the performance of existing MM-LLMs on video understanding benchmarks of various lengths and discuss potential future directions for MM-LLMs in long video understanding.
Authors: Sabid Bin Habib Pias, Alicia Freel, Ran Huang, Donald Williamson, Minjeong Kim, Apu Kapadia
Abstract: Voice Assistants (VAs) are popular for simple tasks, but users are often hesitant to use them for complex activities like online shopping. We explored whether the vocal characteristics like the VA's vocal tone, can make VAs perceived as more attractive and trustworthy to users for complex tasks. Our findings show that the tone of the VA voice significantly impacts its perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness. Participants in our experiment were more likely to be attracted to VAs with positive or neutral tones and ultimately trusted the VAs they found more attractive. We conclude that VA's perceived trustworthiness can be enhanced through thoughtful voice design, incorporating a variety of vocal tones.
Authors: Shivang Rawat, David J. Heeger, Stefano Martiniani
Abstract: Stability in recurrent neural models poses a significant challenge, particularly in developing biologically plausible neurodynamical models that can be seamlessly trained. Traditional cortical circuit models are notoriously difficult to train due to expansive nonlinearities in the dynamical system, leading to an optimization problem with nonlinear stability constraints that are difficult to impose. Conversely, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) excel in tasks involving sequential data but lack biological plausibility and interpretability. In this work, we address these challenges by linking dynamic divisive normalization (DN) to the stability of ORGaNICs, a biologically plausible recurrent cortical circuit model that dynamically achieves DN and has been shown to simulate a wide range of neurophysiological phenomena. By using the indirect method of Lyapunov, we prove the remarkable property of unconditional local stability for an arbitrary-dimensional ORGaNICs circuit when the recurrent weight matrix is the identity. We thus connect ORGaNICs to a system of coupled damped harmonic oscillators, which enables us to derive the circuit's energy function, providing a normative principle of what the circuit, and individual neurons, aim to accomplish. Further, for a generic recurrent weight matrix, we prove the stability of the 2D model and demonstrate empirically that stability holds in higher dimensions. Finally, we show that ORGaNICs can be trained by backpropagation through time without gradient clipping/scaling, thanks to its intrinsic stability property and adaptive time constants, which address the problems of exploding, vanishing, and oscillating gradients. By evaluating the model's performance on RNN benchmarks, we find that ORGaNICs outperform alternative neurodynamical models on static image classification tasks and perform comparably to LSTMs on sequential tasks.
Authors: Praneeth Vadlapati
Abstract: This paper introduces a new approach to using Large Language Models (LLMs) for classification tasks, which are typically handled using Machine Learning (ML) models. Unlike ML models that rely heavily on data cleaning and feature engineering, this method streamlines the process using LLMs. This paper proposes a new concept called "Language Model Learning (LML)" powered by a new method called "Data-Augmented Prediction (DAP)". The classification is performed by LLMs using a method similar to humans manually exploring and understanding the data and deciding classifications using data as a reference. Training data is summarized and evaluated to determine the features that lead to the classification of each label the most. In the process of DAP, the system uses the data summary to automatically create a query, which is used to retrieve relevant rows from the dataset. A classification is generated by the LLM using data summary and relevant rows, ensuring satisfactory accuracy even with complex data. Usage of data summary and similar data in DAP ensures context-aware decision-making. The proposed method uses the words "Act as an Explainable Machine Learning Model" in the prompt to enhance the interpretability of the predictions by allowing users to review the logic behind each prediction. In some test cases, the system scored an accuracy above 90%, proving the effectiveness of the system and its potential to outperform conventional ML models in various scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Pro-GenAI/LML-DAP
Authors: Gen Li, Yuling Yan
Abstract: Score-based diffusion models, which generate new data by learning to reverse a diffusion process that perturbs data from the target distribution into noise, have achieved remarkable success across various generative tasks. Despite their superior empirical performance, existing theoretical guarantees are often constrained by stringent assumptions or suboptimal convergence rates. In this paper, we establish a fast convergence theory for a popular SDE-based sampler under minimal assumptions. Our analysis shows that, provided $\ell_{2}$-accurate estimates of the score functions, the total variation distance between the target and generated distributions is upper bounded by $O(d/T)$ (ignoring logarithmic factors), where $d$ is the data dimensionality and $T$ is the number of steps. This result holds for any target distribution with finite first-order moment. To our knowledge, this improves upon existing convergence theory for both the SDE-based sampler and another ODE-based sampler, while imposing minimal assumptions on the target data distribution and score estimates. This is achieved through a novel set of analytical tools that provides a fine-grained characterization of how the error propagates at each step of the reverse process.
Authors: Dylan Li, Gyungin Shin
Abstract: Unsupervised instance segmentation aims to segment distinct object instances in an image without relying on human-labeled data. This field has recently seen significant advancements, partly due to the strong local correspondences afforded by rich visual feature representations from self-supervised models (e.g., DINO). Recent state-of-the-art approaches use self-supervised features to represent images as graphs and solve a generalized eigenvalue system (i.e., normalized-cut) to generate foreground masks. While effective, this strategy is limited by its attendant computational demands, leading to slow inference speeds. In this paper, we propose Prompt and Merge (ProMerge), which leverages self-supervised visual features to obtain initial groupings of patches and applies a strategic merging to these segments, aided by a sophisticated background-based mask pruning technique. ProMerge not only yields competitive results but also offers a significant reduction in inference time compared to state-of-the-art normalized-cut-based approaches. Furthermore, when training an object detector using our mask predictions as pseudo-labels, the resulting detector surpasses the current leading unsupervised model on various challenging instance segmentation benchmarks.
Authors: Zheng Zhan, Zhenglun Kong, Yifan Gong, Yushu Wu, Zichong Meng, Hangyu Zheng, Xuan Shen, Stratis Ioannidis, Wei Niu, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have the advantage of keeping linear computational complexity compared to attention modules in transformers, and have been applied to vision tasks as a new type of powerful vision foundation model. Inspired by the observations that the final prediction in vision transformers (ViTs) is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, we take the novel step of enhancing the efficiency of SSM-based vision models through token-based pruning. However, direct applications of existing token pruning techniques designed for ViTs fail to deliver good performance, even with extensive fine-tuning. To address this issue, we revisit the unique computational characteristics of SSMs and discover that naive application disrupts the sequential token positions. This insight motivates us to design a novel and general token pruning method specifically for SSM-based vision models. We first introduce a pruning-aware hidden state alignment method to stabilize the neighborhood of remaining tokens for performance enhancement. Besides, based on our detailed analysis, we propose a token importance evaluation method adapted for SSM models, to guide the token pruning. With efficient implementation and practical acceleration methods, our method brings actual speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant computation reduction with minimal impact on performance across different tasks. Notably, we achieve 81.7\% accuracy on ImageNet with a 41.6\% reduction in the FLOPs for pruned PlainMamba-L3. Furthermore, our work provides deeper insights into understanding the behavior of SSM-based vision models for future research.
Authors: Shaowei Liu, Zhongzheng Ren, Saurabh Gupta, Shenlong Wang
Abstract: We present PhysGen, a novel image-to-video generation method that converts a single image and an input condition (e.g., force and torque applied to an object in the image) to produce a realistic, physically plausible, and temporally consistent video. Our key insight is to integrate model-based physical simulation with a data-driven video generation process, enabling plausible image-space dynamics. At the heart of our system are three core components: (i) an image understanding module that effectively captures the geometry, materials, and physical parameters of the image; (ii) an image-space dynamics simulation model that utilizes rigid-body physics and inferred parameters to simulate realistic behaviors; and (iii) an image-based rendering and refinement module that leverages generative video diffusion to produce realistic video footage featuring the simulated motion. The resulting videos are realistic in both physics and appearance and are even precisely controllable, showcasing superior results over existing data-driven image-to-video generation works through quantitative comparison and comprehensive user study. PhysGen's resulting videos can be used for various downstream applications, such as turning an image into a realistic animation or allowing users to interact with the image and create various dynamics. Project page: https://stevenlsw.github.io/physgen/
Authors: Lecheng Zheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Dongjie Wang, Chengyuan Deng, Reon Matsuoka, Haifeng Chen
Abstract: Root cause analysis (RCA) is crucial for enhancing the reliability and performance of complex systems. However, progress in this field has been hindered by the lack of large-scale, open-source datasets tailored for RCA. To bridge this gap, we introduce LEMMA-RCA, a large dataset designed for diverse RCA tasks across multiple domains and modalities. LEMMA-RCA features various real-world fault scenarios from IT and OT operation systems, encompassing microservices, water distribution, and water treatment systems, with hundreds of system entities involved. We evaluate the quality of LEMMA-RCA by testing the performance of eight baseline methods on this dataset under various settings, including offline and online modes as well as single and multiple modalities. Our experimental results demonstrate the high quality of LEMMA-RCA. The dataset is publicly available at https://lemma-rca.github.io/.
Authors: Bettina Fazzinga, Elena Palmieri, Margherita Vestoso, Luca Bolognini, Andrea Galassi, Filippo Furfaro, Paolo Torroni
Abstract: We present ACME: A Chatbot for asylum-seeking Migrants in Europe. ACME relies on computational argumentation and aims to help migrants identify the highest level of protection they can apply for. This would contribute to a more sustainable migration by reducing the load on territorial commissions, Courts, and humanitarian organizations supporting asylum applicants. We describe the background context, system architecture, underlying technologies, and a case study used to validate the tool with domain experts.
Authors: Zhanglin Wu, Yuanchang Luo, Daimeng Wei, Jiawei Zheng, Bin Wei, Zongyao Li, Hengchao Shang, Jiaxin Guo, Shaojun Li, Weidong Zhang, Ning Xie, Hao Yang
Abstract: This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to machine translation tasks of the 20th China Conference on Machine Translation (CCMT 2024). We participate in the bilingual machine translation task and multi-domain machine translation task. For these two translation tasks, we use training strategies such as regularized dropout, bidirectional training, data diversification, forward translation, back translation, alternated training, curriculum learning, and transductive ensemble learning to train neural machine translation (NMT) models based on the deep Transformer-big architecture. Furthermore, to explore whether large language model (LLM) can help improve the translation quality of NMT systems, we use supervised fine-tuning to train llama2-13b as an Automatic post-editing (APE) model to improve the translation results of the NMT model on the multi-domain machine translation task. By using these plyometric strategies, our submission achieves a competitive result in the final evaluation.
Authors: Taowen Wang, Yiyang Liu, James Chenhao Liang, junhan zhao, Yiming Cui, Yuning Mao, Shaoliang Nie, Jiahao Liu, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Qifan Wang, Dongfang Liu
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by finetuning pretrained models on diverse multimodal tasks. As the scale of MLLMs continues to grow, parameter-efficient finetuning becomes increasingly critical. However, most existing parameter-efficient approaches focus only on single modalities and often overlook the multimodal characteristics during finetuning. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Prompt Tuning (M$^2$PT) approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. M$^2$PT effectively integrates visual and textual prompts into the vision encoder and language processor respectively during finetuning, facilitating the extraction and alignment of features across modalities. Empirical results on various multimodal evaluation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validates the effectiveness of our prompt design and the efficiency of our approach.
Authors: Axel H{\o}jmark, Govind Pimpale, Arjun Panickssery, Marius Hobbhahn, J\'er\'emy Scheurer
Abstract: To mitigate risks from AI systems, we need to assess their capabilities accurately. This is especially difficult in cases where capabilities are only rarely displayed. Phuong et al. propose two methods that aim to obtain better estimates of the probability of an AI agent successfully completing a given task. The milestone method decomposes tasks into subtasks, aiming to improve overall success rate estimation, while the expert best-of-N method leverages human guidance as a proxy for the model's independent performance. Our analysis of these methods as Monte Carlo estimators reveals that while both effectively reduce variance compared to naive Monte Carlo sampling, they also introduce bias. Experimental results demonstrate that the milestone method underestimates true solve rates for many real-world tasks due to its constraining assumptions. The expert best-of-N method exhibits even more severe underestimation across all tasks, attributed to an inherently flawed re-weighting factor. To enhance the accuracy of capability estimates of AI agents on difficult tasks, we suggest future work should leverage the rich literature on Monte Carlo Estimators.
Authors: Sawinder Kaur, Avery Gump, Jingyu Xin, Yi Xiao, Harshit Sharma, Nina R Benway, Jonathan L Preston, Asif Salekin
Abstract: The advancement in deep learning and internet-of-things have led to diverse human sensing applications. However, distinct patterns in human sensing, influenced by various factors or contexts, challenge generic neural network model's performance due to natural distribution shifts. To address this, personalization tailors models to individual users. Yet most personalization studies overlook intra-user heterogeneity across contexts in sensory data, limiting intra-user generalizability. This limitation is especially critical in clinical applications, where limited data availability hampers both generalizability and personalization. Notably, intra-user sensing attributes are expected to change due to external factors such as treatment progression, further complicating the challenges. This work introduces CRoP, a novel static personalization approach using an off-the-shelf pre-trained model and pruning to optimize personalization and generalization. CRoP shows superior personalization effectiveness and intra-user robustness across four human-sensing datasets, including two from real-world health domains, highlighting its practical and social impact. Additionally, to support CRoP's generalization ability and design choices, we provide empirical justification through gradient inner product analysis, ablation studies, and comparisons against state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane, Kenneth W. Goodman, Sanjay Oruganti
Abstract: Explanation is key to people having confidence in high-stakes AI systems. However, machine-learning-based systems -- which account for almost all current AI -- can't explain because they are usually black boxes. The explainable AI (XAI) movement hedges this problem by redefining "explanation". The human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) movement identifies the explanation-oriented needs of users but can't fulfill them because of its commitment to machine learning. In order to achieve the kinds of explanations needed by real people operating in critical domains, we must rethink how to approach AI. We describe a hybrid approach to developing cognitive agents that uses a knowledge-based infrastructure supplemented by data obtained through machine learning when applicable. These agents will serve as assistants to humans who will bear ultimate responsibility for the decisions and actions of the human-robot team. We illustrate the explanatory potential of such agents using the under-the-hood panels of a demonstration system in which a team of simulated robots collaborate on a search task assigned by a human.
Authors: Yinghua Li, Xueqi Dang, Haoye Tian, Tiezhu Sun, Zhijie Wang, Lei Ma, Jacques Klein, Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e
Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into mobile applications has significantly transformed various domains, enhancing user experiences and providing personalized services through advanced machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) technologies. AI-driven mobile apps typically refer to applications that leverage ML/DL technologies to perform key tasks such as image recognition and natural language processing. In this paper, we conducted the most extensive empirical study on AI applications, exploring on-device ML apps, on-device DL apps, and AI service-supported (cloud-based) apps. Our study encompasses 56,682 real-world AI applications, focusing on three crucial perspectives: 1) Application analysis, where we analyze the popularity of AI apps and investigate the update states of AI apps; 2) Framework and model analysis, where we analyze AI framework usage and AI model protection; 3) User analysis, where we examine user privacy protection and user review attitudes. Our study has strong implications for AI app developers, users, and AI R\&D. On one hand, our findings highlight the growing trend of AI integration in mobile applications, demonstrating the widespread adoption of various AI frameworks and models. On the other hand, our findings emphasize the need for robust model protection to enhance app security. Additionally, our study highlights the importance of user privacy and presents user attitudes towards the AI technologies utilized in current AI apps. We provide our AI app dataset (currently the most extensive AI app dataset) as an open-source resource for future research on AI technologies utilized in mobile applications.
Authors: Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
Abstract: With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a significant trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, prompt designing strategies, and related analysis. Additionally, we explore various ICL application scenarios, such as data engineering and knowledge updating. Finally, we address the challenges of ICL and suggest potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.
Authors: Seulki Park, Daeho Um, Hajung Yoon, Sanghyuk Chun, Sangdoo Yun
Abstract: With the extensive use of vision-language models in various downstream tasks, evaluating their robustness is crucial. In this paper, we propose a benchmark for assessing the robustness of vision-language models. We believe that a robust model should properly understand both linguistic and visual semantics and be resilient to explicit variations. In pursuit of this goal, we create new variants of texts and images in the MS-COCO test set and re-evaluate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models with the new data. Specifically, we alter the meaning of text by replacing a word, and generate visually altered images that maintain some visual context while introducing noticeable pixel changes through image mixing techniques.Our evaluations on the proposed benchmark reveal substantial performance degradation in many SOTA models (e.g., Image-to-Text Recall@1: 81.9\% $\rightarrow$ 48.4\% in BLIP, 66.1\% $\rightarrow$ 37.6\% in VSE$\infty$), with the models often favoring the altered texts/images over the original ones. This indicates the current vision-language models struggle with subtle changes and often fail to understand the overall context of texts and images. Based on these findings, we propose semantic contrastive loss and visual contrastive loss to learn more robust embedding. Datasets and code are available at {\url{https://github.com/pseulki/rococo}}.
Authors: Chao Feng, Alberto Huertas Celdran, Pedro Miguel Sanchez Sanchez, Jan Kreischer, Jan von der Assen, Gerome Bovet, Gregorio Martinez Perez, Burkhard Stiller
Abstract: Recent research has shown that the integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Moving Target Defense (MTD) can enhance cybersecurity in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Nevertheless, the practicality of existing work is hindered by data privacy concerns associated with centralized data processing in RL, and the unsatisfactory time needed to learn right MTD techniques that are effective against a rising number of heterogeneous zero-day attacks. Thus, this work presents CyberForce, a framework that combines Federated and Reinforcement Learning (FRL) to collaboratively and privately learn suitable MTD techniques for mitigating zero-day attacks. CyberForce integrates device fingerprinting and anomaly detection to reward or penalize MTD mechanisms chosen by an FRL-based agent. The framework has been deployed and evaluated in a scenario consisting of ten physical devices of a real IoT platform affected by heterogeneous malware samples. A pool of experiments has demonstrated that CyberForce learns the MTD technique mitigating each attack faster than existing RL-based centralized approaches. In addition, when various devices are exposed to different attacks, CyberForce benefits from knowledge transfer, leading to enhanced performance and reduced learning time in comparison to recent works. Finally, different aggregation algorithms used during the agent learning process provide CyberForce with notable robustness to malicious attacks.
Authors: Petr Philonenko, Vladimir Kokh, Pavel Blinov
Abstract: Specific medical cancer screening methods are often costly, time-consuming, and weakly applicable on a large scale. Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods greatly help cancer detection but require specific or deep medical data. These aspects prevent the mass implementation of cancer screening methods. For this reason, it is a disruptive change for healthcare to apply AI methods for mass personalized assessment of the cancer risk among patients based on the existing Electronic Health Records (EHR) volume. This paper presents a novel Can-SAVE cancer risk assessment method combining a survival analysis approach with a gradient-boosting algorithm. It is highly accessible and resource-efficient, utilizing only a sequence of high-level medical events. We tested the proposed method in a long-term retrospective experiment covering more than 1.1 million people and four regions of Russia. The Can-SAVE method significantly exceeds the baselines by the Average Precision metric of 22.8%$\pm$2.7% vs 15.1%$\pm$2.6%. The extensive ablation study also confirmed the proposed method's dominant performance. The experiment supervised by oncologists shows a reliable cancer patient detection rate of up to 84 out of 1000 selected. Such results surpass the medical screening strategies estimates; the typical age-specific Number Needed to Screen is only 9 out of 1000 (for colorectal cancer). Overall, our experiments show a 4.7-6.4 times improvement in cancer detection rate (TOP@1k) compared to the traditional healthcare risk estimation approach.
Authors: Zhenyu Zhou, Defang Chen, Can Wang, Chun Chen
Abstract: Sampling from diffusion models can be treated as solving the corresponding ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with the aim of obtaining an accurate solution with as few number of function evaluations (NFE) as possible. Recently, various fast samplers utilizing higher-order ODE solvers have emerged and achieved better performance than the initial first-order one. However, these numerical methods inherently result in certain approximation errors, which significantly degrades sample quality with extremely small NFE (e.g., around 5). In contrast, based on the geometric observation that each sampling trajectory almost lies in a two-dimensional subspace embedded in the ambient space, we propose Approximate MEan-Direction Solver (AMED-Solver) that eliminates truncation errors by directly learning the mean direction for fast diffusion sampling. Besides, our method can be easily used as a plugin to further improve existing ODE-based samplers. Extensive experiments on image synthesis with the resolution ranging from 32 to 512 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. With only 5 NFE, we achieve 6.61 FID on CIFAR-10, 10.74 FID on ImageNet 64$\times$64, and 13.20 FID on LSUN Bedroom. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/diff-sampler.
Authors: Paul K. Mandal
Abstract: In the era of rapidly advancing medical technologies, the segmentation of medical data has become inevitable, necessitating the development of privacy preserving machine learning algorithms that can train on distributed data. Consolidating sensitive medical data is not always an option particularly due to the stringent privacy regulations imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In this paper, I introduce a HIPAA compliant framework that can train from distributed data. I then propose a multimodal vertical federated model for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) detection, a serious neurodegenerative condition that can cause dementia, severely impairing brain function and hindering simple tasks, especially without preventative care. This vertical federated learning (VFL) model offers a distributed architecture that enables collaborative learning across diverse sources of medical data while respecting privacy constraints imposed by HIPAA. The VFL architecture proposed herein offers a novel distributed architecture, enabling collaborative learning across diverse sources of medical data while respecting statutory privacy constraints. By leveraging multiple modalities of data, the robustness and accuracy of AD detection can be enhanced. This model not only contributes to the advancement of federated learning techniques but also holds promise for overcoming the hurdles posed by data segmentation in medical research.
Authors: Hong Guan, Summer Gautier, Rajan Hari Ambrish, Yancheng Wang, Chaowei Xiao, Yingzhen Yang, Jia Zou
Abstract: It is challenging to select the right privacy-preserving mechanism for federated query processing over multiple private data silos. There exist numerous privacy-preserving mechanisms, such as secure multi-party computing (SMC), approximate query processing with differential privacy (DP), combined SMC and DP, DP-based data obfuscation, and federated learning. These mechanisms make different trade-offs among accuracy, privacy, execution efficiency, and storage efficiency. In this work, we first introduce a new privacy-preserving technique that uses a deep learning model trained using the Differentially-Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) algorithm to replace portions of actual data to answer a query. We then demonstrate a novel declarative privacy-preserving workflow that allows users to specify "what private information to protect" rather than "how to protect". Under the hood, the system relies on a cost model to automatically choose privacy-preserving mechanisms as well as hyper-parameters. At the same time, the proposed workflow also allows human experts to review and tune the selected privacy-preserving mechanism for audit/compliance, and optimization purposes.
Authors: Daniel Halpern, Safwan Hossain, Jamie Tucker-Foltz
Abstract: Motivated by the difficulty of specifying complete ordinal preferences over a large set of $m$ candidates, we study voting rules that are computable by querying voters about $t < m$ candidates. Generalizing prior works that focused on specific instances of this problem, our paper fully characterizes the set of positional scoring rules that can be computed for any $1 \leq t < m$, which, notably, does not include plurality. We then extend this to show a similar impossibility result for single transferable vote (elimination voting). These negative results are information-theoretic and agnostic to the number of queries. Finally, for scoring rules that are computable with limited-sized queries, we give parameterized upper and lower bounds on the number of such queries a deterministic or randomized algorithm must make to determine the score-maximizing candidate. While there is no gap between our bounds for deterministic algorithms, identifying the exact query complexity for randomized algorithms is a challenging open problem, of which we solve one special case.
Authors: Gyeongman Kim, Doohyuk Jang, Eunho Yang
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about inference costs, increasing the need for research into model compression. While knowledge distillation (KD) is a prominent method for this, research on KD for generative language models like LLMs is relatively sparse, and the approach of distilling student-friendly knowledge, which has shown promising performance in KD for classification models, remains unexplored in generative language models. To explore this approach, we propose PromptKD, a simple yet effective method that utilizes prompt tuning - for the first time in KD - to enable generative language models to transfer student-friendly knowledge. Unlike previous works in classification that require fine-tuning the entire teacher model for extracting student-friendly knowledge, PromptKD achieves similar effects by adding a small number of prompt tokens and tuning only the prompt with student guidance. Extensive experiments on instruction-following datasets show that PromptKD achieves state-of-the-art performance while adding only 0.0007% of the teacher's parameters as prompts. Further analysis suggests that distilling student-friendly knowledge alleviates exposure bias effectively throughout the entire training process, leading to performance enhancements.
Authors: Laura Kriener, Kristin V\"olk, Ben von H\"unerbein, Federico Benitez, Walter Senn, Mihai A. Petrovici
Abstract: Behavior can be described as a temporal sequence of actions driven by neural activity. To learn complex sequential patterns in neural networks, memories of past activities need to persist on significantly longer timescales than the relaxation times of single-neuron activity. While recurrent networks can produce such long transients, training these networks is a challenge. Learning via error propagation confers models such as FORCE, RTRL or BPTT a significant functional advantage, but at the expense of biological plausibility. While reservoir computing circumvents this issue by learning only the readout weights, it does not scale well with problem complexity. We propose that two prominent structural features of cortical networks can alleviate these issues: the presence of a certain network scaffold at the onset of learning and the existence of dendritic compartments for enhancing neuronal information storage and computation. Our resulting model for Efficient Learning of Sequences (ELiSe) builds on these features to acquire and replay complex non-Markovian spatio-temporal patterns using only local, always-on and phase-free synaptic plasticity. We showcase the capabilities of ELiSe in a mock-up of birdsong learning, and demonstrate its flexibility with respect to parametrization, as well as its robustness to external disturbances.
Authors: Damien LaRocque, William Guimont-Martin, David-Alexandre Duclos, Philippe Gigu\`ere, Fran\c{c}ois Pomerleau
Abstract: Recent works in field robotics highlighted the importance of resiliency against different types of terrains. Boreal forests, in particular, are home to many mobility-impeding terrains that should be considered for off-road autonomous navigation. Also, being one of the largest land biomes on Earth, boreal forests are an area where autonomous vehicles are expected to become increasingly common. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing BorealTC, a publicly available dataset for proprioceptive-based terrain classification (TC). Recorded with a Husky A200, our dataset contains 116 min of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), motor current, and wheel odometry data, focusing on typical boreal forest terrains, notably snow, ice, and silty loam. Combining our dataset with another dataset from the state-of-the-art, we evaluate both a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the novel state space model (SSM)-based Mamba architecture on a TC task. Interestingly, we show that while CNN outperforms Mamba on each separate dataset, Mamba achieves greater accuracy when trained on a combination of both. In addition, we demonstrate that Mamba's learning capacity is greater than a CNN for increasing amounts of data. We show that the combination of two TC datasets yields a latent space that can be interpreted with the properties of the terrains. We also discuss the implications of merging datasets on classification. Our source code and dataset are publicly available online: https://github.com/norlab-ulaval/BorealTC.
Authors: Bo Peng, Daniel Goldstein, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Eric Alcaide, Stella Biderman, Eugene Cheah, Xingjian Du, Teddy Ferdinan, Haowen Hou, Przemys{\l}aw Kazienko, Kranthi Kiran GV, Jan Koco\'n, Bart{\l}omiej Koptyra, Satyapriya Krishna, Ronald McClelland Jr., Jiaju Lin, Niklas Muennighoff, Fares Obeid, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Haoqin Tu, Cahya Wirawan, Stanis{\l}aw Wo\'zniak, Ruichong Zhang, Bingchen Zhao, Qihang Zhao, Peng Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
Abstract: We present Eagle (RWKV-5) and Finch (RWKV-6), sequence models improving upon the RWKV (RWKV-4) architecture. Our architectural design advancements include multi-headed matrix-valued states and a dynamic recurrence mechanism that improve expressivity while maintaining the inference efficiency characteristics of RNNs. We introduce a new multilingual corpus with 1.12 trillion tokens and a fast tokenizer based on greedy matching for enhanced multilinguality. We trained four Eagle models, ranging from 0.46 to 7.5 billion parameters, and two Finch models with 1.6 and 3.1 billion parameters and find that they achieve competitive performance across a wide variety of benchmarks. We release all our models on HuggingFace under the Apache 2.0 license. Models at: https://huggingface.co/RWKV Training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM Inference code at: https://github.com/RWKV/ChatRWKV Time-parallel training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-infctx-trainer
URLs: https://huggingface.co/RWKV, https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM, https://github.com/RWKV/ChatRWKV, https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-infctx-trainer
Authors: Steve Rhyner, Haocong Luo, Juan G\'omez-Luna, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Jiawei Jiang, Ataberk Olgun, Harshita Gupta, Ce Zhang, Onur Mutlu
Abstract: Modern Machine Learning (ML) training on large-scale datasets is a very time-consuming workload. It relies on the optimization algorithm Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) due to its effectiveness, simplicity, and generalization performance. Processor-centric architectures (e.g., CPUs, GPUs) commonly used for modern ML training workloads based on SGD are bottlenecked by data movement between the processor and memory units due to the poor data locality in accessing large datasets. As a result, processor-centric architectures suffer from low performance and high energy consumption while executing ML training workloads. Processing-In-Memory (PIM) is a promising solution to alleviate the data movement bottleneck by placing the computation mechanisms inside or near memory. Our goal is to understand the capabilities of popular distributed SGD algorithms on real-world PIM systems to accelerate data-intensive ML training workloads. To this end, we 1) implement several representative centralized parallel SGD algorithms on the real-world UPMEM PIM system, 2) rigorously evaluate these algorithms for ML training on large-scale datasets in terms of performance, accuracy, and scalability, 3) compare to conventional CPU and GPU baselines, and 4) discuss implications for future PIM hardware and highlight the need for a shift to an algorithm-hardware codesign. Our results demonstrate three major findings: 1) The UPMEM PIM system can be a viable alternative to state-of-the-art CPUs and GPUs for many memory-bound ML training workloads, especially when operations and datatypes are natively supported by PIM hardware, 2) it is important to carefully choose the optimization algorithms that best fit PIM, and 3) the UPMEM PIM system does not scale approximately linearly with the number of nodes for many data-intensive ML training workloads. We open source all our code to facilitate future research.
Authors: Hassan Ali, Philipp Allgeuer, Stefan Wermter
Abstract: Human intention-based systems enable robots to perceive and interpret user actions to interact with humans and adapt to their behavior proactively. Therefore, intention prediction is pivotal in creating a natural interaction with social robots in human-designed environments. In this paper, we examine using Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer human intention in a collaborative object categorization task with a physical robot. We propose a novel multimodal approach that integrates user non-verbal cues, like hand gestures, body poses, and facial expressions, with environment states and user verbal cues to predict user intentions in a hierarchical architecture. Our evaluation of five LLMs shows the potential for reasoning about verbal and non-verbal user cues, leveraging their context-understanding and real-world knowledge to support intention prediction while collaborating on a task with a social robot.
Authors: Junli Ren, Yikai Liu, Yingru Dai, Junfeng Long, Guijin Wang
Abstract: Legged navigation is typically examined within open-world, off-road, and challenging environments. In these scenarios, estimating external disturbances requires a complex synthesis of multi-modal information. This underlines a major limitation in existing works that primarily focus on avoiding obstacles. In this work, we propose TOP-Nav, a novel legged navigation framework that integrates a comprehensive path planner with Terrain awareness, Obstacle avoidance and close-loop Proprioception. TOP-Nav underscores the synergies between vision and proprioception in both path and motion planning. Within the path planner, we present and integrate a terrain estimator that enables the robot to select waypoints on terrains with higher traversability while effectively avoiding obstacles. In the motion planning level, we not only implement a locomotion controller to track the navigation commands, but also construct a proprioception advisor to provide motion evaluations for the path planner. Based on the close-loop motion feedback, we make online corrections for the vision-based terrain and obstacle estimations. Consequently, TOP-Nav achieves open-world navigation that the robot can handle terrains or disturbances beyond the distribution of prior knowledge and overcomes constraints imposed by visual conditions. Building upon extensive experiments conducted in both simulation and real-world environments, TOP-Nav demonstrates superior performance in open-world navigation compared to existing methods.
Authors: Adrien LeCoz, Houssem Ouertatani, St\'ephane Herbin, Faouzi Adjed
Abstract: Image classifiers should be used with caution in the real world. Performance evaluated on a validation set may not reflect performance in the real world. In particular, classifiers may perform well for conditions that are frequently encountered during training, but poorly for other infrequent conditions. In this study, we hypothesize that recent advances in text-to-image generative models make them valuable for benchmarking computer vision models such as image classifiers: they can generate images conditioned by textual prompts that cause classifier failures, allowing failure conditions to be described with textual attributes. However, their generation cost becomes an issue when a large number of synthetic images need to be generated, which is the case when many different attribute combinations need to be tested. We propose an image classifier benchmarking method as an iterative process that alternates image generation, classifier evaluation, and attribute selection. This method efficiently explores the attributes that ultimately lead to poor behavior detection.
Authors: Guoxin Chen, Minpeng Liao, Chengxi Li, Kai Fan
Abstract: Although recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved their performance on various tasks, they still face challenges with complex and symbolic multi-step reasoning, particularly in mathematical reasoning. To bolster the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs, most existing efforts concentrate on seeking assistance from either domain experts or GPT-4 for high-quality process-supervised data, which is not only expensive but also labor-intensive. In our study, we propose an innovative framework, AlphaMath, that bypasses the need for process annotations (from humans or GPTs) by leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). This framework focuses on unleashing the potential of a well-pretrained LLM to autonomously enhance its mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we integrate a value model with the LLM, automatically generating both process supervision and step-level evaluation signals in MCTS. Furthermore, we propose an efficient inference strategy, step-level beam search, where the value model is crafted to assist the policy model (i.e., LLM) in navigating more effective reasoning paths, rather than solely relying on prior probabilities. The experimental results on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets demonstrate that even without GPT-4 or human-annotated process supervision, our AlphaMath framework achieves comparable or superior results to previous state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Huihong Shi, Haikuo Shao, Wendong Mao, Zhongfeng Wang
Abstract: Motivated by the huge success of Transformers in the field of natural language processing (NLP), Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been rapidly developed and achieved remarkable performance in various computer vision tasks. However, their huge model sizes and intensive computations hinder ViTs' deployment on embedded devices, calling for effective model compression methods, such as quantization. Unfortunately, due to the existence of hardware-unfriendly and quantization-sensitive non-linear operations, particularly {Softmax}, it is non-trivial to completely quantize all operations in ViTs, yielding either significant accuracy drops or non-negligible hardware costs. In response to challenges associated with \textit{standard ViTs}, we focus our attention towards the quantization and acceleration for \textit{efficient ViTs}, which not only eliminate the troublesome Softmax but also integrate linear attention with low computational complexity, and propose Trio-ViT accordingly. Specifically, at the algorithm level, we develop a {tailored post-training quantization engine} taking the unique activation distributions of Softmax-free efficient ViTs into full consideration, aiming to boost quantization accuracy. Furthermore, at the hardware level, we build an accelerator dedicated to the specific Convolution-Transformer hybrid architecture of efficient ViTs, thereby enhancing hardware efficiency. Extensive experimental results consistently prove the effectiveness of our Trio-ViT framework. {Particularly, we can gain up to $\uparrow$$\mathbf{3.6}\times$, $\uparrow$$\mathbf{5.0}\times$, and $\uparrow$$\mathbf{7.3}\times$ FPS under comparable accuracy over state-of-the-art ViT accelerators, as well as $\uparrow$$\mathbf{6.0}\times$, $\uparrow$$\mathbf{1.5}\times$, and $\uparrow$$\mathbf{2.1}\times$ DSP efficiency.} Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/shihuihong214/Trio-ViT}.
Authors: Joo Young Choi, Jaesung R. Park, Inkyu Park, Jaewoong Cho, Albert No, Ernest K. Ryu
Abstract: Current state-of-the-art diffusion models employ U-Net architectures containing convolutional and (qkv) self-attention layers. The U-Net processes images while being conditioned on the time embedding input for each sampling step and the class or caption embedding input corresponding to the desired conditional generation. Such conditioning involves scale-and-shift operations to the convolutional layers but does not directly affect the attention layers. While these standard architectural choices are certainly effective, not conditioning the attention layers feels arbitrary and potentially suboptimal. In this work, we show that simply adding LoRA conditioning to the attention layers without changing or tuning the other parts of the U-Net architecture improves the image generation quality. For example, a drop-in addition of LoRA conditioning to EDM diffusion model yields FID scores of 1.91/1.75 for unconditional and class-conditional CIFAR-10 generation, improving upon the baseline of 1.97/1.79.
Authors: Raul Salles de Padua, Imran Qureshi
Abstract: Patient hand-off and triage are two fundamental problems in health care. Often doctors must painstakingly summarize complex findings to efficiently communicate with specialists and quickly make decisions on which patients have the most urgent cases. In pursuit of these challenges, we present (1) a model with state-of-art radiology report summarization performance using (2) a novel method for augmenting medical data, and (3) an analysis of the model limitations and radiology knowledge gain. We also provide a data processing pipeline for future models developed on the the MIMIC CXR dataset. Our best performing model was a fine-tuned BERT-to-BERT encoder-decoder with 58.75/100 ROUGE-L F1, which outperformed specialized checkpoints with more sophisticated attention mechanisms. We investigate these aspects in this work.
Authors: Tian Xie, Xueru Zhang
Abstract: As machine learning (ML) models are increasingly used in social domains to make consequential decisions about humans, they often have the power to reshape data distributions. Humans, as strategic agents, continuously adapt their behaviors in response to the learning system. As populations change dynamically, ML systems may need frequent updates to ensure high performance. However, acquiring high-quality human-annotated samples can be highly challenging and even infeasible in social domains. A common practice to address this issue is using the model itself to annotate unlabeled data samples. This paper investigates the long-term impacts when ML models are retrained with model-annotated samples when they incorporate human strategic responses. We first formalize the interactions between strategic agents and the model and then analyze how they evolve under such dynamic interactions. We find that agents are increasingly likely to receive positive decisions as the model gets retrained, whereas the proportion of agents with positive labels may decrease over time. We thus propose a refined retraining process to stabilize the dynamics. Last, we examine how algorithmic fairness can be affected by these retraining processes and find that enforcing common fairness constraints at every round may not benefit the disadvantaged group in the long run. Experiments on (semi-)synthetic and real data validate the theoretical findings.
Authors: Jingzhe Shi, Qinwei Ma, Huan Ma, Lei Li
Abstract: Scaling law that rewards large datasets, complex models and enhanced data granularity has been observed in various fields of deep learning. Yet, studies on time series forecasting have cast doubt on scaling behaviors of deep learning methods for time series forecasting: while more training data improves performance, more capable models do not always outperform less capable models, and longer input horizons may hurt performance for some models. We propose a theory for scaling law for time series forecasting that can explain these seemingly abnormal behaviors. We take into account the impact of dataset size and model complexity, as well as time series data granularity, particularly focusing on the look-back horizon, an aspect that has been unexplored in previous theories. Furthermore, we empirically evaluate various models using a diverse set of time series forecasting datasets, which (1) verifies the validity of scaling law on dataset size and model complexity within the realm of time series forecasting, and (2) validates our theoretical framework, particularly regarding the influence of look back horizon. We hope our findings may inspire new models targeting time series forecasting datasets of limited size, as well as large foundational datasets and models for time series forecasting in future works. Codes for our experiments will be made public at: https://github.com/JingzheShi/ScalingLawForTimeSeriesForecasting.
URLs: https://github.com/JingzheShi/ScalingLawForTimeSeriesForecasting.
Authors: Guoxin Chen, Minpeng Liao, Chengxi Li, Kai Fan
Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using an implicit reward model has proven to be an effective alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for fine-tuning preference aligned large language models (LLMs). However, the overall preference annotations of responses do not fully capture the fine-grained quality of model outputs in complex multi-step reasoning tasks, such as mathematical reasoning. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel algorithm called Step-level Value Preference Optimization (SVPO). Our approach employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to automatically annotate step-level preferences for multi-step reasoning. Furthermore, from the perspective of learning-to-rank, we train an explicit value model to replicate the behavior of the implicit reward model, complementing standard preference optimization. This value model enables the LLM to generate higher reward responses with minimal cost during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/MARIO-Math-Reasoning/Super_MARIO}.
Authors: Minsang Kim, Cheoneum Park, Seungjun Baek
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has received much attention for Open-domain question-answering (ODQA) tasks as a means to compensate for the parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). While previous approaches focused on processing retrieved passages to remove irrelevant context, they still rely heavily on the quality of retrieved passages which can degrade if the question is ambiguous or complex. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient method called question and passage augmentation (QPaug) via LLMs for open-domain QA. QPaug first decomposes the original questions into multiple-step sub-questions. By augmenting the original question with detailed sub-questions and planning, we are able to make the query more specific on what needs to be retrieved, improving the retrieval performance. In addition, to compensate for the case where the retrieved passages contain distracting information or divided opinions, we augment the retrieved passages with self-generated passages by LLMs to guide the answer extraction. Experimental results show that QPaug outperforms the previous state-of-the-art and achieves significant performance gain over existing RAG methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/kmswin1/QPaug}.
Authors: Yuanyuan Duan, Haiyang Feng, Zhiping Yu, Hanming Wu, Leilai Shao, Xiaolei Zhu
Abstract: With the growing need for higher memory bandwidth and computation density, 2.5D design, which involves integrating multiple chiplets onto an interposer, emerges as a promising solution. However, this integration introduces significant challenges due to increasing data rates and a large number of I/Os, necessitating advanced optimization of the power distribution networks (PDNs) both on-chip and on-interposer to mitigate the small signal noise and simultaneous switching noise (SSN). Traditional PDN optimization strategies in 2.5D systems primarily focus on reducing impedance by integrating decoupling capacitors (decaps) to lessen small signal noises. Unfortunately, relying solely on frequency-domain analysis has been proven inadequate for addressing coupled SSN, as indicated by our experimental results. In this work, we introduce a novel two-phase optimization flow using deep reinforcement learning to tackle both the on-chip small signal noise and SSN. Initially, we optimize the impedance in the frequency domain to maintain the small signal noise within acceptable limits while avoiding over-design. Subsequently, in the time domain, we refine the PDN to minimize the voltage violation integral (VVI), a more accurate measure of SSN severity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dual-domain optimization strategy that simultaneously addresses both the small signal noise and SSN propagation through strategic decap placement in on-chip and on-interposer PDNs, offering a significant step forward in the design of robust PDNs for 2.5D integrated systems.
Authors: Xijie Huang, Zechun Liu, Shih-Yang Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), as a representative Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT)method, significantly enhances the training efficiency by updating only a small portion of the weights in Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, weight-only quantization techniques have also been applied to LoRA methods to reduce the memory footprint of fine-tuning. However, applying weight-activation quantization to the LoRA pipeline is under-explored, and we observe substantial performance degradation primarily due to the presence of activation outliers. In this work, we propose RoLoRA, the first LoRA-based scheme for effective weight-activation quantization. RoLoRA utilizes rotation for outlier elimination and proposes rotation-aware fine-tuning to preserve the outlier-free characteristics in rotated LLMs. Experimental results show RoLoRA consistently improves low-bit LoRA convergence and post-training quantization robustness in weight-activation settings. We evaluate RoLoRA across LLaMA2-7B/13B, LLaMA3-8B models, achieving up to 29.5% absolute accuracy gain of 4-bit weight-activation quantized LLaMA2- 13B on commonsense reasoning tasks compared to LoRA baseline. We further demonstrate its effectiveness on Large Multimodal Models (LLaVA-1.5-7B). Codes are available at https://github.com/HuangOwen/RoLoRA
Authors: Tianheng Ling, Chao Qian, Gregor Schiele
Abstract: This paper presents the design of a hardware accelerator for Transformers, optimized for on-device time-series forecasting in AIoT systems. It integrates integer-only quantization and Quantization-Aware Training with optimized hardware designs to realize 6-bit and 4-bit quantized Transformer models, which achieved precision comparable to 8-bit quantized models from related research. Utilizing a complete implementation on an embedded FPGA (Xilinx Spartan-7 XC7S15), we examine the feasibility of deploying Transformer models on embedded IoT devices. This includes a thorough analysis of achievable precision, resource utilization, timing, power, and energy consumption for on-device inference. Our results indicate that while sufficient performance can be attained, the optimization process is not trivial. For instance, reducing the quantization bitwidth does not consistently result in decreased latency or energy consumption, underscoring the necessity of systematically exploring various optimization combinations. Compared to an 8-bit quantized Transformer model in related studies, our 4-bit quantized Transformer model increases test loss by only 0.63%, operates up to 132.33x faster, and consumes 48.19x less energy.
Authors: Laurens Engwegen, Daan Brinks, Wendelin B\"ohmer
Abstract: Novel imaging and neurostimulation techniques open doors for advancements in closed-loop control of activity in biological neural networks. This would allow for applications in the investigation of activity propagation, and for diagnosis and treatment of pathological behaviour. Due to the partially observable characteristics of activity propagation, through networks in which edges can not be observed, and the dynamic nature of neuronal systems, there is a need for adaptive, generalisable control. In this paper, we introduce an environment that procedurally generates neuronal networks with different topologies to investigate this generalisation problem. Additionally, an existing transformer-based architecture is adjusted to evaluate the generalisation performance of a deep RL agent in the presented partially observable environment. The agent demonstrates the capability to generalise control from a limited number of training networks to unseen test networks.
Authors: Avisek Naug, Antonio Guillen, Ricardo Luna, Vineet Gundecha, Desik Rengarajan, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Sajad Mousavi, Ashwin Ramesh Babu, Dejan Markovikj, Lekhapriya D Kashyap, Soumyendu Sarkar
Abstract: Machine learning has driven an exponential increase in computational demand, leading to massive data centers that consume significant amounts of energy and contribute to climate change. This makes sustainable data center control a priority. In this paper, we introduce SustainDC, a set of Python environments for benchmarking multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms for data centers (DC). SustainDC supports custom DC configurations and tasks such as workload scheduling, cooling optimization, and auxiliary battery management, with multiple agents managing these operations while accounting for the effects of each other. We evaluate various MARL algorithms on SustainDC, showing their performance across diverse DC designs, locations, weather conditions, grid carbon intensity, and workload requirements. Our results highlight significant opportunities for improvement of data center operations using MARL algorithms. Given the increasing use of DC due to AI, SustainDC provides a crucial platform for the development and benchmarking of advanced algorithms essential for achieving sustainable computing and addressing other heterogeneous real-world challenges.
Authors: Xubin Ren, Chao Huang
Abstract: Deep neural networks have become a powerful technique for learning representations from user-item interaction data in collaborative filtering (CF) for recommender systems. However, many existing methods heavily rely on unique user and item IDs, which limits their ability to perform well in practical zero-shot learning scenarios where sufficient training data may be unavailable. Inspired by the success of language models (LMs) and their strong generalization capabilities, a crucial question arises: How can we harness the potential of language models to empower recommender systems and elevate its generalization capabilities to new heights? In this study, we propose EasyRec - an effective and easy-to-use approach that seamlessly integrates text-based semantic understanding with collaborative signals. EasyRec employs a text-behavior alignment framework, which combines contrastive learning with collaborative language model tuning, to ensure a strong alignment between the text-enhanced semantic space and the collaborative behavior information. Extensive empirical evaluations across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of EasyRec compared to state-of-the-art alternative models, particularly in the challenging text-based zero-shot recommendation scenarios. Furthermore, the study highlights the potential of seamlessly integrating EasyRec as a plug-and-play component into text-enhanced collaborative filtering frameworks, thereby empowering existing recommender systems to elevate their recommendation performance and adapt to the evolving user preferences in dynamic environments. For better result reproducibility of our EasyRec framework, the model implementation details, source code, and datasets are available at the link: https://github.com/HKUDS/EasyRec.
Authors: Yuyang Ye, Zhi Zheng, Yishan Shen, Tianshu Wang, Hengruo Zhang, Peijun Zhu, Runlong Yu, Kai Zhang, Hui Xiong
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in the field of Recommendation Systems (RSs). Most existing studies have focused on converting user behavior logs into textual prompts and leveraging techniques such as prompt tuning to enable LLMs for recommendation tasks. Meanwhile, research interest has recently grown in multimodal recommendation systems that integrate data from images, text, and other sources using modality fusion techniques. This introduces new challenges to the existing LLM-based recommendation paradigm which relies solely on text modality information. Moreover, although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of processing multi-modal inputs have emerged, how to equip MLLMs with multi-modal recommendation capabilities remains largely unexplored. To this end, in this paper, we propose the Multimodal Large Language Model-enhanced Multimodaln Sequential Recommendation (MLLM-MSR) model. To capture the dynamic user preference, we design a two-stage user preference summarization method. Specifically, we first utilize an MLLM-based item-summarizer to extract image feature given an item and convert the image into text. Then, we employ a recurrent user preference summarization generation paradigm to capture the dynamic changes in user preferences based on an LLM-based user-summarizer. Finally, to enable the MLLM for multi-modal recommendation task, we propose to fine-tune a MLLM-based recommender using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) techniques. Extensive evaluations across various datasets validate the effectiveness of MLLM-MSR, showcasing its superior ability to capture and adapt to the evolving dynamics of user preferences.
Authors: Yuqing Zhao, Divya Saxena, Jiannong Cao, Xiaoyun Liu, Changlin Song
Abstract: In continual learning (CL), model growth enhances adaptability over new data, improving knowledge retention for more tasks. However, improper model growth can lead to severe degradation of previously learned knowledge, an issue we name as growth-induced forgetting (GIFt), especially in task-agnostic CL using entire grown model for inference. Existing works, despite adopting model growth and random initialization for better adaptability, often fail to recognize the presence of GIFt caused by improper model growth. This oversight limits comprehensive control of forgetting and hinders full utilization of model growth. We are the first in CL to identify this issue and conduct an in-depth study on root cause of GIFt, where layer expansion stands out among model growth strategies, widening layers without affecting model functionality. Yet, direct adoption of layer expansion presents challenges. It lacks data-driven control and initialization of expanded parameters to balance adaptability and knowledge retention. This paper presents a novel SparseGrow approach to overcome the issue of GIFt while enhancing adaptability over new data. SparseGrow employs data-driven sparse layer expansion to control efficient parameter usage during growth, reducing GIFt from excessive growth and functionality changes. It also combines sparse growth with on-data initialization at training late-stage to create partially 0-valued expansions that fit learned distribution, enhancing retention and adaptability. To further minimize forgetting, freezing is applied by calculating the sparse mask, allowing data-driven preservation of important parameters. Through experiments across datasets with various settings, cases, and task numbers, we demonstrate the necessity of layer expansion and showcase the effectiveness of SparseGrow in overcoming GIFt, highlighting its adaptability and knowledge retention for incremental tasks.
Authors: Cong Wan, Yuhang He, Xiang Song, Yihong Gong
Abstract: Diffusion models have revolutionized customized text-to-image generation, allowing for efficient synthesis of photos from personal data with textual descriptions. However, these advancements bring forth risks including privacy breaches and unauthorized replication of artworks. Previous researches primarily center around using prompt-specific methods to generate adversarial examples to protect personal images, yet the effectiveness of existing methods is hindered by constrained adaptability to different prompts. In this paper, we introduce a Prompt-Agnostic Adversarial Perturbation (PAP) method for customized diffusion models. PAP first models the prompt distribution using a Laplace Approximation, and then produces prompt-agnostic perturbations by maximizing a disturbance expectation based on the modeled distribution. This approach effectively tackles the prompt-agnostic attacks, leading to improved defense stability. Extensive experiments in face privacy and artistic style protection, demonstrate the superior generalization of PAP in comparison to existing techniques. Our project page is available at https://github.com/vancyland/Prompt-Agnostic-Adversarial-Perturbation-for-Customized-Diffusion-Models.github.io.
Authors: Yiwei Ma, Jiayi Ji, Ke Ye, Weihuang Lin, Zhibin Wang, Yonghan Zheng, Qiang Zhou, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji
Abstract: Significant progress has been made in the field of Instruction-based Image Editing (IIE). However, evaluating these models poses a significant challenge. A crucial requirement in this field is the establishment of a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for accurately assessing editing results and providing valuable insights for its further development. In response to this need, we propose I2EBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to automatically evaluate the quality of edited images produced by IIE models from multiple dimensions. I2EBench consists of 2,000+ images for editing, along with 4,000+ corresponding original and diverse instructions. It offers three distinctive characteristics: 1) Comprehensive Evaluation Dimensions: I2EBench comprises 16 evaluation dimensions that cover both high-level and low-level aspects, providing a comprehensive assessment of each IIE model. 2) Human Perception Alignment: To ensure the alignment of our benchmark with human perception, we conducted an extensive user study for each evaluation dimension. 3) Valuable Research Insights: By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of existing IIE models across the 16 dimensions, we offer valuable research insights to guide future development in the field. We will open-source I2EBench, including all instructions, input images, human annotations, edited images from all evaluated methods, and a simple script for evaluating the results from new IIE models. The code, dataset and generated images from all IIE models are provided in github: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.
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/benchmark_llm_texts_detection).
URLs: https://github.com/Reliable-Information-Lab-HEVS/benchmark_llm_texts_detection).
Authors: Raunaq Bhirangi, Venkatesh Pattabiraman, Enes Erciyes, Yifeng Cao, Tess Hellebrekers, Lerrel Pinto
Abstract: While tactile sensing is widely accepted as an important and useful sensing modality, its use pales in comparison to other sensory modalities like vision and proprioception. AnySkin addresses the critical challenges that impede the use of tactile sensing -- versatility, replaceability, and data reusability. Building on the simplistic design of ReSkin, and decoupling the sensing electronics from the sensing interface, AnySkin simplifies integration making it as straightforward as putting on a phone case and connecting a charger. Furthermore, AnySkin is the first uncalibrated tactile-sensor with cross-instance generalizability of learned manipulation policies. To summarize, this work makes three key contributions: first, we introduce a streamlined fabrication process and a design tool for creating an adhesive-free, durable and easily replaceable magnetic tactile sensor; second, we characterize slip detection and policy learning with the AnySkin sensor; and third, we demonstrate zero-shot generalization of models trained on one instance of AnySkin to new instances, and compare it with popular existing tactile solutions like DIGIT and ReSkin. Videos of experiments, fabrication details and design files can be found on https://any-skin.github.io/
Authors: Jing Ma
Abstract: Graph machine learning (GML) has been successfully applied across a wide range of tasks. Nonetheless, GML faces significant challenges in generalizing over out-of-distribution (OOD) data, which raises concerns about its wider applicability. Recent advancements have underscored the crucial role of causality-driven approaches in overcoming these generalization challenges. Distinct from traditional GML methods that primarily rely on statistical dependencies, causality-focused strategies delve into the underlying causal mechanisms of data generation and model prediction, thus significantly improving the generalization of GML across different environments. This paper offers a thorough review of recent progress in causality-involved GML generalization. We elucidate the fundamental concepts of employing causality to enhance graph model generalization and categorize the various approaches, providing detailed descriptions of their methodologies and the connections among them. Furthermore, we explore the incorporation of causality in other related important areas of trustworthy GML, such as explanation, fairness, and robustness. Concluding with a discussion on potential future research directions, this review seeks to articulate the continuing development and future potential of causality in enhancing the trustworthiness of graph machine learning.
Authors: Ningyuan Xi, Xiaoyu Wang, Yetao Wu, Teng Chen, Qingqing Gu, Jinxian Qu, Zhonglin Jiang, Yong Chen, Luo Ji
Abstract: Large Language Model can reasonably understand and generate human expressions but may lack of thorough thinking and reasoning mechanisms. Recently there have been several studies which enhance the thinking ability of language models but most of them are not data-driven or training-based. In this paper, we are motivated by the cognitive mechanism in the natural world, and design a novel model architecture called TaS which allows it to first consider the thoughts and then express the response based upon the query. We design several pipelines to annotate or generate the thought contents from prompt-response samples, then add language heads in a middle layer which behaves as the thinking layer. We train the language model by the thoughts-augmented data and successfully let the thinking layer automatically generate reasonable thoughts and finally output more reasonable responses. Both qualitative examples and quantitative results validate the effectiveness and performance of TaS. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TadE.
Authors: Zhenhong Zhang, Jiajing Chen, Weiyan Shi, Lingjie Yi, Chihang Wang, Qian Yu
Abstract: With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, especially the increasingly widespread application of question-and-answer systems, high-quality question generation has become a key component in supporting the development of these systems. This article focuses on knowledge-based question generation technology, which aims to enable computers to simulate the human questioning process based on understanding specific texts or knowledge bases. In light of the issues of hallucination and knowledge gaps present in large-scale language models when applied to knowledge-intensive tasks, this paper proposes an enhanced question generation method that incorporates contrastive learning. This method utilizes multiple models to jointly mine domain knowledge and uses contrastive learning to guide the model in reducing noise and hallucinations in generation. Experimental results show that by designing prompts containing contrasting examples, the model's performance in question generation improves considerably, particularly when contrasting instructions and examples are used simultaneously, leading to the highest quality of generated questions and improved accuracy. These results demonstrate that the method proposed in this study, which combines contrasting context and chain-of-thought prompts, can effectively improve both the quality and the practicality of question generation.
Authors: Dominic Schneider, Lutz Rapp
Abstract: Optical fiber amplifiers are key elements in present optical networks. Failures of these components result in high financial loss of income of the network operator as the communication traffic over an affected link is interrupted. Applying Remaining useful lifetime (RUL) prediction in the context of Predictive Maintenance (PdM) to optical fiber amplifiers to predict upcoming system failures at an early stage, so that network outages can be minimized through planning of targeted maintenance actions, ensures reliability and safety. Optical fiber amplifier are complex systems, that work under various operating conditions, which makes correct forecasting a difficult task. Increased monitoring capabilities of systems results in datasets that facilitate the application of data-driven RUL prediction methods. Deep learning models in particular have shown good performance, but generalization based on comparatively small datasets for RUL prediction is difficult. In this paper, we propose Sparse Low-ranked self-Attention Transformer (SLAT) as a novel RUL prediction method. SLAT is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, wherein two parallel working encoders extract features for sensors and time steps. By utilizing the self-attention mechanism, long-term dependencies can be learned from long sequences. The implementation of sparsity in the attention matrix and a low-rank parametrization reduce overfitting and increase generalization. Experimental application to optical fiber amplifiers exemplified on EDFA, as well as a reference dataset from turbofan engines, shows that SLAT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Yuzi Yan, Xingzhou Lou, Jialian Li, Yiping Zhang, Jian Xie, Chao Yu, Yu Wang, Dong Yan, Yuan Shen
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to progress toward more advanced forms of intelligence, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly seen as a key pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, the reliance on reward-model-based (RM-based) alignment methods introduces significant challenges due to the inherent instability and imperfections of Reward Models (RMs), which can lead to critical issues such as reward hacking and misalignment with human intentions. In this paper, we introduce a reward-robust RLHF framework aimed at addressing these fundamental challenges, paving the way for more reliable and resilient learning in LLMs. Our approach introduces a novel optimization objective that carefully balances performance and robustness by incorporating Bayesian Reward Model Ensembles (BRME) to model the uncertainty set of reward functions. This allows the framework to integrate both nominal performance and minimum reward signals, ensuring more stable learning even with imperfect RMs. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms baselines across diverse benchmarks, showing improved accuracy and long-term stability. We also provide a theoretical analysis, demonstrating that reward-robust RLHF approaches the stability of constant reward settings, which proves to be acceptable even in a stochastic-case analysis. Together, these contributions highlight the framework potential to enhance both the performance and stability of LLM alignment.
Authors: Juan Ossa, Eren Do\u{g}an, Alex Birch, F. Johnson
Abstract: In this technical report, we document the changes we made to SDXL in the process of training NovelAI Diffusion V3, our state of the art anime image generation model.
Authors: Yuanchao Li, Zixing Zhang, Jing Han, Peter Bell, Catherine Lai
Abstract: The lack of labeled data is a common challenge in speech classification tasks, particularly those requiring extensive subjective assessment, such as cognitive state classification. In this work, we propose a Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) framework, introducing a novel multi-view pseudo-labeling method that leverages both acoustic and linguistic characteristics to select the most confident data for training the classification model. Acoustically, unlabeled data are compared to labeled data using the Frechet audio distance, calculated from embeddings generated by multiple audio encoders. Linguistically, large language models are prompted to revise automatic speech recognition transcriptions and predict labels based on our proposed task-specific knowledge. High-confidence data are identified when pseudo-labels from both sources align, while mismatches are treated as low-confidence data. A bimodal classifier is then trained to iteratively label the low-confidence data until a predefined criterion is met. We evaluate our SSL framework on emotion recognition and dementia detection tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised learning using only 30% of the labeled data and significantly outperforms two selected baselines.
Authors: Joshua Ashkinaze, Emily Fry, Narendra Edara, Eric Gilbert, Ceren Budak
Abstract: Recent debates raised concerns that language models may favor certain viewpoints. But what if the solution is not to aim for a 'view from nowhere' but rather to leverage different viewpoints? We introduce Plurals, a system and Python library for pluralistic AI deliberation. Plurals consists of Agents (LLMs, optionally with personas) which deliberate within customizable Structures, with Moderators overseeing deliberation. Plurals is a generator of simulated social ensembles. Plurals integrates with government datasets to create nationally representative personas, includes deliberation templates inspired by democratic deliberation theory, and allows users to customize both information-sharing structures and deliberation behavior within Structures. Six case studies demonstrate fidelity to theoretical constructs and efficacy. Three randomized experiments show simulated focus groups produced output resonant with an online sample of the relevant audiences (chosen over zero-shot generation in 75% of trials). Plurals is both a paradigm and a concrete system for pluralistic AI. The Plurals library is available at https://github.com/josh-ashkinaze/plurals and will be continually updated.
Authors: Cheolhun Jang
Abstract: Preference optimization methods typically begin training with a well-trained SFT model as a reference model. In RLHF and DPO, a regularization term is used during the preference optimization process to prevent the policy model from deviating too far from the reference model's distribution, thereby avoiding the generation of anomalous responses. When the reference model is already well-aligned with the given data or only requires slight adjustments, this approach can produce a well-aligned model. However, if the reference model is not aligned with the given data and requires significant deviation from its current state, a regularization term may actually hinder the model alignment. In this study, we propose \textbf{Modulated Intervention Preference Optimization (MIPO)} to address this issue. MIPO modulates the degree of intervention from the reference model based on how well the given data is aligned with it. If the data is well-aligned, the intervention is increased to prevent the policy model from diverging significantly from reference model. Conversely, if the alignment is poor, the interference is reduced to facilitate more extensive training. We compare the performance of MIPO and DPO using Mistral-7B and Llama3-8B in Alpaca Eval 2.0 and MT-Bench. The experimental results demonstrate that MIPO consistently outperforms DPO across various evaluation scenarios.
Authors: Giandomenico Cornacchia, Giulio Zizzo, Kieran Fraser, Muhammad Zaid Hamed, Ambrish Rawat, Mark Purcell
Abstract: The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in diverse applications underscores the pressing need for robust security measures to thwart potential jailbreak attacks. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities within LLMs, endanger data integrity and user privacy. Guardrails serve as crucial protective mechanisms against such threats, but existing models often fall short in terms of both detection accuracy, and computational efficiency. This paper advocates for the significance of jailbreak attack prevention on LLMs, and emphasises the role of input guardrails in safeguarding these models. We introduce MoJE (Mixture of Jailbreak Expert), a novel guardrail architecture designed to surpass current limitations in existing state-of-the-art guardrails. By employing simple linguistic statistical techniques, MoJE excels in detecting jailbreak attacks while maintaining minimal computational overhead during model inference. Through rigorous experimentation, MoJE demonstrates superior performance capable of detecting 90% of the attacks without compromising benign prompts, enhancing LLMs security against jailbreak attacks.
Authors: Evangelia Christodoulou, Annika Reinke, Rola Houhou, Piotr Kalinowski, Selen Erkan, Carole H. Sudre, Ninon Burgos, Sofi\`ene Boutaj, Sophie Loizillon, Ma\"elys Solal, Nicola Rieke, Veronika Cheplygina, Michela Antonelli, Leon D. Mayer, Minu D. Tizabi, M. Jorge Cardoso, Amber Simpson, Paul F. J\"ager, Annette Kopp-Schneider, Ga\"el Varoquaux, Olivier Colliot, Lena Maier-Hein
Abstract: Medical imaging is spearheading the AI transformation of healthcare. Performance reporting is key to determine which methods should be translated into clinical practice. Frequently, broad conclusions are simply derived from mean performance values. In this paper, we argue that this common practice is often a misleading simplification as it ignores performance variability. Our contribution is threefold. (1) Analyzing all MICCAI segmentation papers (n = 221) published in 2023, we first observe that more than 50% of papers do not assess performance variability at all. Moreover, only one (0.5%) paper reported confidence intervals (CIs) for model performance. (2) To address the reporting bottleneck, we show that the unreported standard deviation (SD) in segmentation papers can be approximated by a second-order polynomial function of the mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). Based on external validation data from 56 previous MICCAI challenges, we demonstrate that this approximation can accurately reconstruct the CI of a method using information provided in publications. (3) Finally, we reconstructed 95% CIs around the mean DSC of MICCAI 2023 segmentation papers. The median CI width was 0.03 which is three times larger than the median performance gap between the first and second ranked method. For more than 60% of papers, the mean performance of the second-ranked method was within the CI of the first-ranked method. We conclude that current publications typically do not provide sufficient evidence to support which models could potentially be translated into clinical practice.